I don't know why people are so obsessed with this idea of in game items as NFTs. It's a terrible idea.

Games have no reason to be decentralized. All of the information can be stored on the company's servers, like an MMO, or if it's not critical to maintain scarcity, locally on devices without the whole network, like pokemon (the pokemon themselves, which can be traded and such).

You can't reasonably expect games from other companies to implement the same NFT scheme. That's just not how games work. A longsword in dnd is not a longsword in final fantasy, nor is it a longsword in dark souls, nor is it a longsword in minecraft. And even if it were, why the fuck would you want scarcity on longswords? 99% of all items in any game are typically very easy to obtain, with a few rare things standing out, and with a natural progression built in. What would it even mean to bring your 50 hour investment in a top tier perfectly slotted jrpg omni magic blue elemental Atk+++ Spd+++ Crt+++ Mag--- weapon to a game like call of duty?

Even if we're just talking about a single game universe, like a dnd setting. Maybe there's now 3 baldurs gate games, for some reason not designed by the same company, but all willing to share the same exact item spec. Where is this concept useful, still? Can I bring my +10 longsword (a big deal) to the beginning of the game and just trivialize the singleplayer mode? Is it more of a multiplayer thing so we want real world wealth and status to be the primary driver of character strength?

But now imagine if 10 different AAA game studios realize that they can create a market in which people instead of paying $5 for a hat or $1 for a loot box with 10% chance of finding a hat-they pay $100 for a hat NFT and $10 of that is a transaction fee to the studio. They pay $100 for it, because a) it will work across games and b) it might be worth $10k tomorrow. The studios can take a cut on each transfer, instead of just one fee! So these studios just scaled up their hat business a lot and all they had to do was agree to honor the hat ledger which says that only the hat's rightful owners can wear the hats.

There is obviously no problem moving the hats between different games (A purely cosmetic thing is pretty easy to implement).

The fact that the honoring of the NFTs is still voluntary from the studios, that it's just as centralized as ever, and that it might disappear the day the studios no longer make money from this is of course lost on the hat buyers. The tokens are extremely fungible.

This seems like a whole huge can of worms to open for what is to the studios a mild gain. The hat market has scaled up by 10-20x in your example, but 90% of that isn't captured by the studios. What happens when two players each have NFTs that point to different URLs where the same digital hat is? Now the game studio has to adjudicate property rights? If a bunch of game studios wanted to band together and sell more expensive for 10x or 100x the current price that could interoperate, why would they give 90% of the proceeds to the hat designer?! Designing a hat is not the hard part of this thing.

EA Games starts selling an exact copy of the GOLDEN HAT for $1. What now? It's data on a decentralized network. I start selling GOLDEN HAT WITH A DICK ON IT for $0.69. What now?

If Activision wants to sell cross game cosmetics, they should do so on their own servers. Which is totally normal frankly. It's common to get rewards for having content on other games. The blockchain adds nothing.

This is how NFTs work. If you own the $10k hat on a blockchain you own the $10k hat on that blockchain. There is nothing anyone can do about the fact that the monkey bitmaps can be copied. The ownership only applies to the ownership on a ledger, not copying or usage. Same with owning a hat on the Activision blockchain and not the EA blockchain. If they both agree to store it on the ETH ledger, then obviously there is only one copy.

To prevent copying or usage, studios would obviously need to agree (which is why this is so ridiculous - and "fungible"). In your scenario EA obviously weren't in on the scheme together with Activision. There could well be different ledgers, or studios that just use a centralized store like they always have. But those studios can't use the NFT buzzword, so they'll miss out on the sweet $$ that they can make in the 15 minutes this is a thing.

> I start selling GOLDEN HAT WITH A DICK ON IT for $0.69. What now?

Whether or not "user created" items will ever be a thing is obviously up to the studios. The studios can obviously ensure only studio-created artifacts are ever allowed, regardless of if a public ledger is used. They can't prevent a studio from making a golden hat with just one bit flipped in a 100kb artifact, which looks exactly the same. This would be even more likely if there were user-created artifacts.

But there is just nothing that can be done about that. That problem exists whether or not you use a public ledger or a private one, and whether there are multiple studios or just one.

> the blockchain adds nothing.

It adds the word "Blockchain" and "NFT" to the equation. Remember that's the difference between pictures of monkeys being worth zero and being worth millions of dollars.

