Once I 'bought' an e-book that was copy protected by Adobe (my fault I didn't read the specs before buying). But because you can only read it when Adobe's servers are online no ownership is transferred to you as buyer. You buy rights to read the book on their terms.
'Hire this book' would be fair to use in this context.
(Afterwards I successfully converted to book to an e-book format that I owned with some Calibre plugins).
People are annoyed that they can pay for something (sometimes an essential identity service), be arbitrarily denied it, and have no recourse other than maybe getting lucky by writing a complaint post that gets traction and read by some human who can tell the abuse department they've fricked it.
Companies shouldn't be able to shift the burden of the negative aspects of running an online service (dealing with abuse) entirely onto society by offering no meaningful appeal process. Regulation isn't an appealing option, but companies have full well demonstrated that they aren't going to handle these cases unless forced to.
I think the reasoning for changing the verbiage from "buy" to something more truthful is because most people don't even know this is a thing. Outside of hacker news and gaming subreddits, how many people are actually aware that digital video games they've "bought" can easily be revoked? I don't believe the average person is aware.
As an example, in Sweden, a country with historically strong consumer-protection regulation, you are not allowed to market something as "gratis" (free) if you need to pay to receive it. You can say something is "included" or "receive X without additional cost when buying Y", but free needs to be truly free of cost. You are also not allowed to say "the [best/fastest/strongest]" etc without pointing to an independent party backing it up. Carlsberg gets around this with "probably the best beer in the world", for example. They would not be allowed to drop the "probably", and it would take more than some random magazine or website to address that.
It does make a real difference in businesses ability to manipulate consumer expectations.
I agree with OP that requiring "buy" to mean actual transfer of ownership without hooks would make a huge difference.
Everybody knows that renting a car is different than buying a car.
This rent economy is horseshit. "You will own nothing and be happy". In reality we keep paying for things we never get to own, then one day have them arbitrarily taken away from us if the company feels like it. Remember how we used to buy things and then they were ours? Like the music we paid for. Now people have a subscription and when it ends your entire library gets deleted. I still don't understand how the majority of people actually signed up for this, it's a horrible deal that doesn't benefit them one bit.
When you "buy" a game, you pay a 1-time fee with the implicit calculation that you'll own that game for enough time for it to be worth the cost.
When you listen to a song on Spotify, there's no expectation that that song will be available next month, and it doesn't matter, since you didn't pay for the song.
right, if I signed a contract to lease a game for 6 months and then my account was suspended for 5 months so I only got one months usage for my lease I would totally be like "that's so fair! Because word usage!"
Nobody is going to read the terms and conditions before buying. But when you are going to rent something you know the ownership is not transferred to you.
That’s technologically backwards, but it’s not like justice system behavior and software industry logic always converged nicely.
So, no, it's actually quite possible to buy a DRM-free ebook. The question is whether the book you want is available without DRM.
> People who self-publish through Amazon are given a choice whether or not to apply DRM to their books.
Didn't now Amazon also sold non-DRM. I guess the authors of the books that I was enticed to buy opted for it.
> Tor Books, the biggest sf/fantasy publisher, doesn't use DRM, either.
Have read short stories published there. Content generally is good and innovative.
My PlayStation account was blocked for online games/chat for 2 months with no clear reason, this also wasted 2 months of PS Plus subscription sice I could not really benefit from it. They did not offer any way to dispute this or clarify what exactly was wrong to avoid it.
My son was using the console to play Fortnite, he told me that some guy blackmailed him to give him gifts or he will submit fake reports, I have no idea who checks this reports and if they have competent people that understand our native language or is all just some shit AI and some dude somewhere just confirming that the AI was wight.
This incident completely changed my sentiments on Sony consoles and on top their greedy pricing and for sure I will avoid them in future.
One time I tried playing Battlefield 2 online (usually played against bots) and played the same map for a few hours (one that didn't work with bots). First I had some trouble, but then I learned the map and how the players behaved so I could anticipate their actions a little, got more kills, and suddenly I got kicked and accused of hacking because my online profile didn't show enough hours played and I beat some of the guys with 1000h+. Sometimes I wonder how anyone gets into e-sports when "being slightly better than average" immediately means "hacking".
