Ubisoft deleted account with hundreds of dollars’ worth of games for inactivity | Hacker News Reader

Ubisoft deleted account with hundreds of dollars’ worth of games for inactivity

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568 pointsjosephcsible526 comments

I feel a bit disappointed by the number of people suggesting that an NFT would somehow help here.

An NFT is just a fancy signed receipt. I can mint an NFT saying the OP owns a bunch of Ubisoft games and give it to him, but his account will still be closed. Ubisoft could mint an NFT saying he owns a bunch of games and give it to him, but his account will still be closed. (He probably still has the receipts from when he bought the games in his inbox somewhere, but of course, his account is still closed.)

We can store whatever records we like in a fancy distributed database, but his account will still be closed. The only fix here is Ubisoft needs to not close peoples accounts.

Somewhat amusingly Ubisoft is in the process of launching an NFT system (https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2021/12/ubisofts-first-nft-pl...) and as anyone paying attention would no doubt expect, it doesn't solve anything related to this; up to an including the fact that if you get banned you...lose your NFTs.

There is no technological problem to solve here.

But if he creates a new account and transfers the NFTs (that function as your proof of ownership of a game in this case), then you're good to go again. Since they can't be deleted. It's a different story if your NFTs are banned of course, then it wouldn't matter if you transfer them to a new account.

Ubisoft is already making NFTs (for cosmetics in this case; same tech though) where they control who can own or transfer NFTs. So...no., this doesn't help.

Ubisoft doesn't need NFTs to let people transfer their games to a new account, and they don't need to let people transfer their games just because they've given you a fancy commemorative memento of the time you gave them money in exchange for not owning a game.

You didn't read what I wrote, I'll try and rephrase it. I am talking about NFTs where you as the owner of the NFT control who you can transfer it to, I explicitly mentioned this. If you can do this, then it can be a solution to the current problem. Because then you simply transfer your ownership rights to your new account.

Ubisoft is under no obligation to honour your transfer of ownership of the NFT. They can just stop accepting it as valid any time they like.

This is true. The assumption I make is that we would be living in a scenario where they would honour the ownership transfer. I'm just saying it's possible for NFTs to work like this, not that this will actually happen.

That's the problem, though: if they wanted to allow this, it's easy to do — for example, GOG has a Steam import feature but relatively few publishers allow their content to be used that way. Spending an enormous amount of money switching to NFTs would just be a distraction from the business reasons why those publishers are blocking that capability.

If you are living under the assumption that they would honour ownership, you don't need NFTs in the first place. The whole thing can be much more efficiently implemented without them.

If "the current problem" is "how do I, the player, get around this company's ban on my account," sure. But from Ubisoft's perspective, "the current problem" is "we banned this player and want them to stay banned."

I guess it depends on how you would implement such a system. They could have a ban on the game ownership NFT too, but it doesn't have to work like that. Banning is usually done on the account level, it's entirely possible that the company keeps track of your hardware fingerprint so you can't just go and buy a new game. In this case it's probably just a weird edge case that triggered the account deletion, I think he'll get his account back.

Ubisoft or any other company for that matter doesn't want people to trade their games, DLC or accounts. They killed the used market they aren't going to bring it back.

I think it would be far more frequent that crackers gain control of NFTs and transfer them to a new account. Are users going to rejoice in the existence of a smart receipt they didn't understand when they are locked out of their purchases and perhaps declared dead on the block chain?

Why would they ever do that, though? That would allow third party resale of digital copies of their games which would eat away their sales of games.

It’s one of the many reasons games are digitally sold now: there’s no physical artifact the owner can sell to someone else.

Why would Ubisoft intentionally create a way for homes to be resold without them getting a cut?

I don't expect the incumbents, like Ubisoft, to do that. But you can definitely program NFTs to automatically give a cut of the sale each time the NFT is sold. It doesn't make too much sense for second hand digital games, you'll likely be able to buy the games as long as the platform is alive. In a situation such as this one it could have helped resolve it though. It would have been even better if Ubisoft didn't just delete the account, but that's apparently not the world we live in. Hopefully the owner of the deleted account can send in his receipts and get his account back.

> It would have been even better if Ubisoft didn't just delete the account

Since mistakes or malice can always occur, the real issue is that it isn't easier to seek legal redress. Somewhat tangential to this issue, I still believe it's wrong for these services to use wording and marketing that suggest you "purchase" or "buy" the game, when in reality you have no such ownership claim to the game as you would a similar, analog purchase of physical media or objects. I don't think it's fair that these companies can get away with using misleading language and obscuring the truth in legalese in a 100 page TOS document.