You seriously wrote all of that out and then admitted at the bottom that it’s only valuable because gullible people will buy it.

So you agree the whole thing is a grift. Next time just say that instead of proposing some pointlessly complex system of offloading a tiny DB onto the blockchain. “It’s valuable because you can trick gullible people into buying it.”

But yes, the reason the money is in the blockchain tech and no one pays millions for monkeys without blockchains? That’s all hype.

This tech solves a problem that could be solved by studios just making a private store they all agree on. I don’t think anyone will argue anything else, least of all me.

But here is the thing: things like currency and trade able tokens only have value because people think they do. There is a fine line between “gullible” and “currency” here.

Sorry, I missed something. What exactly can they not build without blockchains? Surely you’re not saying that the thing they can’t do without the blockchain is “use the blockchain”, because that’s vacuous.

(I’m actually not sure how they wound build this hypothetical system you described with a blockchain, though. Is there a mechanism that allows NFT transfers to accumulate “royalties” to the original seller? Or is this a hypothetical feature of a hypothetical custom blockchain that’s controlled 100% by the studio, eliminating even the distributed nature?)

> But here is the thing: things like currency and trade able tokens only have value because people think they do. There is a fine line between “gullible” and “currency” here.

I don’t entirely disagree with this, but

1) Most people investing in this stuff would have zero interest if it were actually a stable currency. They’re interested in speculation. This is in contrast with dollars (or euros or whatever) which people very commonly hoard in banks, even knowing they are actually declining in value.

2) NFTs are not intended to be currency. So even if you believe that Bitcoin or whatever cryptocurrency has long term real currency potential, NFTs are still stupid.

They can’t build tokens that people would speculate in to the point that they are worth millions unless they use a big ledger like eth where people might believe that the tokens have a lifespan longer than the games.

> Is there a mechanism that allows NFT transfers to accumulate “royalties” to the original seller?

That is my understanding yes, and this would be a premise for the whole thing.

So yes - the whole idea would be to set up a market for speculation and see a cut from each transaction.

And the chain isn’t necessary, technically, it’s a necessity to ensure the inflated speculation only.

And both studios and users have aligned interest: speculation, only. Not hats, not currency. They get shiny gear but it’s also a lottery.

It is interesting that NFT royalties are thing. I was not aware of that. Although I don’t see that this makes it valuable. Royalties are generally paid for reproduction. If you have to pay the creator to transfer the token, then it seems evident that you don’t even own the token, whatever that’s worth.

I don’t think it’s something that has or adds any value from a technical viewpoint. At least not to the point where it would warrant investment or overhead from blockchain tech. It’s hardly worth even $1 “securing” my ownership of a hat on a public ledger unless the chance of it becoming more expensive through artificial scarcity is counted as “value”.

But that actually solves the short term problem of “where is the infra?” and it’s not impossible that in a few spaces, this will actually survive.

Remember how everyone and their mother had to launch “cloud” services 10 years ago, and in 9 out of 10 instances it added no value. Some of those are still things despite never actually being necessary.

Disney's lawyers seem to be doing just fine.

There's no chance for asset reuse across games. Not only do the asset file formats differ from game engine to game engine (or platform to platform) they also differ perspectively, aesthetically, and thematically. Madden 2023 has incentive to sell NFT assets for sports jerseys. And Elder Scrolls 6, NFTs for wizard robes. But render those assets in the other game and they will look out of place. Even two games with wizards in them will have different aesthetics, mostly to differentiate in the marketplace!

Imagine you had a set of digital drawings of apes you wanted to sell. What can you charge for a nice colurful drawing of an ape? $1? Now add "NFT" to the description.

Same with a hat. The studios would do this because they see a situation in which a few of their assets become $10M ape assets and they make $100k. Before this hype dies down, the studios are afraid of missing out on it. No studio wants to be the one that missed the golden rain of NFT hats of 2023 because they didn't get on the hype train.

of course this won't be a long term thing. But we'll see land grabs like these now for a while because it's a low risk/high reward kind of thing.

You're asking the studios to give away 99% of their profit. Even in the worst case, they can all put their own platinum plated, cancer curing, blow job giving hat on the Eth blockchain and charge 10 mil for it without agreeing to share anything with anyone other than gas fees and miner bonuses. They won't. You know why? Because if they sell it in their own stores they can easily sell one thousand of them for 10 grand each and pay nothing in gas fees and miner bonuses.