When I started playing Rocket League I almost immediately turned off voice and text chats. Made the game 100x better.
Recently I tried playing a co-op game, thinking there should at least be some more friendly attitudes there. Accidentally hit a teammate (didn't die), who immediately lost his shit over voice chat and proceeded to murder me shortly after.
The only thing that could have made these things worse would have been some service suspending me on top of getting harrassed, which is apparently Sony's solution.
To be honest, I don't see an easy solution to this, or even a difficult one without creating the equivalent of the judicial system of a medium-sized nation. Banning bad words won't ban bad behavior. Automated bans can be easily used for blackmail. Cheating/hacking prevention seems to be impossible even for extremely successful games (e.g. GTA V), plus it doesn't seem to deter players, so there's not much incentive anyway.
Maybe blacklisting is the wrong approach. Maybe we need better whitelisting schemes instead.
To wit, I can nearly maintain a 1 K/D after a thousand hours of play; the real problem with having bot users, even if they're on both teams, is that they vacuum up all the oxygen, and being an MMO, there is no matchmaking - you fight the population that shows up to that zone, independent of skill level. Nobody really knows how they're performing when 90% of their encounters are with an opponent that instantly three-taps their head. So to achieve a 1 K/D I have to find the rare fights not populated by those players or devise a way of farming them despite losing nearly every direct gun battle. It is mostly possible. As I said before, the game gives you a lot of tools to let you not take a direct confrontation or literally bring a tank to a gunfight.
Tonight was quite bad, though, with the late night server population eventually dwindling until the only opposition was a gang of blatant cheaters who knew the tricks and were all cooperating. If they stay in a group it's extremely hard to catch them unawares - thus, I ended with a 0.6 session K/D. The entire holiday break has made the game harder since that's when cheating intensifies.
But to generalize - gaming as a whole seems poisoned by consumer entitlement. People get sold these games where you imagine you are the hero. Then they get blasted and blame everyone but themselves for it, then run off and find a cheat so that they can prove something to someone. People who play combat sports aren't like this(apart from cranks that show up suddenly at local tournaments and do illegal moves in the first round) - the training is of similar or greater importance to the winning, and there's real risk to the bullshit if it hurts someone.
Imagine how easier it is to moderate, and how polite people become if you do that.
It does not matter even if you care. You do not have negotiating power to change them. It is a 'my way or highway' situation.
And the government should be involved, you alone cannot change the Terms of Service, but your country can create laws to protect you from thieves, whenever they steal physical or digital goods. If you don't like your government fight to improve it but do not renounce to the power that it gives you as a citizen.
IANAL, but I have heard from some people who claimed to be on the Internet things that, if I have understood it correctly, suggests that this fact would weigh heavily against the companies writing the ToS if it came to a court case involving them.
I believe the relevant term is "contract of adhesion"?
Phoned their regulator, was told to register as a reseller, and call back if we still had issues.
After the registration had been finalized we contacted our new wholesaler, all that came of it was being unable to add new accounts for a few months.
The next company we had the issue with you could basically hear the face palming on the phone why they had allowed a registered reseller to open an account that didn’t allow reselling, and whether they would allow us to continue reselling or whether we should do a conference call with <name of person> at <four letter agency>.
It was basically one of those pray I do not alter our agreement further moments.
These aren't the same.
Few to no companies are going to even consider changing the TOS for a small purchase like a game, a book, music, and the like. You, as a consumer, do not have this power. I'd bet that any customer service rep you talk to (if that is an option) does not have the power nor access to the right documents to allow you to change it either. You can choose to buy or choose not to. That's it.
You have lots of options, start by throwing a brick through one of their windows, figuratively speaking. See what happens, most people aren’t dumb. They realize that games cost a lot less than windows.
They can not give you your money back and deal with regulators or they can make the problem go away.
