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by conception
1677 days ago
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NFTs are a great idea but what people are doing with them now is a scam. I’m not sure if it will ever come to pass but imagine what the rumors for GameStop’s nft could be - a decentralized steam. People can build whatever client they want and it uses the blockchain to determine if you own a particular digital game. Then when you want to see it you can just sell the nft. Obviously there are a lot of considerations to that but having a decentralized ownership of digital goods isn’t a terrible idea as compared to “renting” we do now for everything. That said paying 30k for a jpeg seems also a scam but Twitter is going to use them for avatars or something so now, potentially, we’re talking about buy unique digital “gear” for your online persona. Sounds less dumb and more like unique skins in a game or something. So yes most of it is a scam and tulip fever today but I could see the tech being used for interesting things. Probably won’t be but it could be. |
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Let's look at the issues of this one. Let's imagine you wanted to buy FIFA 2025 on this NFT steam.
As a game purchaser, you want to play the game. It'd also be nice if you can resell it when you're done, but this is a secondary use case.
As a game publisher, EA want only people who own the game to play it. They'd also rather they get that money directly, they've previously fought against resale and ownership rights, but let's assume they've given in on that in this example.
So they can't put FIFA 2025 on the blockchain, because it's huge, and then anyone could read/play it. So they put a record that u/conception owns FIFA 2025.
So then you need to use that token to sign something to prove to someone that you own the game such that they can provide you the binaries. What happens if this provider goes out of business? What even is their business model of this binary redemption provider, since there's no guarantee they recieved your money in this decentralised example. So they're hosting data and traffic for potentially zero income.
These providers do allow developers to sell keys on their own website, but they enforce requirements on the developers if they're using Steam/Epic whatever to sell keys not to undercut the store that the keys are for. They do this because there's an interest in still obtaining these devs that won't go for steam exclusivity and yet getting their users into Steam for future sales. The decentralised blockchain means they can go somewhere else very easily next time too, and again, they're not being paid for their services in this example - charging a fee for downloads would be worse for the user and noncompetitive versus centralised services.
Then you get the game. Is the game going to verify with some sort of blockchain transaction at launch? Online only DRM is quite unpopular for games with single player modes. Plus blockchain transactions are slow.
Ok, let's assume it does like many games did in the SecuROM era and only checks periodically.
What happens when someone comes along and cracks that DRM? Does it solve that problem for publishers? No.
I just fail to see how this solves the problems that exist with game distribution, and there's clear areas where it's worse for every party involved.