They don't make something and sell for $10M because nothing studios create and market would have that kind of value. The high price of an asset is only because end users trade it among themselves (quite literally in the case of wash trades) to inflate the value. Studios can only provide the scarcity or exposure of the assets - they don't set the prices other than perhaps initially. But the key is that every time an asset changes hands, the studio gets a cut. A hat is sold for $10 then they get $1. Then it's sold 100x over, and the studio takes $1 each time. If a hat for some mysterious reason becomes the $1M monkey picture of hats, then it earns them a bigger cut in the transaction. But the key is: this is only happening because people want to take part in the lottery/hysteria of NFTs on the eth blockchain. Not because they are ready to pay $1M for a game asset. So the studio isn't "losing" 99% of anything. They just tricked people into trading NFTs which earn studios a cut, instead of other NFTs that don't.

This would almost certainly result in KYC requirements, and I'm skeptical that the delta in profit is big enough to justify that lift.

The cost of KYC might not even be the biggest issue. The friction will be a non-negligible drag on sales.

1. With NFTs games can take a cut of resales. With something like cs:go there was a substantial secondary resale market for things like skins, which valve wasn’t able to capture but with NFTs they could have taken say 10% of each resale.

2. Because the data is public it’s possible for other games to bootstrap off the data (we have seen this with “airdrops” in the crypto land). Meaning a game which is coming out can give some perk to people who own X in fortnite because they think their game is similar and want to entice people to try their game, especially people who they know like fortnite.

In the tech world we are always talking about how valuable data is. The blockchain makes that data public so secondary products can exist to serve needs the game doesn’t care about. And provides the ability for the original game to capture part of that market if they wish because they own the initial contract. But because the data is public, other games can also use that data how they want.

So what is EA's incentive to join the Valve blockchain where Valve gets 10% of each resale? And if there's no incentive for EA to join, why isn't it just a centralized marketplace rather than a blockchain?

> 2. Because the data is public it’s possible for other games to bootstrap off the data (we have seen this with “airdrops” in the crypto land). Meaning a game which is coming out can give some perk to people who own X in fortnite because they think their game is similar and want to entice people to try their game, especially people who they know like fortnite.

Valve and other companies already have this data, in much greater specificity than "this wallet owns a longsword".

They already can do this via the [non-nft-based] Steam marketplace where Steam itself takes a 5% fee from every transaction.

Am I missing something?

How is this a positive? Where were the people begging GameStop to write publishers a check for the used games they bought and resold?

Penny Arcade explains: https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2021/12/22/ubisoft

You would want scarcity on longswords if your business model included selling loot crates that may contain longswords.

There's a couple points: low- vs high-trust, and distributed vs centralized. Blockchains have in turn two mechanisms to match: proof-of-work to handle low-trust environments, and public cryptographic ledgers to handle distributed work. In this case, games are high-trust, centralized services. There is a single controller that authoritatively owns the current game state. So this does not seem a good match for blockchain technology.

If you're not in a low-trust environment, you don't need proof-of-X. You just a public cryptographic ledger written to by a set of trusted keys. Any party can extend the blockchain by just creating and signing the next block. (Would need some contention resolution for simultaneous write attempts -- could be as simple as whoever got the lower signature hash wins.)

One could imagine some sort of opt-in system that servers could enable that would allow for cosmetic items to travel with a player from server to server using NFTs as proof of ownership of the cosmetics.

There isn't a real reason for this to be done with NFTs vs some centralized database, but it does make more sense than the vast majority of games with are hosted on centralized systems already.

Obviously support agents make mistakes sometimes too, but that's a heck of a lot rarer than scams in MMOs.

That's like the main point...

I'd also argue that this feature is lackluster and I don't think it would have had any success at all if it wasn't for the fact that you also get a figurine.

There is an Epona Link one that instantiates Epona into breath of the wild, but it definitely doesn't do that in Mario Odyssey.

Amiibo are cool. People like them because they're cool and the in game bonuses are a fun little extra. That's very different from the idea of trading in game item NFTs with the intention of carrying over their utility to other games.

Imagine you have an NFT for, say, a gun, let's go with AK47 because of its popularity, and say it unlocks it for the current Call of Duty (whatever that is now). Why would Activision make it work with the next CoD? Is it supposed to work with Battlefield too? Is there anything stopping people at Valve from giving you a cosmetic if you validate it, if they so desire?