A friend of mine got citizenship just by filing a FOIA against the govt that wouldn’t issue it, they were up against the deadline and would have had to deal with the EU, so they just issued him citizenship in exchange for withdrawing his request.
Nowadays DRM are running in kernel mode so I'd say that the pirated version is safer in a lot of cases ...
when you get in, you need to seed something, if you are worried about torrent activity on your network, try to seed something benign like a linux distribution.
Apple's iOS App Store has normalized how updates can remove and disable (or just break) features, and there's no way to downgrade.
However if you have already bought the game, and then download a pirated version, it isn’t.
Source? No research ever managed to prove that.
If the thing that you are trying to do is legal by universal laws, international laws and national laws (in order). You don't really need to worry.
In that stealing example let's assume someone stole something and you "stole" it back. Good luck for the first stealer to initiate a court case - which probably the stealer will not initiate because he will lose it plus with the expenses for the court. No court case meaning no complains therefore no crime.
Just because you pirated a game that you own a copy, in order to play it on newer version of operating system does not make you criminal. You may need a court decision only if you are not able to private or fix it without the company help but that's all.
https://codes.findlaw.com/us/title-17-copyrights/17-usc-sect...
[1] https://www.justice.gov/archives/jm/criminal-resource-manual...
Though that criminal statue wouldn't apply to the actions described here, it is indeed an example of how copyright violations of some kinds can be crimes, even felonies.
Is this the actual law?
I remember hearing about people being sued for $100k+ just for downloading a few albums back in the Limewire days.
While I totally agree with the advice of “it’s illegal so you probably shouldn’t do it”, I don’t think it’s a terribly interesting conversation philosophically. Deferring to human law in these discussions feels like an existential cop-out.
I think the question is substantially more interesting if you pretend that you have a magic wand to make the laws whatever you want, and then ask “why would it be wrong for me to torrent a game that I have purchased a legal copy of?”
In the case of downloading a copy of the game you own, I don't have a moral issue with that.
However, I don't think that generalizes to any digital good. I'd say it is morally wrong to make copies of a digital good where an additional instance gets you some benefits. For example, downloading an additional digital ticket to a limited virtual event, thereby gaining access for free, or any instance where the original creator loses a sale and someone gets to enjoy or profit from said copy of the digital good.
I’m well aware that I’m legally allowed to do legal things, but “laws” have a lot of politics and emotion involved in their creation, and I don’t feel like they’re a great place to determine the “morality” of something.
I have friends that got banned because somebody hacked into their account and fraudulently bought things. This is apparently account sharing, ban. Or filing a dispute about the charges = ban. Mass report by trolls = ban. There's a bunch of technical reasons outside your control where your account can be banned.
Most of the legal protections you otherwise would have apparently do essentially nothing when you're banned from the service / platform you are required to use instead of just the thing you bought.
This is annoying when your Steam account is hacked. This is a life altering problem when your YouTube comment gets flagged for a combined technicality of a combo-rule like "hate speech or terrorism" by calling somebody a "dummy," causing your YouTube account and all videos to be shut down, gmail account and all archived email deleted, all google docs deleted, all linked google cloud services to be suspended, and all 3rd party login oauths to be revoked. You won't be able to log into even non-google things, and further can't reset your password / login credentials or prove who you are because your email was deleted.
This entire nightmare can happen to anybody at any time for any reason. Even further, because YouTube in particular is fully automated customer support, your rebuttable is likely to be automatically denied and flagged for trolling putting you in an even worse state. The only chance you have is if you happen to personally know a higher-up human before hand that you're able to talk to.
You absolutely do.
Anyway, I agree with you. Digital marketplaces are becoming more and more important and certainly I'm sure I have a lot of money in Steam, Kindle, and various other services. It'd be nice to move away from the Wild West phase given how much money's sloshing around at this point.
You can definitely remove it, but it's not like GOG where the launcher really is 100% optional and you can install and play the games without an internet connection or an account of any sort
This type of anticonsumerism would get so much attention if it were in another field. I can only hope it happens here.
Generally yes, and this is obviously bullshit.
