People want retail games and if the big 3 can’t cover that market a new and more sustainable subject will fill that space. Maybe it’s time to bring back physical media to PC, a more open system where publishers could make profit selling their retail games similarly to vinyls for music.
It’s not the disc itself that people care about, it’s having a transferrable license. People want the option to rent games, or give them away/resell after playing. Physical media provides some legal protections for that because you are buying a license attached to the thing storing the software.
Digital distribution is a perfectly fine way to get a game, if it weren’t synonymous with big companies taking away your ownership of the right to use software you purchased. You can’t share a game you enjoyed with friends. If you lose access to your account you’re SOL. If the host server shutsdown, you better have had a stable copy installed/backed up.
People don’t hate digital downloads, they hate the consumer abuse they have enabled. Stop the consumer abuse, and only collectors will care about physical media.
That’s one of the use cases NFTs were meant for, noncustodial transferable digital property. Sadly, they got ruined by the ape jpeg grifters who didn’t even bother to upload the actual image to the blockchain. The entirety of Steam, Spotify, and Netflix could fit on a specialized blockchain like Arweave, but none of the publishers or big media corporations have any interest in doing that when they can “sell” them to you every 5 years or, better yet, let you rent them one month at a time. Maybe if one day people stop “buying” them, they’ll be forced to do that, but I won’t hold my breath.
I think “Robot Cache” was a company that claimed to do this sort of thing. The only reason I had even heard of them is because they gave away a game for free, and ironically now they’ve gone out of business and I can’t even access the game anymore!
How would you: make the key transferable and secret, while still notifying the original vender it happened, and collect payment, and keep me from selling and turning off the key?
And once the vendor went away, no new keys would be issued. So why make a public crypto ledger, when their ledger suffices?
Just like an NFT. Useless in this case too.
Imo they weren’t ruined by grifters. NFTs are built on a flawed system that caters to exactly the kind of libertarian, free enterprise assholes who ate it up. If they weren’t running the grift, they were getting scammed themselves. Crypto is a mirage of wealth, and everything built on top of it is either only a vehicle for legitimate currency or laundering ill gotten gains. It’s just an unregulated stock.
Signed chains of custody already exist, they could be inplemented and nothing is stopping any of these marketplaces from doing so. They don’t need NFTs, which have a needlessly complex set of requirements, to validate a game’s license. Any service could leverage their pre-existing DRM scheme to let you sell your copy to someone else, but that doesn’t give them the same benefits as someone buying a new copy.
What do you mean by that? What is the flaw of the system?
What do you mean by “legitimate currency”? If I can buy and sell things for it, how is it illegitimate? There are plenty of non-strictly monetary blockchain and crypto applications, like arweave, for example, which is a decentralized, permissionless blockchain based data storage protocol where you can store and share encrypted private data like on google drive or publicly host files and static websites, or DAOs, which enable decentralized control and decision making through provably fair voting. Financial applications of crypto are also great. You can buy and sell things privately over the internet without a need for a middleman who will take a cut and can cut you off if the government makes them or they don’t like what you’re selling, like what happened with wikileaks, pornhub or more recently with steam. Platforms like hyperliquid and tokenized real world assets give people across the world, also from sanctioned and disenfranchised regions, access to global financial markets where they can privately and permissionlessly trade stocks, commodities, etc. without the need for a broker who can block buying and selling, like robinhood did during the GME short squeeze, front run them, and take a cut of their trades. People from countries with high inflation like Venezuela or Turkiye can use crypto to easily and safely store their wealth in a less inflationary asset like ₿, $ with stablecoins, or tokenized gold.
How do you launder money with crypto? I thought that starting a fake business in the service sector like a beauty parlor or a restaurant was the gold standard for money laundering, tax man don’t care as long as he gets his cut.
True, but that’s still dependent on the marketplace continuing to exist, if it ever disappears, so does your media. I suppose that’s also true for a blockchain, but it would be a lot less likely for the digital media blockchain to go down than some marketplace, and since it’s decentralized, the community would have a vested interest in running nodes to help keep it alive.
What complex set of requirements do NFTs have? You can deploy them pretty easily these days. You can send them automatically upon payment, and you wouldn’t even need a server for that or validation of licenses, as it could all be done in the EVM with a smart contract.
This doesn’t address the accessibility issue. If the service goes down, you lose the media you “bought”, and doesn’t work for services without DRM.
The first question is kinda encompassed by the rest of the structure, so I’ll work through the others and come back to it.
Legitimate currency, is admittedly a nebulous term, so I’ll revise this to match something closer to what I meant: minted, regulated currency held to an economic demand. I believe there’s merit to this system, though its benefits have been substantially eroded by modern aristocrats.
By my statement, I meant to say that the most popular use-cases are frequently that of investment, rather than good-faith application of cryptocurrency as currency. I recognize this isn’t true of all currencies, but as long as it remains the case, crypto will continue to be utilized as an investment vehicle for national currencies rather than as something I could go buy my groceries or pay my bills with. One of the biggest fundamental problems that have been a challenge to solve for cryptocurrencies is the overall stability of its value. For some currencies, the idea was that a limited supply would lead to a fixed value, or that proof of work systems would mitigate speculation. This hasn’t proven true. It cannot be tied to someone’s needs, and instead floats based on wants or hype. This is remedied by stable-coins, but at this point you’ve only recreated a national currency with extra hoops to jump through to use it. That said, I do recognize its value as a means to ensure some personal liquidity in nations where the currency at home is more volatile than not, but I think the flaw in this is that no matter what you end up pinning your personal wealth to someone else’s economy.
