Coming back to the main topic, I would suggest looking into Lateral thinking with withered technology. Nobody cares what technology is used for consumer facing products. Nobody cares if its web1 or web25. What people care about is usefulness and purpose.
Cutting-edge tech has always been here, but the break-throughs are mostly coming from cross-pollinating existing tech and remixing something into a better, cheaper, faster version.
An NFT is like a key to a house. You can use it to open the door until the owner of the house decides to change the locks. You still own the key, but that impresses nobody.
It'd be a stupid hill to die on anyway. Granted Ubisoft has done some stupid stuff in the past, but this one I don't think they'd win in the end.
So yeah, I maintain my point that if they offer NFTs, allow owners to sell them to other people (which is kind of the point of NFTs), and then decide certain instances of NFTs don't have to be honored because they banned that person, they're going to get enough articles like this that they'll feel pressure to walk back such an action.
> The idea that NFTs somehow help in these kind of situations is utter nonsense
is accurate. Is your point that NFTs wouldn't hurt the situation? That's a different claim.
NFTs add nothing here.
That cant be right, well Ubisoft could still fuck this up. I can sell my NFTs on marketplaces completely independent of ubisoft. Sure they could invalidate, not honor the NFTs, but i wouldnt expect them to do so unless criminal activity like money laundering is involved.
Even on a public chain, this isn’t true. It’s shocking to me how many people in this space really don’t know the basics.
An NFT is just a contract that implements ERC-721/ERC-1155. I can implement restrictions around the transfer functions however I like.
True they could implement arbitrary restrictions.
Ubisoft's coin is on a public chain right now, and they have restrictions that prevent people from using arbitrary 3rd-party marketplaces to trade the NFTs. So it's a nice theory, but it doesn't seem to be working in practice; being on a public chain isn't currently preventing Ubisoft from restricting other portals.
I think people believed this portability was inherent to how NFTs work, that of course anything on a public chain would have to allow 3rd-party marketplaces. But I don't see what mechanisms actually exist to force that outcome; I think that's just a hope that people had rather than an inherent technological property of how blockchain contracts work.
On the other hand being able to have more restrictive tokens enables smart contracts to comply with regulations. But for gaming NFTs it really destroys any added value/utility which is something i should have expected of Ubisoft.
I can create NFTs that cannot be traded on other marketplaces.
See the link I posted. As of right now, the stated plan is that you will NOT be able to do so.
Of course, Ubisoft could in a theoretical world also not do that stuff, but the point is they could also allow you to transfer your games using a centralized service. The NFTs don't force them to be more open or customer friendly, if they were customer friendly they would already be allowing you to download games without DRM or transfer them around. They could already offer you a Steam key with every game you bought from the Ubisoft store; it's corporate politics and competition between Ubisoft and Steam that prevents this from happening, not technology.
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What Ubisoft demonstrates so well here is that the incentive structure behind NFTs also doesn't really seem bias companies towards being more open. There's no commercial incentive for any other game to integrate with Ubisoft's NFTs. Doing so would be a pure act of charity with no upside to those companies, and with a ton of liability since Ubisoft would be allowed to mess with those NFTs which would now be part of the customer experience on a separate game.
What you're seeing with Ubisoft is not going to be an exception, this is going to be the norm of how companies work with NFTs. A quick heuristic you can use: releasing a game DRM-free is easier, cheaper, simpler, and more directly beneficial to consumers than building a consumer-friendly NFT system; so whenever you look at a company that says they're going to work with NFTs, do yourself a favor and check to see if their games are currently DRM-free. Do they currently allow game trading/gifting? If they don't, then I think it's a strong probability that their NFTs are going to look more like Ubisoft's and less like the ethical systems that people imagine and hope for. Because I can't stress enough that it's not hard to build the systems and restrictions on the blockchain that Ubisoft has, it really comes down to corporate choice about how they proceed rather than the technology.