- Are players that bought the game on GOG able to play with those that bought it on steam/Uplay/other when lobbies are involved
- Are there DRMs for online play that have lobbies ? If so, how are they handled ?
Also, their list is sadly quite limited it seems, for the games many play. No GTA V, no God of War, no Red Dead Redemption, no Call of Duty, no battlefield V, which seem to be some of most selling games of past years.
I know it's not their fault but because of it, it won't fit a huge chunk of the users' needs.
It depends: some games implement multiplayer through their publisher's private servers (e.g. Paradox games) so users can play together regardless of the shop they bought the game from. Some others (e.g. Dying Light) reimplement multiplayer replacing Steam facilities with GOG Galaxy. In that case interoperability is not possible maily because GOG Galaxy doesn't implement the same anticheat system. Finally some other games whose multiplayer is based on Steam, had the multiplayer removed in the version sold on GOG (e.g. modern XCOM games).
> Also, their list is sadly quite limited it seems, for the games many play.
Nowadays the game market offers more than just AAA games and for people like me who stopped buying DRM-protected games and are not interested in multiplayer there are still many good games to enjoy. Some AA and AAA games are also published on GOG after a while, so it's just matter to wait and support GOG's business model if you don't like DRM.
I have bought games from GOG, just not multiplayer ones (or ones that don't have DRMs anyway such as Factorio)
I also don't play much AAA games. But I'll have a hard time convincing anyone when the game they want isn't there. Not that it is GOG's fault but stil...
In general, if the developer wants DRM, the developer gets DRM, so the options on GOG will probably always be years behind other platforms and usually not include multiplayer experiences, in terms of AAA games, that is.
That's because, even though the TOS is quite clear that you can lose all your stuff due to inactivity, Ubisoft doesn't want the risk of the court deciding the TOS is unfair and striking out those clauses.
And people want you to believe that "it is not ethical".
But you said you were nervous about buying these things. What are you nervous about? And why do you pay money anyway if you're nervous about what you're getting?
> even though I should have indefinite ownership
On what grounds? These are companies operating in a free market. They're offering a product whose terms are right out there in the open. If you don't like the terms, don't buy.
For a ridiculous example, imagine there was a clause buried in the fineprint that allowed the store owner to charge you $5000 to unlock the game whenever they chose to. Even if it were in the T&C, it would be ruled invalid because it was so unexpected.
Similarly, removing the right to play a game you have bought with money because you haven’t played it “enough” (according to the vendor) may also be considered unreasonavlble.
That doesn't mean they aren't a contract. They're simply a contract where your only options as the buyer are to buy or not to buy.
That said, a unilateral contract like this can be treated somewhat differently by courts. See below.
> removing the right to play a game you have bought with money because you haven’t played it “enough” (according to the vendor) may also be considered unreasonable.
As I posted in response to someone else upthread, it would be an interesting case if someone actually did try to take a game store to court on these grounds. Contract law does include general rules about reasonableness, and courts are more likely to apply them for unilateral contracts like these where one party does not have the opportunity to bargain.
There is a concept in contract law where if an agreement is heavily biased in favor of one party and that party has almost all of the leverage in the relationship, flat out refuses negotiation etc. - then a court can find that contract unconscionable and invalidate it.
That sounds like it might apply to a lot of "take it or leave it" software/online ToS and EULAs, but there's very little case law in this area to my knowledge.
Plus if your contract with Steam is invalidated, where does that leave you? It means Steam has no further obligation to you so you still can't access your games.
IANAL
What you never signed with a witness and a notary?
So if they put in a term that said you agree to give them your house or 500 you would have to?
Terms of service are the rules outlined by the service provider. Breaking these could get your service cut and you would have a hard time finding a legal recourse.
That doesn't sound to me like a reason for legislation. It sounds to me like a reason for competition.
But for there to be competition, customers have to be willing to put their money where their mouth is. If there were a competitor that charged, say, 20% more for a product that included the confidence you want, would you pay it?
