This article is a great example of why we need legislation around ownership of digital items. I generally hate getting the government involved in things, but if you're paying money for goods, there needs to be a way to be credited or receive your digital goods in a way that still works without your "account".
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).
I think one simple legislation could help a lot: forbid to use the word 'buy' in this context. Instead it should be 'hire' or 'lease' or something.
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).
Nobody gives a flying fuck whether the terms are legally accurate. This distinction is entirely already covered in the existing terms of service.
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.
> 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.
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.
Words do go a long way and can make the distinction clear for potential customers.
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.
I am not saying people give a fuck it is legally accurate. But since nobody ever reads the terms and conditions this could help to give a quick understanding of what you are paying for.
Everybody knows that renting a car is different than buying a car.
You're spot on, it might not fix the entire problem but it's a good start and can help waking people up.
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.
The music example is more acceptable though, because you don't pay a 1-time fee to own a song anymore.
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.
>I think one simple legislation could help a lot: forbid to use the word 'buy' in this context. Instead it should be 'hire' or 'lease' or something.
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!"
That's a different problem.
Right now the problem is that people think they buy something but they don't.
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.
I don't think it's a different problem, there are people posting in thread about basically this problem, I'm pretty sure they were aware they were leasing the game and not owning it, nonetheless they lose access to the game for periods of time and that time loss is not reimbursed in any way.
The ToS says rent but the UI says buy, what gives? It may be technically correct that it's not a purchase but also purposely deceitful: this has to change.
IMHO a better way forward is to de-categorize downloads of “purchased” items from “downloading” in legal context, such that removing access is considered theft rather than enabling downloads to be considered willful distribution.
That’s technologically backwards, but it’s not like justice system behavior and software industry logic always converged nicely.
That sounds like a good idea. It would probably make sense to require that they specify how long you get to lease it for, rather than the current situation which is pretty much "until we decide not to run the service anymore".
While I kind of want to give a snarky answer of "actually, buying an ebook without DRM is exactly as easy as it is as buying one with, the trick is just finding one without DRM," the truth is that this is dependent entirely on the publisher. I buy a lot of technical books from Pragmatic Programmers, which are all DRM-free, and I believe they're not alone in that. My small press fiction publisher doesn't use DRM; Tor Books, the biggest sf/fantasy publisher, doesn't use DRM, either. People who self-publish through Amazon are given a choice whether or not to apply DRM to their books.
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.
I worded it badly. It's as you said. In my experience if I want to buy a given X book it's almost certain that I will not be able to purchase it in a non-DRM format. Because DRM became de facto in the industry and only a small share of titles are available to purchase without it.
> 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.
>Personally I always get kind of nervous around buying things on PSN
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.
Sony is extremely trigger happy with suspending based on messages. I’ve gotten a few weeks suspension for ‘harassment’ because I told someone that kept messaging me I was hacking that that was ‘honestly kind of dumb’.
I've completely given up on playing with strangers. All my experiences were negative, and whenever they weren't, they were just neutral.
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.
I do have an MMO I play often(Planetside 2) but I go through frequent periods of disillusionment since the game has its fair share of cheaters and toxicity. (An MMO with FPS gameplay = quite a wide open space for cheating). The only thing keeping me in it is the fact that it's super unique and it has so many tools for outwitting the average "just good no hacks" bot user.
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.
Hearthstone has exactly this system (only friends can chat with each other). What happens quite often after some matches:
1. You receive a friend request from your opponent
2. If you accept it, they probably are going to send you a bunch of insults and then unfriend you.
In my case with my son, the guy who blackmailed him to give gifts was a friend of a friend of a friend. So usually you have only 2,3 people you know in real life, then each one will have other 2,3 and they will bring them into a group to play together. I never bought Fortnite shit for my son so he had no stuff to give and he got reported multiple times, probably some shitty employee that is super bored will randomly click some buttons to empty his queue.
> I don't really care too much about what the Terms and Services say
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.
> You do not have negotiating power to change them.
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"?
Yes you do. I had a ToS with an anti competitive clause in it, no reselling, was told they needed to transfer all our customers, etc, or they and us could get fined for illegal reselling.
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.
