To get the inevitable question out of the way immediately: how do NFTs help? They're just receipts of purchase, not the purchase itself. If you're saying that someone else would honor the receipt of a different store... why?

I guess in the same way you can currently link Steam to GeForce Now and be allowed to play your game.

But steezier!

Nah, NFTs don't quite fit the bill. They can act as receipts but they're not good for hosting the product.

I think the spirit of your desire is valid though. What I want to see is the invention of some kind of digital legal-trust structure.

In theory, SAAS providers could produce some kind of "serverless" way to run their SAAS. Trusted cloud providers could host the SAAS past the lifetime of the original company. Users would need to pay for the hosting but the service can live longer than the company given there was a desire.

Legally things could be structured such that this works for closed source SAAS such that it remains closed source. It hits the niche for when just open sourcing the product on the way out isn't feasible.

If the receipt part is solved then torrent is enough for hosting installation files, no?

If you can torrent, then why bother with the receipt?

Because developers will want to make the game content only accessible to buyers who have the receipt

If the devs have servers to validate authorization anyway, then NFTs are unnecessary. Were also discussing the case where the devs go under and no longer provide such a service.

Asking clients to check their own NFTs is very weak DRM.

So what is the actual proposed flow?

The easy solution is Good Old Games. Download the installers and archive them wherever you want. NFTs are a red herring for this use case.

Or just offer steam keys

Even Steam revokes paid for content, which I think is the issue being discussed.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=11481...

Not sure how this link proves the point you're trying to make. I can in fact still download all the games that no longer have a page on the Steam store.

There’s at least one game steam pulled from purchase history because it was completely unusable when the servers and auth servers shut down.

Sorry for the late reply. Dungeon Siege 1 had an expansion pack called Legends of Arranna which was sold as a bundle at first on Steam. Sometimes later LoR was removed from everyone's library leaving only the base game. You can download/pirate LoR and apply a steam fix, but as far as I'm aware, you either have to pay or pirate for LoR. The link is "grey" legally AFAICT (pirated but nigh-abandoned)

NFTs would not help. Like. At all. Otoh digital copies for download would

NFTs would replace DRM, so it would, in order to actually play the game.

Alright so the stadia games are computed in a remote datacenter, right?

Let's assume that what you proposed is good and useful and I have an NFT in my wallet that entitles me access to a game in stadia's platform

How does the NFT help me now that the compute resource has been unplugged? I have the entitlement but not the delivery.

It wouldn’t work for a native streaming service like Stadia, but I could definitely see it working for Single Player games where all the content is stored in the executable, where there isn’t reliance on centralized servers for content. Maybe download the game from IPFS or Arweave, or as another have said, developers making it available on torrents

For multiplayer games, you’d need servers for match making and such, so it’s probably not possible right now.

Unless you're putting the entire executable on the Blockchain (gigs and gigs of data), then you still need servers to host the game. I don't see how hosting the entire game is feasible, since games can be hundreds of gigs. Day one patches would also be infeasible if you store the whole game on the Blockchain.

Note that most NFTs are links to a central server hosted on a Blockchain, not the actual image itself.

Developers can still make the executables available on other centralized servers, decentralized solutions like BitTorrent, etc.

The NFT wallet check could happen internally within the game, perhaps some kind of WebView allowing access to browser wallet extensions.

How does one replace DRM with NFTs if the game is locally loaded?

It couldn't replace the DRM, just the license check. Some DRM spyware from the publisher will still have to check if you can prove ownership via the blockchain instead of checking a CD key against the publisher's license server. If you can't, it will refuse to launch the game. Someone will crack the game and provide a DRM-free experience that is better.

I struggle to see how the NFT provides any value in this setup.

It doesn't, except that I guess the publisher doesn't have to run a license server. IMO this would be better achieved by simply not having a license check, at least on some terminal version after which no updates will go out.

Have an interface that interacts with MetaMask or WalletConnect within the game.

What I mean is: the point of DRM is to regulate play of the game whether a person has rights to run the software to play it.

How do NFTs help if I have the binaries on my machine and can just patch the check for NFTs to always return "Yes this user is authorized?"

You can patch the check with binaries? Wouldn’t you need to modify the source and build?

I’m not familiar enough with tampering, cracking software like that so I can’t really say.

No problem. So in general: yes, it's not always trivial to crack a locally-hosted binary but it's generally possible. It can often be done by actually modifying the binary itself (it's just machine code; if, for example, the entire check is evaluated by one "Call out to the server to find out if we're authorized" function that returns a boolean, you can just replace the first few bytes in its machine code with "LDA $FF # true ; RETURN" and the function will think you're always registered. If it's more complicated, you could maybe run a proxy server locally that pretends to be the check server and always returns "authorized" for the query.

Assuming everyone's playing by the rules, I can see how an NFT could be used to indicate when someone has an ownership license to play a game (but not the mechanics of how that right would be enforced were someone to patch their local copy to just ignore the rights check). If the game is cloud-hosted, this is easier to enforce.

Ooh very interesting, thanks for explaining!

From reading others replies too, it does looks like client-only mechanism on its own is weak compared to having checks on both the client and server..

Patching out these checks has existed for literally decades.

Even in the 90's (And possibly 80's and before), this was common. Games distributed on floppies would have a check that involved asking you what the 13th word of page 4 of the manual was, or would have some sort of decoder wheel. And it wasn't hard to find cracked versions that had those checks patched out.

When games started coming on CDs, there were copy protection tricks that could detect if the game was running from an ISO image (via Daemon Tools or something) or even a copied disc, and those were all patched out.

GameCopyWorld was a very popular website in the early '00s. It served up these cracked versions of games. How it still exists is beyond me, tbh.

Oh you sweet, summer child. That is not how gaming NFTs are going to work. They are not going to be consumer-friendly transferable assets.

They are going to be vendor-locked, and they will only get invested in if they increase the bottom line of the walled garden that produces them.

This is correct. Reason: it's already technically possible to transfer games between platforms, the reason it's not done is financial, legal and political.

NFTs create a new method for the technical axis but do nothing to change the others.

How would NFT's help?

If the company refuses to refund you, your digital "receipt" is worthless

If the game is able to connect to your wallet and confirm internally that you own the game’s token, it could unlock the game without having to rely on a server.

Sounds interesting, but isn't there an issue that 10 friends could hold a key to the same wallet and all play all the same games, even simultaneously while purchasing just one copy?

I'm guessing implementing this would require some sort of known-file-type attestation distributed app.

I.e. I prove I have a token + link that token to a hash of my current system(s)

It's actually one of the better uses for blockchain I've heard so far, given the data sizes are minimal...

Who is going to maintain this distributed app, and what incentive do they have not to change the code so every game is reported as owned by everyone?

Then can you just duplicate the wallet and you've "pirated" the game

Ah but we'll put it on the blockchain!

...Which is quite literally re-inventing a worse version of systems like Steam

Sure I guess, if you want to share private keys with friends.

Why not just make a separate wallet per-game? You've then effectively duplicated serial keys :)

Who's running the server that actually runs the game?

The idea would work for single player games, where all the content is in the executable, but yeah, multiplayer is another story.

It won't necessarily work for single-player games, since it's trivial to build a game so that it requires a connection to an external server (put in some API with game logic there. Make sure logic isn't easily reversed engineered). Of course, a game company could always make a game which was built to run locally. It's all the company's choice regardless of NFTs, which are as useless as always.