In short, NFTs offer no additional positive incentives to be more consumer friendly, and the technology doesn't make anything possible that wasn't possible before with good-old-fashioned OAUTH or signed public databases. If Ubisoft wanted to allow game transfers, there are dozens of ways they could do it today, many of which could survive as authentication mechanisms even if the company folded. Game ownership on the blockchain is not going to go through the kind of revolution that people suppose. My advice is, if you want a revolution in game ownership then lobby to reform copyright and/or establish a legal digital right of resale. If you want to more directly protect your games, boycott and criticize companies like Steam/Epic/Ubisoft/EA/etc that bundle DRM into their storefronts.
What about bootstrapping a new game?
If you were launching a new game and wanted to steal marketshare from Ubisoft, integrating their NFT's (if they are open and not in a closed ecosystem) would be beneficial
You'd basically only be appealing to people who are bought into the hype...without getting any guarantees in returns.
How so? It is just another way of giving away in-game content to attract new players. But it would be technically more complex and would make your game dependent on a market that is controlled by a competitive third party.
It would be more work and your new game would be subject to Ubisoft's whims. You're not getting any money from the existing NFTs, and you're not getting any money when people trade them. And the game-balance problems of trying to take an existing economy that's built around restrictions in another game, and then retrofitting that onto your economy without resulting in weird pay-to-win outcomes... oof, difficult problem.
If you want to bootstrap a new game that has a lot of content and freebees for new players, just give people a bunch of content, it's the same amount of work. Using Ubisoft's NFTs in your game still requires you to build the mechanics and still requires you to build all of the media assets around those NFTs. So you don't really get to skip anything, and now your digital assets/rewards are harder to balance.
And very importantly, you don't get any money out of it, Ubisoft gets money when you integrate their NFTs. I just don't see what the advantage would be.
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Edit: Well, okay, after more thought I guess maybe carrying over progress in some limited ways, but... who really wants that, either as a game designer or as a player? Nobody really wants someone who started playing Call of Duty 10 years ago to go into a new game in a different genre already dominating everyone else in the game because of pay-to-win mechanics. That's frustrating for designers, but it's also frustrating for players who want to feel like they're starting out brand new games on equal footing with each other.
I want to stress again, we could already be doing this stuff today using OAUTH/account-imports, and we're mostly not outside of a few random, often very limited promotions; and I would suggest the reason is that it turns out there's not a lot of incentive for games made by separate companies to do a lot of integration with each other -- otherwise we'd already see it happening.
It's all well and good to talk about bringing your Magic cards over to another Magic game, but... it's kind of a weird theoretical problem that NFTs don't help with, because first of all Magic isn't something that just anyone can make a game around, it's still a copyrighted game. And if Wizards is the one making all of the legal Magic games, they can use a centralized service to make cards transfer between them (they could also use that service for games outside of their control, but at the very least they don't need a blockchain for a bunch of games that they exclusively own). But second of all outside of Magic, it doesn't make a ton of sense to try and bring your Magic cards into, say, Hearthstone (which again you couldn't do in a literal sense because the card art and text is all copyrighted and Blizzard would get sued if they tried to import your Magic Online library). Hearthstone has separate mechanics, what would the mapping even be?
A lot of these collectable games like Magic/Hearthstone are collectible first and foremost not primarily for gameplay reasons, but as a way to make companies money by encouraging you to buy cards, and Hearthstone ends up incentivizing new players by giving a lot of free stuff away and then pulling players into a store ecosystem that they control. They don't have a lot of financial reason to make it so that giving Wizards money makes your Hearthstone experience better. Even a very small indie game with this monetization model would probably just prefer to give you bonus packs whenever you refer a friend or if you sign up during a promo period.
It's maybe possibly a nice idea to have some kind of artifact of achievement in a game that lives beyond that game, but it's not an idea that NFTs seem to really help with or encourage.