Games aren't fungible with each other. If you want to play Dark Souls, you have to buy it from From software. You can't go to an alternative Dark Souls provider that offers you better terms. Likewise Ubisoft has IP that fans want access to. Therefore due to copyright etc they have small monopolies that aren't as subject to market forces.
Some years back I decided I had had enough of Ubisoft's anti-consumer bullshit, and decided AC: Unity would be my last Ubisoft game (bits of the game that I had bought were locked behind a mobile game and there were paid-for items as well). There have been lots of times I have thought I would love to play certain games (eg Anno 1800) but I've held off because they were Ubisoft games.
These days I try to spend my game dollars in a way that rewards publishers with a more positive stance, but that does mean depriving yourself of certain games etc. I can totally get why people don't do this.
But they are; you yourself give an illustration:
> Some years back I decided I had had enough of Ubisoft's anti-consumer bullshit, and decided AC: Unity would be my last Ubisoft game (bits of the game that I had bought were locked behind a mobile game and there were paid-for items as well). There have been lots of times I have thought I would love to play certain games (eg Anno 1800) but I've held off because they were Ubisoft games
> These days I try to spend my game dollars in a way that rewards publishers with a more positive stance, but that does mean depriving yourself of certain games etc. I can totally get why people don't do this.
In other words, the market forces favor game distributors who do the things you (rightly, IMO) call "anti-consumer bullshit"--not enough consumers are willing to do what you did to deter distributors from doing those things. That's a free market: the voluntary choices of buyers are determining the incentives faced by the sellers. The only way to change those incentives would be for many more people to do what you did.
(I'm even more extreme than you, btw; I have never bought a single online game distributed on these terms and never expect to. All the computer games I've ever played came on CDs or DVDs.)
> But they are; you yourself give an illustration:
I didn't say they aren't subject to market forces at all. I said they aren't as subject to market forces. They are insulated to some extent by the monopolies created for them my copyright. That's precisely why I gave my example - as something that I (and some others) do but which is almost entirely ineffective.
It's not a free market. Copyright and other IP protections specifically mean the goods are not fungible for the reason I explained.
No. The game developer, who owns the copyright, decides what channels it gets sold through. If game developers knew that people wouldn't buy their games through channels that didn't give good guarantees of ownership and access, they wouldn't sell through those channels.
First of all, when a game or a platform does poorly, the reason for that can be very hard to discern (unless there's some kind of coordinated vocal protest). "The customers are disagreeing with the fine print of our end-user license agreement" usually isn't high up on the list of reasons.
Secondly, there are many degrees of incentive separation between the game developer and the customer. If the distributor offers the game developer a good lump-sum payment for a platform exclusive, they might not care about the EULA. The distributor might also own the developer.
IP isn't fungible, so competition in the space is subject to much more inefficiency than a market for, say, wheat.
Ultimately, people get the market they create through their buying decisions. The reason these market inefficiencies and misaligned incentives exist is that game distributors know that people will spend a lot of money on games and won't pay much attention to the fact that they are actually not buying ownership but only a subscription. The only way to "fix" that, if it's a problem, is for people to change their buying behavior so it is no longer lucrative to distribute games on those terms.
> The distributor might also own the developer.
Yes, fair point, I had forgotten that Ubisoft in this case is both.
I agree in general. Remember, though, that copyright is government intervention too. Are you in favor of getting rid of that? That would solve this whole problem too, since just downloading a new copy without paying would then be perfectly okay.
The customer may have preferences along n dimensions where n is a very large number of choices and a small number of choices wherein their ability to effect the distribution of characteristics is limited to avoiding choices which make massive strides along multiple axis away from desirable areas. Regulations force all players into a reasonable space in the game board and let them compete within that space. It is the only practical way to achieve this.
It is if the consumers don't demand choice, yes. Which, as a number of other responses in this thread have shown, appears to be the case in this market. The people who are willing to not buy games distributed on terms unfavorable to them are statistical outliers (at least one such person has posted elsewhere in this thread) and don't have any significant effect on the incentives faced by the distributors.