Did you change the TOS or just get switched to a proper account type?
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.
Ignore any provision of the TOS you dislike and lodge complaints with the various regulatory bodies and see what happens, you’ll get your $70 back or the game back or $70 and the game long before they enforce the TOS.
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.
I wouldn’t feel any guilt about pirating the content I bought on any of those services if my account was taken from me for inactivity. I’d be interested to hear the argument about why that would be wrong though.
These days I generally pirate the single-player content I purchase anyway. Anything that requires Origin, Epic, uPlay, or any other cancerous software to be installed gets paid for and promptly pirated. I trust the Pirate Bay more than I trust Ubisoft.
I do the same thing for my Kindle purchases. Luckily I have a Paperwhite whose serial number works with DeDRM to strip DRM for all my Kindle purchases (except Hindi books which are not downloadable for some reason).
You could also use the PC kindle app to download books and strip their DRM. That might be easier than transferring every book back and forth.
(I use the kindle 1.26 version. It requires an additional plugin to convert the new amazon format, but works with DeDRM after that.)
Thanks for the tip, I haven't tried it with the PC Kindle app! An additional issue with (most) Hindi books is that they aren't supported on the Mac app, so they don't even download into the app's storage, let alone as standalone AZWs for manual transfer.
According to https://opentrackers.org/torrentleech/ account creation on TL is currently open, but unfortunately when I try to create an account via Tor enabled Onion Browser on my phone nothing happens when I push submit. Even with most permissive JS settings in the browser. Sad times.
try a normal VPN then? I hope you are aware that bittorrent is bad for Tor, maybe they are helping you.
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.
Doesn't sound like he is trying to torrent over tor.. Just access the tracker website. I use tor to access several of them cus they are blocked at an ISP level in my country, and tor-browser is a convenient workaround.
More like "frequency of bugs" developers put out for their games. Best to buy only once the "GOTY/Definitive/Special edition" is released and all DLC's are available and when it's a couple of years and 50 patches old - including patches fixing the patches. And when the game is on holiday discount sale. The game is then smooth and playable with no blood-pressure inducing defects and doesn't need too much Googling/forum-posting on asking what went wrong.
It seems there is a window of ideal time. You've described when that window opens. It closes as OS's evolve out from under the last patch. Steam in particular appears in no hurry to require games be playable after any initial QA.
And I refund if it's bad and I didn't know it in advance. Steam refund experience has been great but they started warning me about "refund is not for trying games". Good things don't last forever but they day they start to BS me I will go back to piracy or give up on DRM titles.
Why is that? If you buy the game off Steam or something, this implies that the creators/publishers/platforms have gotten their due compensation. The cracks and files on ThePirateBay are done on a volunteer basis, meaning that it’s not costing the game developers any money.
Maybe lay off the eggnog or before reading HN so that you don't comment this poorly w/o reading the thread... They've bought it, the Dev. Got whatever pittance the publisher seems worthy, they just want an experience unadulterated by crappy launchers or corrupted by overzealous DRM.
Is there any chance you misunderstood? They said they wouldn't feel bad morally about pirating things they had in fact already paid for? Does your ethics require you to stick to the letter of the terms and conditions including allowing people to keep your money and take back the value they promised you?
Because laws are not about justice. If you get something stolen you need to go to a judge to get a sentence that gives it back to you. You cannot take justice on your hands and expect to not be punished.
I don't think that is entirely true. For example, if a cheating happens in an online game you don't wait a court decision to ban the player - taking the justice on your hands and expect to not be punished. Or killing a person is illegal but you can use your self-defence rights if the other person is trying to kill you. You can use interfaces from copyrighted language (Oracle v. Google) for fair use purposes without getting a court decision first.
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.
There are many old games that runs some kind DRM system that is using deprecated Operating System API's - some of them are undocumented and mostly operated in ring 0.
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.
This is infeasible though as evidenced by how actual theft doesn't get handled by the legal system (police, prosecutors, and judges). Realistically the only way to get your stuff back is to take it back yourself or somehow force the police into action by doing the work for them.
Copyright violation is a tort, not a crime. If you were sued for it, they'd have a hard time proving damages given that you have paid for a valid license.