The same mechanisms that blockchains use to verify ownership and to trace ownership history are the same mechanisms that Ubisoft (or any other company) can use to block NFTs or add restrictions around them. But of course, the companies don't need to be so clumsy about how they restrict the tokens, they don't need to have off-chain monitoring and coordinate to block NFTs. They can also just code this stuff directly into the smart contract. Being on a public chain offers no guarantee that individual smart contracts will be decentralized.
Public chains like Ethereum/Tezos that implement smart contracts also inherently give companies tools to use those smart contracts as DRM and centralization mechanisms. In a weird way, the only thing that's decentralized about Ubisoft's NFT system is the enforcement of their DRM and the liability when a token gets stolen, lost, or hacked.
"All the content you buy from Ultra, such as games, DLCs, and virtual items, are on-chain digital goods you truly own. On Ultra you’re in control of your assets as though they were physical items. These assets can be sold, traded and given away to your friends within Ultra, or outside of Ultra, through 3rd party marketplaces and mobile apps."
They might if they contractually agreed to honor it. But even if they were inclined to offer such licenses (lets say consumers everywhere demanded it), there's not many meaningful enforcement advantages of shoving NFTs in the mix.
As a consumer such a contract could (including transferability) could exist without an NFT, and be just as enforced by the (centralized) judicial system or consumers voting with their feet.
Maybe I am also salty that I was one of the "early adopters" who saw this glaring flaw and missed out on a fortune because I understood the technical side. Right about the technology, wrong about the adoption I guess.
Owning a physical copy is not helping me play the game as Bliz has decided that license is no good.
An NFT could have the same experience. Nothing forcing the vendor to honor it.
Seems if NFT game licenses worked the way they are being talked about in this thread then there would be no way to ban players for bad behavior because it would be out of the hands of the developer. Which clearly isn't true.
No company is going to give a shit about what they sold to whom 10 years ago. Hell chances are they're already out of business.
What about proving ownership, on the balance of probabilities, to show tortuous damages in a court? Seems like a list of receipts that's somehow certified would be beneficial to that end?
Probably first we need legislation to make digital purchases resalable, and to require DRM free versions to be made available if a product is EOL-ed.
Companies world copyright against the populous who are [in a functioning democracy] the ones who give them the copyright in the first place.
I think an Amex statement from 1999 would stand up just fine in court if you had a scanned copy sitting in your Dropbox.
Maintaining a list of receipts and transactions is basic finance. This still has not much to do with technology.
NFTs aren’t magic. The issue here isn’t proving ownership, it’s that the thing that was owned (a license) is not the thing people really want to own (the game). I can deploy an NFT that replicates the current system 100%
A receipt?
It's an illusion to think that they are, but they aren't. The stolen art that is put on NFT's from artists is still the artists one and not from the NFT creator.
Eg. https://opensea.io/DisneyCollectibles
Ontopic: the company that creates the software/game owns your account, there is literally 0 benefit for them to use a NFT.
But all that does not change the fact that they can't possibly want a second hand market. Leaving the old licence to whoever paid full price and selling anothor copy at long tail volume rebate is what pays the server bill.
Eg. In Europe reselling is possible because of a court order put into law in many cases. They don't like that, so it's not done in the US.
And in this case, you are ignoring basic licensing logic: group licenses for Enterprise, discounts, beta licenses, ...
Add usually, NFT fanatics are ignoring all logic of the real world and just say "NFT's are better" lol.
The same is currently true of the NFT art market: an artist can say "I minted 0xff.." and so a token with hash "0xaa.." is clearly not originating from that artist, despite them having some similar attributes.
I am guessing there is some way around minting fees.
It seems to me in that sense a NFT could help - you can get the MP3s anywhere, but the NFT proves you actually paid for it.
Of course there would have to be a way to get the Ubisoft games, or they would have to play along.
The point of NFT is to use ownership to provide access. If they use another system, like an account system, well obviously it's no longer NFT and then obviously it no longer has the advantage of NFT. Even if they don't use NFT to provide direct access but instead access is provided behind another wall (like an account), the other advantage of being able to transfer its ownership to someone else is still there, and again if they block that, well obviously, they really don't support NFT at all.