The "buy" button on these digital games storefront should say something like "purchase limited license," or at least something a little closer to reality.

I don't think it should be possible to "purchase" an online-only game that requires access to the proprietary game servers in order to function. You're renting the game and don't actually own anything.

>no technological problem //

What about proving ownership, on the balance of probabilities, to show tortuous damages in a court? Seems like a list of receipts that's somehow certified would be beneficial to that end?

Probably first we need legislation to make digital purchases resalable, and to require DRM free versions to be made available if a product is EOL-ed.

Companies world copyright against the populous who are [in a functioning democracy] the ones who give them the copyright in the first place.

NFT's are not a source of truth.

It's an illusion to think that they are, but they aren't. The stolen art that is put on NFT's from artists is still the artists one and not from the NFT creator.

Eg. https://opensea.io/DisneyCollectibles

Ontopic: the company that creates the software/game owns your account, there is literally 0 benefit for them to use a NFT.

Yeah I have been involved in the community and things like Ubisoft making an NFT is 0% utility and 100% money grab. Don't trust gaming companies NFT providing any sort of value to you. Those things are not good for the community.

In theory if some kind of token-as-license system were to be used by a game distributor, it would be trivial to confirm that the token contract address (0xff..) matches the contract address required by the distributor. Other tokens may appear similar, but would have a different addressable hash.

The same is currently true of the NFT art market: an artist can say "I minted 0xff.." and so a token with hash "0xaa.." is clearly not originating from that artist, despite them having some similar attributes.

Silly question, did this person/entity selling Mickey permutations on opensea actually pay around 400k USD equivalent in Ether to mint those 4000 NFTs?

I am guessing there is some way around minting fees.

If they wanted to allow an open second hand market for nonphysical game copies, where you can separate out single games from your account, I'd say that the NFT approach might be one of the easier ways to do it. Downright practical. I'd even go so far as suggesting that this could be one of the least nonsensical NFT use cases.

But all that does not change the fact that they can't possibly want a second hand market. Leaving the old licence to whoever paid full price and selling anothor copy at long tail volume rebate is what pays the server bill.

That's not even remotely true. Companies have laws to abide to per country, that's not even possible to implement now.

Eg. In Europe reselling is possible because of a court order put into law in many cases. They don't like that, so it's not done in the US.

And in this case, you are ignoring basic licensing logic: group licenses for Enterprise, discounts, beta licenses, ...

Add usually, NFT fanatics are ignoring all logic of the real world and just say "NFT's are better" lol.

Your real world licencing caveat to shatter all NFT game licencing ideas would have been regional pricing, not enterprise or whatever. Because that's what game platforms are already struggling with even without NFTs anywhere near, volume transfer of one-time voucher tokens across price region borders. (the bar to becoming an NFT fanatic seems to be particularly low today?)

This has been around since May without getting taken down?

Most financial institutions are required to keep transaction records for 7+ years by law, and you could maintain your own copies indefinitely.

I think an Amex statement from 1999 would stand up just fine in court if you had a scanned copy sitting in your Dropbox.

Maintaining a list of receipts and transactions is basic finance. This still has not much to do with technology.

> What about proving ownership

A receipt?

I have to admit the NFT is a positive here since you could prove ownership that a site like archive.org could prove they could verify.. So an independent third party could have more ways to navigate IP law and be able to replace failing services, serve older content the site wants to forget, etc.

An email receipt in your Google inbox suffices for most people.

Yup but that's a manual process. An NFT could help automate the whole process.

Receipts are already a universally accepted proof of purchase, nobody is questioning that the games were purchased. This is a solved problem.

You’re conflating two different things here: the user next owned the games, they owned a license to the games that Ubisoft could (and did) revoke.

NFTs aren’t magic. The issue here isn’t proving ownership, it’s that the thing that was owned (a license) is not the thing people really want to own (the game). I can deploy an NFT that replicates the current system 100%

Exactly. The idea that NFTs somehow help in these kind of situations is utter nonsense. Sure, if Ubisoft minted an NFT and give it to you, they couldn't delete the NFT itself. However, it is always up to Ubisoft or whoever else is using NFTs whether they want to honour that NFT or not. You can present them with the NFT, and they can say "Hmmm... no."