You would have to stick exclusively to downloading though. As soon as you upload as well (e.g., torrents) the defence that you have a valid licence for your personal use no longer suffices. And even if you are fine from a legal standpoint (which I fear may not be the case in every jurisdiction), there is still the financial risk of getting sued by someone with much bigger pockets.
The defendant in a copyright violation case is not just liable for actual damages. The plaintiff can elect to take either actual damages or $750 to $30,000 per copyright infringement. This can rise to up to $150,000 if it is determined to be willful copyright infringement.
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.
In most jurisdictions, copyright infringement isn't a crime, it is a civil tort, meaning you can be sued by the copyright holder for damages. Most big media copyright holders (MPAA/RIAA/etc) have a policy of only going after uploaders because it just isn't cost effective to go after downloaders for damages. A downloader can only be sued for the retail value of what they downloaded, while uploaders can be sued for the retail value of what they uploaded times the number of downloads. But this isn't codified in law, it is just corporate policy.
I remember a story a while back of a gentleman who had a house fire and then went and later pirated all the music CDs he had lost. I think they interviewed a copyright lawyer who basically says that the law doesn't permit that, I remember the quote that buying a copy entitles you to a copy and that "there is no such thing as a listening right".
That's a little different. Copyright, without any license involved, is very strict about the copying, how the copy gets made and where it's copied from. But if there's a license, things might get fuzzier.
Sure, but taking this to its logical extreme, it seems like I could justify any act as long as it’s also legal.
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?”
You might as well remove the legality of it from the question then and focus on the moral aspect.
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.
No argument but I feel like that’s an orthogonal topic to “is it moral for me to pirate a game that I purchased a legal copy of?”
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.
Everybody I've talks to jumps on the victim blaming high horse every time this comes up. "Well just don't get banned. What did you get banned for? What were you wearing when you got banned?"
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.
> If they ban me, do I lose my thousands of dollars of games?
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 still play the games without steam (I often play without internet connection). But of course you'll miss out on a lot of things (multiplayer, achievements etc.) which might be important to you.
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
For some games this is true. But there's plenty of games which have an 'offline mode' that require you to connect to an auth server before the game will launch.
That's exactly why it's safer to buy DRM-free from GOG because you can keep a backup of your purchases without having to worry the service might lock you out or remove a product.
https://gog.com has (nearly?) all games DRM-free, so you can backup (and also actually torrent I believe) any of the games, that's why I choose to buy from them.
The question may be silly, but how does GOG handle multiplayer ?
- 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.
> The question may be silly, but how does GOG handle multiplayer ?
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'm not saying the model is bad or there are no AAA games, only that this currently limits the games that could be played.
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...
It really depends on implementation in-game. I think GOG has worked on API for crossplay with Steam for any game developers who are interested.
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.
If you try to take this to court, you will typically be offered a "goodwill payment" of a complete refund of all your games.
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.
We should go in the complete opposite direction and abolish data ownership straight up. Copyright needs to end. The second it's gone it will no longer be a crime to copy and these problems will no longer exist.
Don't really know. Patronage seems to be working well these days. Lots of creators seem to be finding success on services like Patreon. Also, crowdfunding. There needs to be a way to get paid before you create it for the labor of creating it. The creators and their labor are what's valuable, not the end result. Data is infinitely abundant and trying to limit access to data is just insane. It's the 21st century and we have world wide networked computers capable of copying data at massive scales at minimal cost. Paying for data just doesn't make any sense. Once it's out there it's pretty much done.
What about you write the book, it is good, then others take said book and print it themselves to sell on Amazon for less because they don't have to cover the cost of the time and effort that went into writing the book.
The guarantee that if anyone buys or reads it in the future, I can claim my compensation. Otherwise I have to create a perpetual begging campaign and be at everyone's mercy.
I consider it a fair game to torrent those games that the publisher screws me over. Like San Andreas, the Steam version of which was FUBAR a few years ago and then removed altogether (for new buyers). I've paid for maybe five copies in my entire life, sorry, I'm not paying for the sixth.
I apologize but I find this to be a silly question. I buy because I want to play. I do not have an expectation of indefinite ownership (even though I should have indefinite ownership), hence my comment.