An NFT is not a receipt, it's the actual ownership.
The real question is whether any games will ever really support NFT, that's a whole other question. It will takes times before we find that out as currently, with the amount of cash it bring for barely providing anything, it's not clear whether an actual full featured game will comes out or it will all be glorified visualizer.
> An NFT is not a receipt, it's the actual ownership.
This is incorrect for most NFTs since they lack a contract assigning ownership rights. Ubisoft certainly could add that but, again, why wouldn’t they do that now if it’s something they want?
1. Even if a blockchain could be efficient enough to publish the client software, few companies are going to allow their software to be published somewhere which allows anyone in the world to download it without a mechanism to prevent a single leaked key from making it irrecoverably free to anyone on the internet.
I seem to remember a time when people were able to sell games and buy games on the Steam market.
Ubisoft doesn't need NFTs to let people transfer their games to a new account, and they don't need to let people transfer their games just because they've given you a fancy commemorative memento of the time you gave them money in exchange for not owning a game.
It’s one of the many reasons games are digitally sold now: there’s no physical artifact the owner can sell to someone else.
Why would Ubisoft intentionally create a way for homes to be resold without them getting a cut?
Since mistakes or malice can always occur, the real issue is that it isn't easier to seek legal redress. Somewhat tangential to this issue, I still believe it's wrong for these services to use wording and marketing that suggest you "purchase" or "buy" the game, when in reality you have no such ownership claim to the game as you would a similar, analog purchase of physical media or objects. I don't think it's fair that these companies can get away with using misleading language and obscuring the truth in legalese in a 100 page TOS document.
The "buy" button on these digital games storefront should say something like "purchase limited license," or at least something a little closer to reality.
I don't think it should be possible to "purchase" an online-only game that requires access to the proprietary game servers in order to function. You're renting the game and don't actually own anything.
That may be how some NFTs are utilized. But it’s probably better to think of an ERC20 (tokens) and ERC721 (NFTs) as self executing code on the Ethereum Virtual Machine. The difference between the two is that ERC20 standard is self-similar and the ERC721 standard is uniquely identifiable.
Sure you can mint an NFT with “whatever record” you want in theory, if the NFT isn’t minted within a given self-executing smart contract, then your NFT is immediately recognizable as bullshit.
You are simultaneously suggesting there is no need for a technological solution, the answer if forcing Ubisoft to act a certain way, whereas the technological solution removes the need to trust Ubisoft to act a certain way or force them to when they don’t.
We have seen it time and again with centralized services right?
Just take any one of the horror stories where PayPal has shutdown/frozen accounts. People have been frozen for months/years/indefinitely with funds they need to live and feed their families.
You don’t need to force PayPal to unlock you account/funds if you can take your seed phrase/private key and access my funds on any other wallet.
Games can be deployed on IPFS right? Access to play games on IPFS be trustless, such as holders of NFTs, right?
That is not the only way to employ blockchain technology to avoid a centralized company removing access to games you paid for, but not knowing your familiarity with the current state of the technology that is low hanging fruit.
Also let’s not pretend there isn’t a legal contract between Ubisoft and users, but it’s that very contract that gives them the legal right to take away access to games you have paid for by the rules they dictate. Even if Ubisoft breached the contract, no one is going to hire a lawyer to sue Ubisoft over breach of contract over the cost of a game…don’t forget to take into account legal fees and costs when calling the blockchain expensive.
They could, but IPFS is not a blockchain and putting it on IPFS would be a competitive disadvantage since you'd still need to pay for hosting but your users would see lower performance than competing options.
> Access to play games on IPFS be trustless, such as holders of NFTs, right?
No. If it's on IPFS, it's globally accessible to everyone on the internet. You could host encrypted blobs but publishers are unlikely to do that because it would mean that any breach of any purchased decryption key would mean that people who did not purchase it could download the same thing paid customers get, and there'd be no way to rotate the keys without breaking access for paying customers.