An NFT is like a key to a house. You can use it to open the door until the owner of the house decides to change the locks. You still own the key, but that impresses nobody.

It'll be bad PR if they don't honor it, though. Purchasers of the NFT don't know the original holder got banned, and they have every reason to assume buying the NFT from that person will give them whatever privilege or cosmetic it's supposed to grant them in-game. Enough people don't have that happen and complain about it loudly enough and Ubisoft will feel pressure to change their policies to honor it.

It'd be a stupid hill to die on anyway. Granted Ubisoft has done some stupid stuff in the past, but this one I don't think they'd win in the end.

It's bad PR that they delete inactive account with games at all, but they did it anyway.

And according to the article they got pushback, said it was a glitch (his got deleted after a year of inactivity, they claim it's supposed to be four years, and in part to comply with data privacy laws, I'm guessing in the UK as theirs are pretty stringent), and also said they're going to more or less undo it in this instance, meanwhile Steam wasted no time announcing they don't delete inactive accounts ever, gaining some free brownie points and a decent number of people will probably avoid their store in the future so as not to risk this happening.

So yeah, I maintain my point that if they offer NFTs, allow owners to sell them to other people (which is kind of the point of NFTs), and then decide certain instances of NFTs don't have to be honored because they banned that person, they're going to get enough articles like this that they'll feel pressure to walk back such an action.

So from the post you responded to

> The idea that NFTs somehow help in these kind of situations is utter nonsense

is accurate. Is your point that NFTs wouldn't hurt the situation? That's a different claim.

This is true for any system, not just one based on NFTs.

NFTs add nothing here.

> but his account will still be closed.

That wouldn't be a problem with NFTs as they could just go to another game provider, show their proof-of-ownership and download their games from there. Such import functionality already exist to some limited degree right now with GoG, Steam and Co., but all of them require that your account with Ubisoft is still working. NFTs would work even if Ubisoft disappeared completely.

Furthermore NFTs would allow used game sales, something we have lost with the switch from physical to digital, despite it being required by law in many countries. A signed recipe is nowhere good enough, as that still depends on your account at Ubisoft, e.g. to keep track of if you refunded the game or not.

Now getting the game industry to actually implement and use an NFT based game-ownership system, that's the tricky part. But claiming there is no technological problem that needs solving is ignoring all the freedoms we lost by going digital with our purchases and that could be regained with NFTs.

OPs point is that all of that can be done without the use of NFTs - the reasons Ubisoft are doing this are commercial not because of technical limitations.

Just saying NFTs will solve it even if Ubisoft goes rogue completely ignores other things that would need to happen too - ie how do you avoid double redemption and multiple installs?

How? Which digital sales system still works when the shop I bought it from goes down (as happened with GameStopApp and Desura)? Even DRM-free doesn't work in the modern landscape where games are getting updates years down the road. Trying to sell a DRM-free game, while theoretically allowed, is also not really practical.

If GameStopApp wanted to allow you to transfer them they could have - hence it being commercial rather than technological.

How do I transfer a game from a shop that is already dead into one that doesn't yet exist? Any kind of transfer depends on both services still being alive and well. With NFTs I could retain ownership even when the shop is gone.

With a central authority you can do that too.

It just doesn't matter if it is nft or not.

That is the point.

Nft need to be provided as well. Access to it, tools etc. Mining and verifying it is costintensive.

Ubisoft didn't just use nft it went to a company which provides a nft Blockchain. They could just go to any company for this. It's cheaper to just use a database.

Fiat currency is basically already proof of stack. Because there are so many like me having money in a bank account. Pensions etc.

Nft needs either a resource intensiv PoW or a PoS which both have not been be solved in a good and scaling and save way.

So why not using PoS in the normal world with creating a company, contracts and a basic database? It's good enough for everything we do and we know how to do it.

But do you agree that this is not a very difficult technical problem, and could be implemented with our without a blockchain, and that the real issue would be how to get all actors involved to buy in to such a system? Why would Ubisoft want this? Commercial entities are typically motivated by profit, not wanting to bring Ready Player One to life.

This is a key question from multiple angles - a few specific ones:

1) Does Steam want to allow you to download games to their platform when you have bought it from the lowest cost seller, when they will take zero cut of the revenue?

2) Do games sales platforms want to make it so you can leave their platform en-masse with zero friction?

3) Do developers really want to lose control of being able to revoke keys (e.g. cheaters) or lose the ability to stop the transfer of the license to other players? (i.e. block resale). And if developers / game sellers retain the ability to revoke keys as part of the design of the blockchain contract, how does that avoid the original situation where Ubisoft is revoking access to inactive accounts?