> Regulations force all players into a reasonable space
Into what some unelected government bureaucrats decide is a "reasonable space", perhaps. But any such regulation is far more likely to make things worse, not better, for consumers. Look up "regulatory capture". The game distributors have much deeper pockets and a much more concentrated incentive to simply buy the regulations they want.
A lot of games fall into the same categories of digital interactive art. Especially if its mostly a single player game, I may want to re-experience that game later, much like I might watch a DVD or VHS I still own from my childhood.
Of course I wouldn't expect their servers to still be running, which is why getting rid of DRM is important for the sake of archival
Keep in mind that players leave long before servers stop working. To me games are more of medium than an object and the artifacts left behind like stories, wikis, screenshots, videos and memes are of a higher importance and also easier to preserve. Let's say that you don't need to have a running Coliseum to understand how it works and it's societal implications.
Also most of what I see in games and movies are things originated or preserved long ago in books. And what games and movies do is summarize things and add action scenes and emotional filler.
In any case the biggest examples would be software.
(I personally have no experience with such things because I will never use or pay for software that is provided in this way.)
I bet in a few years we'll have plenty of documented instances.
I asked another poster just upthread about the software (such as Creative Cloud) case.
You didn’t buy any games. You paid for access, but as you note you don’t actually own any of these games. Please stop giving in to the doublespeak BS of these companies.
Other than the false marketing (using words like “buy”) and that DRM is toxic, I don’t see what’s really not right - it’s a terrible deal but you’re free to not partake. As long as people keep giving companies money for this kind of thing it will continue.
It’s not like being able to play the very latest AAA game is something that is hard to give up, unlike a lot of other essential software. Just say no.
(BTW, is this really the case with Steam? Last time I checked you could always make a local offline backup of a downloaded game and bring it with you; any connectivity/license check would have to be made in the game itself)
Source: am indie game dev
Source: Have used Steam pretty much since it was released and also worked with SteamKit for a project or two.
I can kind of understand if you were legitimately in the wrong (e.g. sending death threats to other users, getting a warning, and then doing it again), but in the situation where you are simply inactive for some period of time I think it’s unreasonable.
- Disable online features on the account
- Fill a complain to authorities if illegal in the user's country (in France, sending death threats online is totally illegal)
But not "Delete the account with its paid content". IMHO, the community part and game library part should not be strong-linked in such a way. If only for false positives.
Banning this type of practice gets into much thornier ground, because plenty of games legitimately do run only online (MMOs of all types, for instance), and for plenty of others, there's a legitimate reason for them to at least have an online component...and just how deeply embedded in the game that online component has to be is rarely going to be a simple matter to determine.
I don't really see a good solution to this at the moment, sadly.
Preferring games that don't do the bad thing and being willing to pay a premium for (or accept lower production values from) them is the market solution. I think you’ve outline why there isn't a legislative solution that doesn't adversely impact lots of genres of games where online is fundamental to the game and not an abusive control methods with no other purpose.
You might not be able to ban always-online requirements without unacceptable collateral damage, but you can legislatively address “extremely dodgy privacy policies” by simply having decent privacy laws and not leaving the issue up to corporate policy.
It is sad when it occurs, but that's the exact reason why governments are there: they're (theoretically) reliable powerful people that should protect us from other unreliable powerful people, in exchange of being kept in power. Any other alternative would involve violence.
The general idea behind a protection racket is that once you paid the goons, they protect you against aggression, from themselves, and others.
Why do you hate your elected representatives safeguarding fairness against large corporations like this?
Asking for regulation is kind of "gnome underpants" plan where regulate -> X -> profit. X is extremely complicated.
Let’s say you bought a bunch of things for The Matrix Online, do you expect that server to run forever? It won’t. It didn’t. Why should someone else maintain it forever? Are you getting a refund? Why? You already extracted the useful life of it.
If there’s government regulation it’s around the deceptive use of the word “purchase” it’s just a long term rental
Don't mean to sound too cranky but this "you just bought a license" crap has been a thing since software began being software. It was no more fair back then than it is now.