Moreover, IPFS would only matter if the game is either completely standalone or allows you to run your own servers. If that's not true, what really matters for most people is whether the servers will allow you to login, where again Ubisoft would have complete control about whether they care about your NFT. In the absence of a signed contract, that's “hahaha, no”.
> Also let’s not pretend there isn’t a legal contract between Ubisoft and users, but it’s that very contract that gives them the legal right to take away access to games you have paid for by the rules they dictate. Even if Ubisoft breached the contract, no one is going to hire a lawyer to sue Ubisoft over breach of contract over the cost of a game…don’t forget to take into account legal fees and costs when calling the blockchain expensive.
That is rather the point: Ubisoft has those terms because they created the game and the legal systems in most of the world give them a lot of control over how they grant access to their work. Blockchains aren't magic pixie dust which allow you to redesign their business how you want it to work and, as we've already seen from this same company, if they chose to use a blockchain they would structure the terms to preserve the same favorable position they currently enjoy.
If, as I do, you think that games should have resale rights or there should be some required process & means of recourse before terminating access, what you want are laws. Copyright is a legal creation and your elected officials can adjust the terms for it. Sure, that's won't happen without hard work but a blockchain has no authority to make anything happen at all so why not spend your effort on something which has a chance of working?
Right, and Ubisoft is making NFTs right now, that will use that self-executing code to implement customer unfriendly restrictions on who can own and transfer the NFTs.
If your self-executing smart contract says "you lose the games when Ubisoft bans you or goes out of business", then you've gained nothing. "Ah", you say, "but what if Ubisoft decided to be nice and customer friendly?"
But this is Ubisoft. That's not going to happen. :)
That wouldn't be a problem with NFTs as they could just go to another game provider, show their proof-of-ownership and download their games from there. Such import functionality already exist to some limited degree right now with GoG, Steam and Co., but all of them require that your account with Ubisoft is still working. NFTs would work even if Ubisoft disappeared completely.
Furthermore NFTs would allow used game sales, something we have lost with the switch from physical to digital, despite it being required by law in many countries. A signed recipe is nowhere good enough, as that still depends on your account at Ubisoft, e.g. to keep track of if you refunded the game or not.
Now getting the game industry to actually implement and use an NFT based game-ownership system, that's the tricky part. But claiming there is no technological problem that needs solving is ignoring all the freedoms we lost by going digital with our purchases and that could be regained with NFTs.
Just saying NFTs will solve it even if Ubisoft goes rogue completely ignores other things that would need to happen too - ie how do you avoid double redemption and multiple installs?
It just doesn't matter if it is nft or not.
That is the point.
Nft need to be provided as well. Access to it, tools etc. Mining and verifying it is costintensive.
Ubisoft didn't just use nft it went to a company which provides a nft Blockchain. They could just go to any company for this. It's cheaper to just use a database.
Fiat currency is basically already proof of stack. Because there are so many like me having money in a bank account. Pensions etc.
Nft needs either a resource intensiv PoW or a PoS which both have not been be solved in a good and scaling and save way.
So why not using PoS in the normal world with creating a company, contracts and a basic database? It's good enough for everything we do and we know how to do it.
You don't see it now, but once many games allow you to resell the skins or game itself, and gamers get used to that, publishers that don't allow it will look evil.
Coordination between many companies is an exceptionally difficult problem without blockchains. This is what NFTs solve in a simple way - a neutral platform that every party can easily integrate with knowing the rules, API and data integrity won't change.
Before we solutionise to blockchain though we should work out how we want the world to work.
This is my main issue with discourse about NFTs and Blockchain - it gets banded around as a technical solution to solve everything before anyone has even started to think of what the requirements are for the problem we are trying to solve.
1) Does Steam want to allow you to download games to their platform when you have bought it from the lowest cost seller, when they will take zero cut of the revenue?
2) Do games sales platforms want to make it so you can leave their platform en-masse with zero friction?
