How did we, as gamers, let this happen? The #Epic Games Store made an attempt to become the best gaming platform on PC by allowing #crypto games. How has tha...
Basically, the crypto-blockchain ownership for gaming goods only becomes viable when you make the one big step:
Governments force the software vendors to support fair-use rules that give us the same control over digital goods as we have with physical products.
Right now, software companies get to write whatever copyright rules they like. They don’t have to let you resell the software, or transfer it, or whatever. They don’t even have to let you keep it beyond warranty laws in many jurisdictions. As soon as the warranty is over, any cloud-based purchases you still have access to are essentially just goodwill from the vendor - they can take the servers down or boot you out and you have very little recourse.
So while blockchains might be a good solution for giving digital goods the same advantages as physical goods - like if the ownership of my Overwatch skins, or of various indie-games were on the Blockchain, I could sell them used freely on used-product marketplaces just like I can the paperback books on my bookshelf. Of course, this would create new problems: with a robust used-products market, how does the vendor make money if people aren’t buying so much stuff from them? Well, making new stuff still gives them new stuff to sell - they’re the only ones who can mint new software licenses or digital good ownership tokens. They could also charge for access to servers, but then there’s questions of whether that, too, is letting them write their own copyright since nobody else has access to the server hosting software.
If a major market country like the US or the EU laid down the law and said:
All digital-purchased goods must be transferrable, and
All digital-purchased software licenses must be transferrable (although only patch guarantees are up to the original warranty)
Then I could see many software vendors saying “I don’t want to deal with supporting the used-stuff market I can see how much of a headache that was for Valve, I’ll just offload managing your licenses to a Blockchain”.
Of course, more likely everybody would just switch to a subscription model like cloud service companies.
I mean, if you made “you must publish your application-server software for free, as long as it checks with a respected 3rd-party like a blockchain for client validation” a rule, then what would happen to eg. Office 365? Would Microsoft be expected to give away free Office 365 server-software? Would each monthly or yearly subscription purchase also be a blockchain token? So like in addition buying a blockchain token of “1 stout shako” you could buy a blockchain token of “access to Office 365 from March 1 2024 12am UTC to March 1 2025 12am UTC”. Then your subscription has all the same benefits of a physical good as well. Idunno.
Also there’s always the question of whether blockchains can scale to this size without falling over. If it’s too hard, then the gas costs of minting micropurchases are unsustainable or transaction times are too slow. In the reverse case, if it’s too easy (ie ownership transfers at no cost and instantly), you could have a second-by-second lending library where you rent access to the Ghastly Gibus for the exact length of your play session and one Ghastly Gibus is being used by dozens of people per week and the benefits of owning anything goes through the floor and the vendors have to charge far more than before to own the software licenses and all the money goes into these hypothetical arbitrage rental blockchain services.
I’m a little more interested in this conversation now that Ethereum has proven out Proof of Stake, and so they’re no longer burning down the world to power this stuff. But still, fundamentally Blockchain is a solution looking for a problem.
You got to the root of the problem, ownership vs licenses, very eloquently.
However, I don’t think it needs to be enforced for every game or software service. Yeah, it would be nice to transfer my license when I no longer need it, but I’m totally fine with software vendors not allowing transfers, or only allowing transfers through them (e.g. like Steam marketplace).
However, I do think digital licenses should be unrevokable without full compensation of the original, inflation-adjusted purchase price. And a license is not just to the client, but the complete solution, so the vendor would be required to either keep the server in operation or make the server available for the end user to operate themselves, and if they release the server component, they are released from their obligations to the licensee.
So if I own a license to a game with an online multiplayer component, and the company wants to discontinue the servers, I get complete access to the server in a form that I could reasonably run myself to maintain the complete solution, complete with my user data. I could then legally host it for any other licensed user to access (though they may need to provide their user data to me to load onto my instance).
At no point would blockchain be required, but it would be an option if vendors wanted to outsource license verification, otherwise they would need to keep their license servers running indefinitely.
Subscription services are a bit more tricky since you don’t have a long term licence. So I think for those, the vendor would only be obligated to provide you your data in a format that can be used with a similar product. So if Office 365 shuts down, they could provide your Word docs in a format a competitor (say, LibreOffice) understands, likewise for other parts of the stack. If no direct analogue is available, they have to make a reasonable effort or face legal damages for breach of contract.
That’s about as far as I’d want to take it.
blockchain is a solution looking for a problem
I disagree. The problem is clearly stated: we don’t trust centralized banks to manage currencies. Central banks have proven willing to steal from the average person by maintaining positive inflation (essentially a convoluted tax on savings). Currencies can also be replaced, which means money is a revokable license to value, not value itself.
But it creates other problems as well. Since it’s a store of value uncorrelated with fiat currencies, there’s going to be speculation between the two. If that speculation outpaces mass adoption for transactions and as a store of value, it’ll scare away the mass market and it’ll stay dominated by speculation.
But that doesn’t mean there’s no valid use case, it just means we need to be more careful about the use cases we choose for it. In the case of games, the vendor would be the only one to produce new coins or whatever, so that eliminates mining entirely, and if the vendor has a fixed price for goods, speculation can be kept under control. Coin minting doesn’t have to be decentralized to have a decentralized blockchain, a blockchain is merely a public ledger of transactions that can be cryptographically verified by anyone. When the game servers go down, the vendor would only need to release the server code and anyone could host it using the public ledger, so there would be no need to import user data.
That’s one possible use case, but I’m sure there are plenty others. It’s just that speculation is a much more lucrative application since you just need to convince suckers to buy into your coin. But just because it’s easy to turn into a scam doesn’t mean the tech has no valid use.