No one is arguing, at least I don't think they are, that a company has an obligation to keep servers running in perpetuity. But to tell me I have no portable way to retain the bits I bought--excuse me, "licensed"--from a company is just crap. If a game can run in single-player mode without a server, or if a movie file can be played, or a song file listened to, then the act of "buying" it should mean I can do that for as long as I can keep my computers running and the onus on keeping backups of those files is on me.
We call them app "stores," we use the moniker of "purchased," and the ads call them "ours." If companies don't want to let us keep the ability to independently use the software or content files we "purchased," then they should be prohibited from using the lexicon of buying things and be very explicit that this is a one-time fee for a rental that can be taken away at any time.
Being explicit does not mean burying it in a multi-thousand word document that no person with a regular command of English can understand and that none of us have the power to negotiate for ourselves.
But I think you have got it right with the rest of your comments. There has to be a meeting of the minds in these dealings, and I don't believe these companies are acting in good faith when they explicitly or implicitly suggest that you are "buying a game" or "buying a song" even if you can find out what that really means in fine print somewhere.
Hopefully we get more legislation and precedent that forces them to be more explicit about what these purchases mean exactly.
(AGPL is a little different, but that's an issue for another discussion.)
Take for instance Amazon. They say they sell you a digital video, but they actually can’t, because in reality they have a revocable license, which does get revoked, thus all your “purchases” disappear. If you owned physical media, this couldn’t happen.
https://www.slashfilm.com/574053/amazon-sued-purchased-movie...
Reminds me of some friends who had Bitcoin and “forgot” about it and only to come back with massive profits.
Not that I'm defending centralized services like Steam, because I'm very well aware that companies have happily wielded their power to randomly lock people out of their accounts (like the main subject here). But crypto isn't solving anything either (or at least not yet).
Back up your password, in a safe deposit box, at a bank.
>And then there are people who had their computer stolen/broken and then just downloaded Steam on a new device and had their games and saves ready to go.
Back up your password, in a safe deposit box, at a bank.
>But crypto isn't solving anything either (or at least not yet).
How does it not solve a centralized entity taking away your license key? Sure they can stop honoring your key, but they cant remove it from you.
Decentralizing that doesn't change anything. Crypto is once again just trying to solve something through burning coal and oil that was solved decades ago far more efficiently. Want to reclaim your game? Fire up a torrent. No need for a ponzi scheme.
Online games occasionally have stories of 'I got hacked and support helped me get my items back', where they just clone up new in game items. They wouldn't do that for things you are allowed to sell for real value.
So I think there's a real risk of trading one bad problem for another.
Doesn't seem like it'd work to me without a central authority.
> OK, but where do you download the game?
You download it once you buy it. After that it’s your responsibility to backup it like it would be with a physical medium. Of course, sellers would probably allow you to download it again if you have an account.
On your other points, I just don’t believe (and don’t want either) that good anti-piracy protection will exist as long as the game can be run on a platform you control.
I just hope that someday the industry finally gives up on this shit.
Platforms like GOG already sell DRM-Free backupable games. It just works. They are not on the edge of bankruptcy because of the piracy. All their games are available on Steam with the Steam DRM and still, the universe is not collapsing.
Games like The Witcher 3 or Cyberpunk 2077 are available on GOG without DRM and are still hugely profitable. It’s a win-win situation. As long as you backup your games and keep a compatible computer somewhere, Cyberpunk 2077 will be playable in 2077 without a hack.
> Even with licensing, you couldn't play offline?
That’s a good point. The GOG DRM-free model wouldn’t work here. Someone smarter than me could likely give you an answer.
Who will pay and maintain the servers? Blockchain here is not a solution but added overhead.
Also. What prevents me from leaking my license so anyone on Earth can download and play it for free? Note that this is the same issue that any DRM-free model faces but with incurring costs. Can licenses be revoked?
Highly unlikely any of this will happen as it is more profitable and easier for game publishers just to stick with their current closed ledger, that allows them the ability to revoke any license as they see fit.