> I do not have an expectation of indefinite ownership
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.
The terms are not a negotiated contract - they are dictated by one side and even if they are read by the purchaser, the implications of the terms may not be obvious. Many/most people will not understand that after paying hundreds of dollars for games, their games could suddenly be taken away from them without recourse.
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.
For anyone who wants to go down the rabbit hole and learn more about this topic, try Googling "eula unconscionability"
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.
Terms are not a contract or a type of contract. Were you instructed to consult your legal team before signing the contract?
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.
I agree with your whole opinion on T&C's and abuse by companies, but they are still a contract, mostly because there is no "hard standard" in how a contract can be formed between two parties. Even a verbal agreement can be seen as a "contract" as much as a signed paper.
If I put a piece of tape across the door to your house, and I write "by breaking or removing this tape, you owe me $1000", is that a valid contract? One party shouldn't be able to just make up things that constitute agreement to a contract.
The general consensus for some of the people commenting here (one that I absolutely despise to be clear) is that nobody is entitled to any ownership of anything and should have zero expectations of it, even when spending money on things. Be thankful for what little you get, don't ask for more, and either make your own or shut up. When you start reading these comments with that "lens" you can suddenly understand the logic.
> there's not an alternative way to buy them that does give you that confidence
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?
This is a sort of reductionist viewpoint that's ignoring the realities of the market (in this case computer games) and how monopolies are created.
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.
> they have small monopolies that aren't as subject to market forces.
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.)
>> they have small monopolies that aren't as subject to market forces.
> 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.
Don't copyrights preclude meaningful competition here? If a game is sold through Publisher X, Publisher Y can't just unilaterally decide that they want to sell it too.
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.
This sounds great on paper but I really don't think that feedback channel is effective in practice.
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.
Your point about market inefficiency and misaligned incentives is a valid one, but government intervention, which is what many people in this thread are calling for, does not make market inefficiencies better; it makes them worse.
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.
> government intervention, which is what many people in this thread are calling for, does not make market inefficiencies better; it makes them worse.
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.
Competition is very nearly worthless as far as ensuring consumer choice. The market tends to trend towards a small number of players who all act collectively with or without the benefit of collaboration to serve their own interests.
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.
> Competition is very nearly worthless as far as ensuring consumer choice.
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.
These are games we're talking about. They're recreation. For people to be demanding legislation because a recreational activity isn't set up just the way they like it, when they knew the terms perfectly well before they paid their money, is not "participating in cultural works".
Why should recreational works not be protected? Isn't enjoying artwork purely recreational, except we put a greater deal of care into preserving and displaying the historical works.
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
I'm glad that people worry about preserving all forms of cultural works but I personally attribute a lesser value to games, cinema and TV.
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.
I can't think of any "digital good" where there is a risk of losing access in this way that isn't recreational in a similar way to games. So my comments would apply equally well to any such goods.
With service providers (eg. Google/Facebook) it happens every day to thousands of people, and there's little to no recourse although there was usually no financial transaction to begin with. With software you setup on your computer, i'm not aware of any instance, BUT subscription models (eg. Adobe) are really recent and not so long ago software vendors did not have the means to disable software remotely on your machine, because it was usually not (always) connected to the network, and because software that didn't need it didn't make useless network connections.
I bet in a few years we'll have plenty of documented instances.
Hm. I agree online textbooks are different because you're not just paying for the textbook, you're also paying a school tuition, and the school isn't going to refund your tuition just because the textbook provider made a mistake.
I asked another poster just upthread about the software (such as Creative Cloud) case.
You can buy text books outside of school. Let's say I buy some OReilly or Manning e-books, and then they take them away from me. Whereas the physical copy for just a little bit extra remains mine for as long as the copy stays readable (centuries if given care)
It must have been around 2006 when I registered my Steam account. I was just a kid back then. Didn't understand the fact the buy button was lying to me.
You are of course correct but at the same time I often buy games for $5 - $10 on sale that are a few years old and after completion they have little to no replay value. Although many may not be as frugal they might well have the same attitude towards reuse/replay/resale. Play and forget.
> 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?