Basically, the crypto-blockchain ownership for gaming goods only becomes viable when you make the one big step:
Governments force the software vendors to support fair-use rules that give us the same control over digital goods as we have with physical products.
Right now, software companies get to write whatever copyright rules they like. They don’t have to let you resell the software, or transfer it, or whatever. They don’t even have to let you keep it beyond warranty laws in many jurisdictions. As soon as the warranty is over, any cloud-based purchases you still have access to are essentially just goodwill from the vendor - they can take the servers down or boot you out and you have very little recourse.
So while blockchains might be a good solution for giving digital goods the same advantages as physical goods - like if the ownership of my Overwatch skins, or of various indie-games were on the Blockchain, I could sell them used freely on used-product marketplaces just like I can the paperback books on my bookshelf. Of course, this would create new problems: with a robust used-products market, how does the vendor make money if people aren’t buying so much stuff from them? Well, making new stuff still gives them new stuff to sell - they’re the only ones who can mint new software licenses or digital good ownership tokens. They could also charge for access to servers, but then there’s questions of whether that, too, is letting them write their own copyright since nobody else has access to the server hosting software.
If a major market country like the US or the EU laid down the law and said:
All digital-purchased goods must be transferrable, and
All digital-purchased software licenses must be transferrable (although only patch guarantees are up to the original warranty)
Then I could see many software vendors saying “I don’t want to deal with supporting the used-stuff market I can see how much of a headache that was for Valve, I’ll just offload managing your licenses to a Blockchain”.
Of course, more likely everybody would just switch to a subscription model like cloud service companies.
I mean, if you made “you must publish your application-server software for free, as long as it checks with a respected 3rd-party like a blockchain for client validation” a rule, then what would happen to eg. Office 365? Would Microsoft be expected to give away free Office 365 server-software? Would each monthly or yearly subscription purchase also be a blockchain token? So like in addition buying a blockchain token of “1 stout shako” you could buy a blockchain token of “access to Office 365 from March 1 2024 12am UTC to March 1 2025 12am UTC”. Then your subscription has all the same benefits of a physical good as well. Idunno.
Also there’s always the question of whether blockchains can scale to this size without falling over. If it’s too hard, then the gas costs of minting micropurchases are unsustainable or transaction times are too slow. In the reverse case, if it’s too easy (ie ownership transfers at no cost and instantly), you could have a second-by-second lending library where you rent access to the Ghastly Gibus for the exact length of your play session and one Ghastly Gibus is being used by dozens of people per week and the benefits of owning anything goes through the floor and the vendors have to charge far more than before to own the software licenses and all the money goes into these hypothetical arbitrage rental blockchain services.
I’m a little more interested in this conversation now that Ethereum has proven out Proof of Stake, and so they’re no longer burning down the world to power this stuff. But still, fundamentally Blockchain is a solution looking for a problem.
You got to the root of the problem, ownership vs licenses, very eloquently.
However, I don’t think it needs to be enforced for every game or software service. Yeah, it would be nice to transfer my license when I no longer need it, but I’m totally fine with software vendors not allowing transfers, or only allowing transfers through them (e.g. like Steam marketplace).
However, I do think digital licenses should be unrevokable without full compensation of the original, inflation-adjusted purchase price. And a license is not just to the client, but the complete solution, so the vendor would be required to either keep the server in operation or make the server available for the end user to operate themselves, and if they release the server component, they are released from their obligations to the licensee.
So if I own a license to a game with an online multiplayer component, and the company wants to discontinue the servers, I get complete access to the server in a form that I could reasonably run myself to maintain the complete solution, complete with my user data. I could then legally host it for any other licensed user to access (though they may need to provide their user data to me to load onto my instance).
At no point would blockchain be required, but it would be an option if vendors wanted to outsource license verification, otherwise they would need to keep their license servers running indefinitely.
Subscription services are a bit more tricky since you don’t have a long term licence. So I think for those, the vendor would only be obligated to provide you your data in a format that can be used with a similar product. So if Office 365 shuts down, they could provide your Word docs in a format a competitor (say, LibreOffice) understands, likewise for other parts of the stack. If no direct analogue is available, they have to make a reasonable effort or face legal damages for breach of contract.
That’s about as far as I’d want to take it.
I disagree. The problem is clearly stated: we don’t trust centralized banks to manage currencies. Central banks have proven willing to steal from the average person by maintaining positive inflation (essentially a convoluted tax on savings). Currencies can also be replaced, which means money is a revokable license to value, not value itself.
But it creates other problems as well. Since it’s a store of value uncorrelated with fiat currencies, there’s going to be speculation between the two. If that speculation outpaces mass adoption for transactions and as a store of value, it’ll scare away the mass market and it’ll stay dominated by speculation.
But that doesn’t mean there’s no valid use case, it just means we need to be more careful about the use cases we choose for it. In the case of games, the vendor would be the only one to produce new coins or whatever, so that eliminates mining entirely, and if the vendor has a fixed price for goods, speculation can be kept under control. Coin minting doesn’t have to be decentralized to have a decentralized blockchain, a blockchain is merely a public ledger of transactions that can be cryptographically verified by anyone. When the game servers go down, the vendor would only need to release the server code and anyone could host it using the public ledger, so there would be no need to import user data.
That’s one possible use case, but I’m sure there are plenty others. It’s just that speculation is a much more lucrative application since you just need to convince suckers to buy into your coin. But just because it’s easy to turn into a scam doesn’t mean the tech has no valid use.