A license exists so that it can connect to the license server -- which is owned by the game company -- which then allows you to play.
You're still at their whims.
I don't think blockchain has any application here. You already have a receipt of your purchase, and noone is disputing that, so blockchain would add nothing but an extra layer of complexity. The problem is that the rights that follow with that purchase does not match what consumers would naturally expect.
this actually sounds like the only beneficial use for NFTs i can think of
If you show me well-written legislation that doesn't have generous handouts for cronies, I'm all for it.
The details are messy. And the lawmakers would guarantee the passing the most fucked up version of it with some other draconian measures bundled in there. Startup ecosystem would be in sheer panic to comply and some won't even contemplate starting a company selling digital goods/services. The scope is so insane, I am having a hard time thinking about it.
Even if a company offered a convenience service, the ideal implementation allows people to restore their account from the current function state onchain, which is what most web3 services do in an increasingly standardized and predictable way right now.
regarding the NFT's and where they store the images, many NFT classes have getter methods that tell enough about what the implementation of the digital item should look like, usually when I'm talking to people I get the impression that they haven't looked.
there are so many ways to do this right, even if they aren't passing muster right now.
the games you possess and the digital items you possess would have an independent record of your possession and continued access
if you did use a company's platform because of its convenient UI, even if you lost access to that company's platform you should still be able to access all of your games and items
in the Web3 paradigm and idea, the closed systems build themselves around open systems just to make them convenient, and aren't strictly necessary. the open system allows the records of assets to be tapped into and re-rendered in other games, or marketplaces. Think about it like Web 1.0 with updated technology and requisite pieces that were missing back then.
I’m not a fan at all of that kind of DRM. Cryptographically prohibiting the owner of the machine from inspecting what code is running on their machine is a different league than obfuscation but I’m pretty sure that’s where we’re heading regardless with DRM. PCs will become more like video game consoles in that sense.
Or of course, streaming cloud gaming, where your local machine is more of a thin client. In this case the NFT is really just a token you present to the proverbial gatekeeper every time you want to play. So you can still be blocked, but at least you’ll have irrefutable proof of which games you paid for and have an obvious case in small-claims court.
Especially the former will probably mean I’ll just completely quit gaming altogether.
the system would check your signature and/or check for current possession of the necessary NFT.
trusting a friend to experience that is up to the user at their own risk.
the game producer's goals are not really about preventing shared access any longer, as they are still selling items and doing things for creation of items (engagement), just like the most lucrative games already do now.
With online accounts you could prevent said identity from connecting to multiple online games at once but this is notably worse than old school physical games where you could have 3 games at 3 different friends houses while playing a fourth.
Makes me wonder if we should stop multiplying complexity beyond need and go back to cartridges except now they are $5 64GB usb drives.
A unique mitigation could be to raise the barrier of sharing, like not only could you check for NFT ownership, you could look for a purchase transaction on an NFT marketplace. So now the friends would need capital to wash trade that, and they'd have to beat the bots looking for low value bids, and they would have to unnecessarily pay for transaction fees.
Not advocating for that, but oh well the idea is out there now.
It becomes a long serial number that anyone who knows can transfer to another account.
But it wouldn't make sense to pay to transfer it over ($60-$300 gas fees) on an under $60 game.
I can see some real issues with your approach.
NFTs can't be used for products under a few hundred if you want to leverage the value as insurance.
the client and the server would be checking nearest nodes for the latest block height. so any mismatch would prevent the user from keeping a snapshot of an old blockchain state as the max height would be too different.
it is also easy to disconnect a user if the assets moved when reading the current blockheight. many web3 applications just keep a websocket open to several nodes, this is boilerplate code at this point. reading from a blockchain is free. many services already check for onchain tokens to enable or disable access, for several years now. you can try gaming them to trick for access and see if you find anything.
Personally I always get kind of nervous around buying things on PSN, Xbox, Stadia, Steam, Oculus, etc. If they ban me, do I lose my thousands of dollars of games? That doesn't seem right (and no, I don't really care too much about what the Terms and Services say).