So maybe this analogy works better than you realized.

Still though, if you pirate you don't get the actual official figurine, there are certainly other ways to implement DRM, consumers hate DRM, and despite Nintendo's well known aggressiveness in litigating and preventing piracy, they don't seem to care about DRM on amiibos, apparently because the data is not the core value-prop.

It's true that items are unique to games. But if you want to allow some kind of trading, you will have to implement it yourself (next to programming, art, marketing, etc.). Linking this to crypto-tokens could have the benefit that you outsource the trading part. Your players "own" their items through crypto tokens, and can trade them on crypto exchanges.

You can implement it yourself in a centralised way of course. But the question is if you want to spend the resources on that.

They'd still need to do the work to implement every single item you are talking about. No indie would even want to do that. Nobody goes indie to work on compatibility drudge-work. Maybe if they are trying to jump on get-rich-quick financialization trend, but not if they want to actually work on their art.

It's a huge undertaking that would need to be custom done for each game's data it interacts with. And indie games are less likely to conform to standards than others.

Adding crypto assets seems way more programmer work than doing in game trading, which you would want anyway as a player.

That's not a terrible idea. Crossovers between games. Good gimmick.

And a lot of what you're talking about is culturally constructed, it doesn't have to be that way.

Exactly. A few original JPEG NFTs will survive, but 90% of the late comers and copycats will fail.

> There is literally no point in making an NFT without utility now, unless the minter is someone popular

Precisely. That ship has sailed and this is why you see a popularity of copycat NFTs JPEGs upon copycat JPEGs since that they know it is a scam. They are taking advantage of the market before it collapses just like the wild west of ICO scams in 2017. Now the SEC has put a stop to that and has regulated them as securities, [0] making unregistered ICOs as illegal. Similar regulations may happen to NFTs.

The only form of NFT that seems to have some value, valid use-cases and utility is a blockchain domain name which is likely to surpass the nonsense of useless NFT JPEGs.

[0] https://www.sec.gov/ICO

Literally every major game company has created their own marketplace despite Steam existing. So yes: they really do want to create their own marketplaces. If NFT's somehow gain traction in mainstream games, they aren't going to allow things from some random public blockchain, they will force users onto their own. You're delusional if you think they're going to forego that revenue stream because of the one-time investment of creating a market. That's not even a rounding error in their budgets.

Similarly self custody isn't great for all users. It's great that a company can get you back your items if you get hacked.

I just gave some pros and not any cons in my previous post.

I never said that, nor did anyone bring up something like that. Your game system only needs to handle your own items. It's on the developers of wallets and NFT marketplaces (aka not you) on supporting all different kinds of NFTs.

2. There already exist NFTs that take a x% cut and give it to the creator.

There are some projects working on reducing this though, for example zkSync is doing some really interesting work on a layer2 solution that feels like you're staying on the Ethereum mainnet but the fees are highly reduced thanks to the zkRollup algorithm.

I saw my friend mint an NFT for $1.40 the other day just to showcase the work zkSync has been doing, at this cost it'd be super interesting for real world uses beyond just art provenance.

A decade on from The Silk Road and this is where we continue to be with crypto.

Now what if I'd like to sell access to that genius on a marketplace, locked behind an NFT, bid on, tracked and tied to a leaderboard etc. Now let's say I have generated Token X with the value of "TSLA Feb. 29 2022", inside of which lies the closing price of Tesla on that date, with the value being tied to my previous performance on similar picks...

There is a huge market for content creators having large fan bases that literally pay them money via subscriptions, merch, etc. while they broadcast their gaming sessions live online. The entire business model for Epic's Fortnite is all cosmetic items via season passes, in-game transactions, etc. The game is free to play.

If content creators were to issue NFT's that represented a cosmetic item badge/emblem, which could be bought/sold/traded on an independent marketplace and each game studio was pressured to allow these emblems/badges across games then the content creator would profit on transactions and possibly the game studios could profit - maybe they get a cut via smart contracts if that's possible.

It wasn't very long ago that cross-platform play was not allowed by Sony and Microsoft and the game studios and players pushed for it. Major games have cross-platform play now, its expected in multi-player console games. Cross-game cosmetic items could be a huge thing for studios, indie content creators and and an opportunity for always online game platforms to get income from marketing/advertising. When there's a new comic book hero movie coming out, the movie studio could release cross-game cosmetic items (i.e. look like spidey) that players could then sell/trade later on. I would agree you don't need the tech from crypto or NFT's to accomplish this but it sounds like that tech has the features needed.