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)
That's a different thing from what OP is saying, they're right that Steam doesn't automatically enforce any DRM. It does provide the mechanisms but it's up to the devs whether they use them or not. In lots of cases you can just directly run the executable, especially for indie games.
Steam can work as a dumb CDN for executables, but a substantial number of games do use the out-of-the-box Steam DRM, especially the AAA games GP referenced.
Source: Have used Steam pretty much since it was released and also worked with SteamKit for a project or two.
> If they ban me, do I lose my thousands of dollars of games?
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.
Even with such extreme things, the course of action should be:
- 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.
Unfortunately, there's a pretty straightforward way around legislation that requires that people have access to games they've bought, and companies are already moving in that direction: Just make every game have an online component, and make it not run if it can't properly authenticate with the server.
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.
> 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.
Well, yes, but on the whole, that one doesn't seem to be working: there are still plenty of people more than willing to plop down their $60+ for the latest and greatest AAA games...with loot boxes, microtransactions, always-online requirements for single-player modes, and extremely dodgy privacy policies.
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.
> I generally hate getting the government involved in things
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.
That’s because you never actually bought the item. You got a license to run it on someone else’s server.
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
> That’s because you never actually bought the item. You got a license to run it on someone else’s server.
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.
There is nothing unfair about licensing. I contribute to FOSS software, I expect that an individual or company abide by the terms of the license I grant them and that license is terminated if they fail to meet various conditions. That seems fair to me, it wouldn't become unfair if a payment was required either.
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.
In FOSS, the conditions and possible termination are usually centered around redistribution. You can do whatever you want on your own computer, with no restrictions placed upon you, and those restrictions are the "unfair" part of licensing.
(AGPL is a little different, but that's an issue for another discussion.)
Actually “we” don’t call it “purchased”, they do. It’s a deceptive marketing practice for rentals.
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.
It's one thing if it's an MMO or something else that inherently needs a central server. It's another if it's a game that could work 100% offline if not for the DRM.
This makes a good case for decentralization no? Imagine all those items in the blockchain, you can leave for years knowing you can retrieve them anytime. The only con at the point is if you lose your keys.
Reminds me of some friends who had Bitcoin and “forgot” about it and only to come back with massive profits.
Blockchain isn't a good replacement for functional legislative and/or regulatory bodies that actually give a shit about the people they're supposed to be protecting. In this case, corporations unwilling to grant actual ownership of "digital purchases" to the consumers who paid for them aren't going to change that policy just because it sounds like a cool application for blockchain. If they were willing to do something like that, they would already offer portable DRM-free installers and license keys to match. Indeed, some publishers do exactly that, but Ubisoft's management are the sort of bottom of the barrel scum who will only be dragged kicking and screaming into a world where consumers actually own what they've paid for.
At the same time, there are people who lost their wallet and RIP to all that potential wealth. 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.
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).
>At the same time, there are people who lost their wallet and RIP to all that potential wealth.
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.
A license key alone is about as useful as a key in real life. If someone decides to change the locks, you're out.
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.
You could have a system where a license is tied to a blockchain and not an account or person. It would presumably also mean that if someone gains control of your computer or account for a moment, they could steal your stuff and the company would be in the right to refuse you further survice.
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.
I don't understand how blockchain would solve this problem. How much would it cost in gas fees to download a 100GB game? That aside how would you handle licensing, revocation, etc?
OK, but where do you download the game? Even with licensing, you couldn't play offline? If so, what's stopping someone from just keeping the state of the blockchain such that the offline client thinks you own the games but you actually don't.
Doesn't seem like it'd work to me without a central authority.
Disclaimer : I don’t believe that licence tokenization is a solution to the issue of game ownership. But what I’ll said also applies to DRM-free games.
> 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.
> You set up a server and allow any wallet with the license in it to sign a valid request to download and launch the game.
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?
You haven't explained where the game is stored, though. Where would the game be downloaded from? How much would it cost to do this. If you setup a server that's centralized the defeats the entire purpose of this.
You would download the game from the same place you’d get updates if you bought a physical copy off a friend. The purpose isn’t decentralized downloads. It’s retaining the ability to virtually press the eject button and put the disc in a different console.