And believe me, I agree people should be able to spend their money how they please. No few should have complete power of the many, especially not in how the many may accumulate or redistribute their wealth. Robinhood, stock exchanges and their third party brokers should not have power to affect this. In a well-regulated context, they would not.
Now let’s talk about money laundering and fraud. I wasn’t referring to an old mafia outfit. Organized crime has evolved well past that, though I’m sure a shell company with some shady accou ti g is part of the process. Cryptocurrencies are weak for the same reason they are strong. Wallet addresses are at worst, pseudnonymous. It is possible to track them through transactions to exchanges or services with KYC requirements, but not all blockchain services expose transactions transparently. This makes currencies like Monero a popular option for anyone looking to hide the sources and destinations of their payments without needing to worry about how to balance their books for a nail salon. Add in tumbling services for popular cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, Ethereum and stablecoins and now you’ve got yourself a very convenient pipeline for shady dealings.
As a privacy advocate, I believe in the ability to make a cash deal with someone without the scrutiny of the bank, payment processor or other entities, but many of those guiding principles have led to the design of systems that directly facilitate scams, fraud, human trafficking and espionage. The fact that there is no oversight means there are no repercussions until that money re-enters a national currency. It’s an immensely popular way to hide wealth for those who are already rich beyond their means as well. Everything about it requires trusting the individual, and that’s rarely the correct choice.
As for decentralization. I agree here, that’s a better approach. The web should be a collection of nodes, with each reaching to the other to properly describe its namesake. Instead, we have the problem of consolidation among services, where large entities with the means to do so have become immovable conglomerates of critical infrastructure, developing a hub and spoke design instead of the web it was first called. However, blockchains by nature risk the same eventuality. A blockchain relies on redundancy. It needs to be able to point to its own history, and then it needs to have copies of that history redistributed among the entire network of users. The problem is that this requirement becomes exponentially more difficult to fulfill as its use and history extends further. Mining needs to be performed to validate transactions, but mining becomes more time consuming the longer the chain. As a result, the ability to perform these tasks is directly tied to the person able to afford the hardware required. There’s an initial or ongoing investment required no matter what. Not to mention that the validation of these transaction requires energy. It needs to be done computationally, and the cost of that computation also increases as the chain does. The environmental impact may be overshadowed by present AI training datacenters, but it’s still a present and largely unsolved issue.
I hadn’t heard of arweave mind you, but nothing in their documentation about hosting a node or being part of the chain itself leads me to believe they have found a solution to this, which is a must, if you are to rely on it as a stable, distributed storage medium. That said, its permanent storage design is intriguing, since it has the potential to address common problems with the bittorrent protocol.
As for complexity, it’s as described above. The infrastructure is the complexity. You’re right, it’s easy to deploy an NFT, but there is no move to standardize on a platform for them. No self-serving enterprise is going to set themselves up on a chain of custody they do not have control over. I admit this is a political complexity, not a technical one, but I think it’s a truth to contend with for the same reason centralized services exist to begin with.
As for your last point: I don’t believe in NFTs because I fundamentally do not believe in DRM. Smart contracts, NFTs and blockchains on the whole are designed to track, verify, and validate the transfer of ownership in a way that describes and acts as an extension of existing DRM schemes. It goes beyond a certificate of trust, and introduces the limitations of physical property into a digital space. In fact, it doesn’t even solve the resale problem because there would be nothing to prevent a vendor from reintroducing some kind of SecuROM nightmare via a Smart Contract.
I think the base technology is important. At the end of the day blockchains are actually a useful technology, with wide application. But the need to have visibility of the whole transaction is the flaw. You can mitigate it somewhat by chunking the chain and holding data in different places, but the data must remain intact.
You can’t reason with someone who is already biased to one position. They’ll never try to see the benefits.
But yeah we can have visa and mastercard approve all of our purchases too
I am biased, I admit, but that stems from lived experience. I was, for a time, pretty invested in the concept of cryptocurrencies, blockchain cryptography and NFTs. I don’t like traditional payment processors or banks, but I don’t think NFTs themselves are the solution. In general, I think applying physical restrictions to digital content is a bad idea, and ultimately that’s what NFTs and smart contracts aim to do. It sounds nice to be able to validate ownership, but all it does is prop up existing licensing schemes by building a framework to enforce them.
And if you don’t see a problem with that, then we’ve got different perspectives on the world and that’s fine, but don’t assume I’m not willing to listen.
But this would not be interoperable with other services, and to make it interoperable would require mutual trust and coordination between them that does not exist. Not to say that NFTs specifically are a solution here (video games are fungible after all, and porting physical ownership properties to digital goods is a problem these companies don’t want to solve to begin with), but there are actual reasons to use credibly neutral infrastructure and standards.
I mean, there’s no reason NFTs are needed for that, a normal database would also work.
Sure but when a company shuts down or decides to shut down the database all the media goes with it. That’s what sony just did, all the stuff you “bought” went poof. Not having the ability to transfer the license is only half of the issue.
The media goes poof anyway, there’s plenty of NFTs that point to dead links on domains that expired once the grift was no longer worth it.
Personal backups are the only real way to protect media for yourself and those around you.