NFTs only solve one part of the problem though - rights management. You still need a good way for a cosmetic designed for game X to work in game Y. That's similar to any multi-platform development challenge. There are many other economic decisions that will have to be experimented with, including tax collection, platform fees, creator fees on resale, etc. It needs to work for everyone or it won't get the reach it needs to really empower users.

Whether or not NFT actually add anything here comes down to the remaining technical challenge of interoperability. Is it common for parties to agree on a common asset definition but not a common rights management platform? That's the situation where NFT help.

edit: To clarify, I'm not talking about regular NFTs as currently added by game developers where they're basically just a ticket to an ID referencing something created by the game developers and hosted on the game servers. I'm talking about trying to create a system for NFTs shared between games from different developers.

I suggest you read "How Virtual Worlds work" by Raph: https://www.playableworlds.com/news/riffs-by-raph:-how-virtu...

All 5 parts (more focused on the metaverse topic than NFT, but applicable to both) show exactly why interoperability is a pipe dream by non-game developers and has zero basis in reality. Not just because game developers don't want decentralization but because even simple stuff is hard, and even if you could solve the technical aspects you can't solve the game design aspects of it.

A while ago Ninja (top earning game streamer) mentioned he sees Fortnite becoming the Ready Player One universe, something I'd seen myself as they're by far the best positioned to do so.

For the most part assets in the Unreal store have to be modified (some slightly, some heavily) to work in another game. You don't get it for free because decisions are made for each game. You can't just download a helmet from the unreal store and it just magically sits on your character's head and works with all animations, because there's no clear idea of what a "head" is and how it should work.

There's no way a helmet from the unreal store can provide working stats for your game because health, food, armor, etc.. all vary in fine detail from one game to another.

So no, go read the link I pointed. Even what seems simple is extremely hard to do for interoperability, even if developers wanted it.

Assets in the UE store are meant to give *developers* an easy integration path, it's not designed to be a trivial integration path without development involvement.

The problems of centralized control:

The game dev can decide that your skin should not be in the game for any reason - now you have a broken link

The game dev can suddenly make 1000 more of your limited series skin - now the value has deflated

The game dev can shut down the game permanently - what is your NFT worth now?

This is combined with typical blockchain issues, like if you get scammed, or somebody hacks your account and transfers out your items, there are no backsies - no support person can help you.

As an example, I have the Twilight Princess Link Amiibo. In most games it gives some reward related to The Legend of Zelda in general. When I scanned it in "Yoshi's Woolly World" for the Wii U it unlocked a Yoshi looking like Link, as would any Zelda themed Amiibo. When I scanned it in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild for the Switch it instead unlocked Epona, Link's horse featured in many games, including Twilight Princess. Which can only be unlocked by that specific Amiibo and no other Zelda ones.

Of course, these tags are not unique and can quite easily be cloned.

* Nintendo chooses what amiibos are made. Centralized.

* There are many copies of a small number of amiibo types. Fungible.

* You get a physical thing. Not a token

* Only nintendo games may use amiibos

* The data on the amiibo is uniquely interpreted for each game. It's not a generic interface. Not all amiibos will do anything to every game.

Amiibo, and pokemon (trading the pokemon) are great examples of how to trade and scale information exchanges in the real world without needing an NFT blockchain. Blockchains are terrible ideas for games.

The point I was getting at was that udbhavs' comment on "no two games would ever want to share an item" reminded me of a case where several games do share some item, though in this case not a unique one. Any item shared between games would always have to be interpreted by each game unless they're based on some shared engine feature or module for interpreting them.

its just a URL. an expensive one.

Recently cryptobros are obsessed with backporting scarcity into the "creative economy", but NFTs don't provide any primitive to do that. Its immensley amusing to see the same people who were railing against DRM in the Zune era, are now saying how brilliant NFTs are. All the while advocating for DRM but with cool glasses.

Yes. But apart from some specific edge cases (cryptocurrencies, specific name registries where the ledger is actually the store-of-value) how would that even work?