3) Do developers really want to lose control of being able to revoke keys (e.g. cheaters) or lose the ability to stop the transfer of the license to other players? (i.e. block resale). And if developers / game sellers retain the ability to revoke keys as part of the design of the blockchain contract, how does that avoid the original situation where Ubisoft is revoking access to inactive accounts?
4) What does it mean if I lose access to my account in an NFT world? If someone steals my account can it be recovered? Can I get my games back?
...nothing says an NFT needs to be arbitrarily transferable. Again, Ubisoft is launching an NFT that has a huge laundry list of conditions around who can own them and when and how you are allowed to transfer them.
If Ubisoft won't let you transfer your Ghost Recon pants NFT to whomever you like, why would they let you transfer an NFT representing a game?
> Such import functionality already exist to some limited degree right now with GoG, Steam and Co., but all of them require that your account with Ubisoft is still working. NFTs would work even if Ubisoft disappeared completely.
Again, this is not a technical problem, it's a legal and economic problem. And as you say, we already have this feature (without NFTs), so why do we need NFTs? I bought a copy of Satisfactory on Epic; I'd like to play it on Steam. There's is zero technical reason why I can't go through some basic oauth flow to verify that I control both accounts, and let me remove the license from Epic and add it to Steam. Or even better, let me press a button and turn my copy on Epic into a product key that I can paste into Steam, or resell on Ebay. Wouldn't that be cool?
And why doesn't this exist? Well, because the companies involved (markets and publishers) don't want it to. So, well, yes, you could also solve this is a much more difficult and expensive way (with NFTs), they don't want that solution to exist either.
Steam already had a very well functioning marketplace for transferring digital items including - in very limited cases - games between accounts. Why can't I sell the copy of Portal 2 I've finished? Again, no technical reason, but because that's the last thing they want people to do.
There's a lot more complexity to building a global game/item reselling marketplace than proving ownership once.
NFTs give a consistent, 100% uptime, permissionless, platform where the APIs never change and participants don't get bored and turn off their "xml signing server" because it's not profitable any more.
NFTs are a bunch of worthless bullshit.
Game providers already accept games from other shops. I can import my Steam games into GoG right now. That feature exists. The issue is that it's very limited due to digital game ownership being a mess.
> having an intermediate token adds _more_ friction.
It adds no friction at all, as you could hide it completely within the client. But it would allow adding a "Backup" button that could backup all your game ownership into a tiny file instead of having to download TB of game data in the hope that you can reinstall them later (which rarely works with modern games due to mandatory updates).
With NFTs you have a framework of ownership and both the entry on Steam and the one on GoG become the same thing. If you sell or refund your game-NFT it disappears from both services.
I mean, they obviously are, which is about 95% of the reason I even have an account on EGS, but…
> With NFTs you have a framework of ownership and both the entry on Steam and the one on GoG become the same thing.
Which is why neither Steam nor GoG would have any interest in adopting those NFTs.
At the moment nobody can complete with Steam because Steam has most of their games. If there would be a way to transfer games between services, services would have to compete and what services they offer instead of just relying on user lock-in.
Exactly? You're right. Which is why Steam will never allow this from their side.
Companies don't do things out of the goodness of their hearts, they do it because better, faster, more consumer friendly competitors appear.
https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/steam-should-let-users-rese...
An NFT is just a fancy signed receipt. I can mint an NFT saying the OP owns a bunch of Ubisoft games and give it to him, but his account will still be closed. Ubisoft could mint an NFT saying he owns a bunch of games and give it to him, but his account will still be closed. (He probably still has the receipts from when he bought the games in his inbox somewhere, but of course, his account is still closed.)
We can store whatever records we like in a fancy distributed database, but his account will still be closed. The only fix here is Ubisoft needs to not close peoples accounts.
Somewhat amusingly Ubisoft is in the process of launching an NFT system (https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2021/12/ubisofts-first-nft-pl...) and as anyone paying attention would no doubt expect, it doesn't solve anything related to this; up to an including the fact that if you get banned you...lose your NFTs.
There is no technological problem to solve here.