You're being very vague. If the game is centrally located there's absolutely no point of using a distributed ledger to begin with. The same place the game is stored can store your license.
The OP thread is about the centralized entity revoking your digital ownership over these licenses at their will. The parent you are replying to is imagining a hypothetical future where licenses around digital ownership are not merely private records on centrally owned and mutable ledgers, but rather, public records on decentrally owned and immutable ledgers. This has nothing to do with files/media and of course it is all hypothetical and legally untested, as no publisher is using public blockchain tokens to issue licensing rights.
so you have a license. The data you license is still centralized.The owner of that server rejects your license or simply shuts down the server. How does your blockchain help you? Note that downloading your data elsewehere is still infringement and hacking the DRM is still circumvention.
The idea would be that these tokens-as-licenses would not be revocable. If you hold the token, you hold the license and rights to download and play. This would need to be defined and enforced by the publishers own ToS and/or some hypothetical regulatory body that acts in users best interests - if they break this, such as blocking a specific license holder from access to the game, there would be grounds for a dispute, and clear records for it given the ledger is public.
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.
So in order to actually enforce your distributed blockchain license you need two centralized groups (download provider/regulator) to acknowledge it? Still don't see what blockchain adds.
The token would have to be fungible such that an individual license can only be authenticated and not identified (“this is a real copy of the game” vs. “this is the copy we individually banned”)
Trustless trust doesn’t solve any problems here. Having your ownership of games notarized without someone central, does not mean you can access them. You need someone to enforce that.
How so? The technical answer to this problem is that it must always be possible to store games and media on media that you physically own, and load these on the gaming device in a completely offline process that does not depend on having an account.
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.
How would an NFT help here? Nobody is disputing that you bought the music (or, more precisely, bought a license for the music, that they may revoke at their discretion). The NFT proves nothing that a receipt wouldn't also prove. What you want is a law that forbids the current practice of revoking ownership.
Sounds nice, but I don't think we need legislation. It would bring the entire digital content ecomony to a grinding halt. The line between what can be owned and what cannot be is not clear. The line between what's a digital good and what's not is also not clear. Is your online bank balance a digital good? Is it an immutable binary that's considered a digital good? An in-game item in a MMORPG that requires servers to operate? Is Adobe Creative Cloud a good or a service?
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.
or just let Web3 and onchain NFT's happen, accepting one of the reasons why the incremental improvement is being seen as valuable.
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.
I don't understand how NFTs would solve the problem I described. Even if all of my Oculus games are NFTs - if I'm banned and can't access my account to download the games then I'm out of luck.
the games wouldn't be released on exclusively on a closed system because they have other paths to monetize
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.
TEE (Intel SGX; AMD will have to follow suite to keep up). It’s unfortunate that this will most likely reverse the current trend of increased cross-architecture compatibility and ARM64 will probably get the short end of the stick unless something unexpected happens.
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.
address signing. if you give someone your address in order to access the game, they are also accessing all of your digital items and can transfer them to their own address. this is risky enough for the user that they won't do that, or learn not to. there won't be a customer support to help them, you can try to build that kind of customer support if you want though.
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.
Seems like a group of like minded individuals could easily form an identity that only had access to things they absolutely intended to share between them. This is already an issue with streaming services.
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.
Right. Taking it a step further, maybe the users could actually transfer the assets to unique addresses that are their friends, and send it back when a different friend wants to play. Would only take a few seconds, or a few minutes. Like assuming there are session checking that already exists, the friends could would have their unique id due to their unique address, but have the same gear or game access.
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.
only Ethereum mainnet has "$60-$300 gas fees", which is multiple orders of magnitude higher than everything else. there are a couple of networks that would maintain their low transaction fees even at the same transaction size as Ethereum and marketcap.
So the game would check against a blockchain that the signature is valid every time you want to play? What prevents you from just keeping a snapshot of the blockchain at a point when you owned it?
verification signatures don't use the blockchain, this is just public private key cryptography the same as PGP. the blockchain, for this purpose, just helped proliferate a standard application of that in a few years, where PGP failed at that for 25 years and counting as it has stayed very niche. many Web3 services use this for determining a user, or even accepting terms and conditions, while logging them in.
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).