For an NFT to somehow be a proof-of-ownership it has to provide the owner of the token with some value. Access to some material, for example, like you mention. But where dooes NFTs come in? The provider of the service or product would need to agree to honor the NFT! And by that, magically, it's just like any gift card or rebate code!

There is a massive divide between on the one hand a tiny number of systems where the ledger is central (E.g. a cryptocurrency) because the users have already agreed that the value is stored on the ledger.

But why would a seller of hot dogs or concert tickets agree to that? And more importantly, how is it ever guaranteed? It can't be! So it's just a gift card!

What am I missing?

Why wouldn't a company just try to do something like steam marketplace?

We already do all of those things you listed just fine with databases. All NFTs would add are transaction fees and massive power wastage.

This use case isn't an appealing use case FWIW - it is a use case though. Already seen coffee with NFTs being sold (mind you its marketing BS trying to signal its modernity, no function).

The funny thing about NFTs and gaming that I find is that if you listen to VCs and other people talk about the future of gaming. They say things like people won't play games unless their getting paid (i.e. NFT like reward system).

Personally I find that disturbing that the only reason people would play video games is for work/make money (dystopian). The original concept behind video games was for sheer enjoyment .. Not trying to make this a rant but the twitch monetization of gaming really changes the incentive structure and NFTs would further cement that poorly aligned structure in that video games are considered "work".

I agree that is BS. I tried out a few "Play2Earn" dApps and they are in no way a replacement for modern video games. Some of them weren't even dApps, like one game running on a discord bot where you basically had to spam commands to earn tokens that you could withdraw. Guess what happened? Discord banned the bot for gambling features and the token tanked. The server is back up somehow with some features stripped out and I'm amazed people are running back to it after countless red flags.

Nobody is in it for the enjoyment because there is no "game", it's just people looking to make a quick buck. The P2E games which are "single player" necessarily have to function as a Ponzi to keep new players coming. If you try to run the game logic on chain, you will be severely limited in terms of scope which means that PvP games will need a centralized server to run the game itself in which case there's no reason not to cheat the hell out of it.

(only thing I could think of)

Thinking of it in terms of utility vs ownership is useful because ownership is a social/regulatory concept.

The problem with utility is that that utility is still bound to the seller/market. Can I use it as a decoration in my Meta VR home if it was bought outside Meta's marketplace? Does the utility actually transfer with sale?

As such, it looks like a purchase receipt of a DRM-protected good in a single centralized ecosystem, regardless if it that receipt is represented in a third party or decentralized system.

Convince me that the "decentralised web" isn't just selling something and you might start to convince the average person.

There are a few existing solutions to this. Movies Anywhere[0] consolidates your video purchases across 8 vendors[1]. It mostly works ok. The problem is that I still have to trust those vendors, and this industry consortia, to manage the property rights for me. I can't prove that I own a particular movie outside of that ecosystem. I want to download the movie and transcode it for personal use, and prove that I legally own the right to that movie file outside of their system. If I own a copy of the movie, I should be able to take that copy of the movie anywhere.

Music is similar. Remember a few years ago when a bunch of music services added "upload your offline library and we'll make it available on the cloud" services? That was basically using the files on your computer (ostensibly obtained by ripping a physical CD you bought at a store) as a DRM key to unlock new features within the platform. Personally, I got burned by this when Google Music got shut down and took my uploaded music with it (backups, yes). It would make a lot more sense to have a wallet of licenses that I could present to any of these services.

Finally, the BIG thing with interoperability is freedom of exchange. I want to be able to sell my digital stuff to somebody else. Or lend it to them. Or present it to a new vendor / media player / device.

MOST importantly, I want to use the media myself wherever and for whatever I want, without worrying that I'm somehow breaking the law. I want to make mashups. I want to self-host. I want to dump everything in a new hosted service and see how it works. And I want to do all that knowing that it's all above board and the creator's are compensated fairly for their work. The current system works for Disney. I'm much more interested in the artisan digital economy.

NFTs do not deliver on this vision today. Additional technology is needed. Content-addressed, distributed storage like IPFS would be helpful. We might even need opinionated regulation to get the big players on board. Just look at the difference between electronic bank transfers in Europe and the state of US electronic medical records to see what I'm talking about.

[0] https://moviesanywhere.com/welcome

[1] AppleTV/iTunes, Amazon Prime Video, Fandango/Vudu, Google Play/YouTube, Microsoft Movies & TV, Xfinity, Verizon and DirectTV