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Comment by moolcool | Hacker News Reader

What about gaming? A huge problem in gaming now is that once games are no longer profitable, the servers go offline and they become unplayable. In-game assets simply disappear, and DRM servers go offline on the whim of the publisher. With the right architecture, crypto could solve both of these problems.

Disclaimer: I don't like DRM or microtransactions, I think both of them make the gaming experience in 2021 pretty terrible.

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What use are records of your in-game assets if the servers where you play the game are down?

How would crypto force gaming companies to keep servers for old games online?

Instead of hitting the publisher's endpoints, they'd hit a web3 endpoint to get the list of digital assets owned by the player

What use is that if the servers running the rest of the game are turned off?

Most (not all) web3 games don't have a server. Just frontend interacting with a smart contract

And what do you think you're getting the frontend assets from? They certainly don't live on-chain, and usually aren't open source.

Distribution of binaries of obsolete games is a solved problem. It costs money to leave dedicated servers running for legacy titles, but costs nothing to leave the Steam page online. Plenty of commercial games are also free to download, but cost money to register and actually play.

Yes I realize that could be an issue, but it's way easier to address than keeping a server alive. See: https://archive.org/details/softwarelibrary_flash_games

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