4) What does it mean if I lose access to my account in an NFT world? If someone steals my account can it be recovered? Can I get my games back?

Why do companies do anything in the consumers interest? Competition.

You don't see it now, but once many games allow you to resell the skins or game itself, and gamers get used to that, publishers that don't allow it will look evil.

Coordination between many companies is an exceptionally difficult problem without blockchains. This is what NFTs solve in a simple way - a neutral platform that every party can easily integrate with knowing the rules, API and data integrity won't change.

I can see how once such a system comes into place, it might be functional and stable. I’m not quite sure how we’d get over the threshold from where we are to there. I’m not saying it’s impossible, I do however think it’s very hard.

Blockchains are not useful here. Just mint something like a PGP NFT and eliminate the pointless waste of the blockchain.

You should probably learn blockchain 101 concepts like preventing double spending before making assertions with such confidence.

> Coordination between many companies is an exceptionally difficult problem without blockchains.

Before we solutionise to blockchain though we should work out how we want the world to work.

This is my main issue with discourse about NFTs and Blockchain - it gets banded around as a technical solution to solve everything before anyone has even started to think of what the requirements are for the problem we are trying to solve.

No, that would require the other game provider to accept your Ubisoft-minted token. Since they already don't with a very centralised system that makes this very easy, having an intermediate token adds _more_ friction.

NFTs are a bunch of worthless bullshit.

> No, that would require the other game provider to accept your Ubisoft-minted token.

Game providers already accept games from other shops. I can import my Steam games into GoG right now. That feature exists. The issue is that it's very limited due to digital game ownership being a mess.

> having an intermediate token adds _more_ friction.

It adds no friction at all, as you could hide it completely within the client. But it would allow adding a "Backup" button that could backup all your game ownership into a tiny file instead of having to download TB of game data in the hope that you can reinstall them later (which rarely works with modern games due to mandatory updates).

If the publisher who provides the game downloads doesn't honour your store account, why would they honour your text file?

Game services aren't allowed to give away games for free. The game you own on Steam is a different one than the one you own on GoG. So it requires the publisher's permission to allow this kind of import which in turn means it's rarely available. Also this kind of import essentially allows you to duplicate games, as you can import a Steam game into a GoG account and than sell the GoG account while still keeping the game on Steam. Without proper tracking of ownership it's a mess.

With NFTs you have a framework of ownership and both the entry on Steam and the one on GoG become the same thing. If you sell or refund your game-NFT it disappears from both services.

????? Adding a non-steam game on Steam is not transferring it, it's a simple shortcut. Your GoG game will not be installable through Steam. Your Ubisoft game will still launch uplay. It's a damn shortcut. I'm sorry you're in denial about your NFTs being worthless, but you ought to cut your losses now.

> Game services aren’t allowed to give away games for free.

I mean, they obviously are, which is about 95% of the reason I even have an account on EGS, but…

> With NFTs you have a framework of ownership and both the entry on Steam and the one on GoG become the same thing.

Which is why neither Steam nor GoG would have any interest in adopting those NFTs.

Why would one store honour an NFT issued by another one?

It's a quick and easy way to dramatically increase their user base.

At the moment nobody can complete with Steam because Steam has most of their games. If there would be a way to transfer games between services, services would have to compete and what services they offer instead of just relying on user lock-in.

> At the moment nobody can complete with Steam because Steam has most of their games.

Exactly? You're right. Which is why Steam will never allow this from their side.

That might not be up for Steam to decide, first-sale doctrine already exist as law in many countries, what's missing is the enforcement of it for digital goods:

https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/steam-should-let-users-rese...

Until someone builds a Steam that does allow it, and users start migrating over, and steam has to either allow it or keep losing market share.

Companies don't do things out of the goodness of their hearts, they do it because better, faster, more consumer friendly competitors appear.

Ubisoft could generate some XML with list of games and sign it with their private key with known certificate. This XML is proof of purchase that you can back up and import into other stores. All it takes is some cooperation between stores. You don't need blockchain, it's basic public key cryptography.

That does not allow selling your used games or transferring them to another person.

And Dropbox could be replicated with a couple of servers and rsync...

There's a lot more complexity to building a global game/item reselling marketplace than proving ownership once.

NFTs give a consistent, 100% uptime, permissionless, platform where the APIs never change and participants don't get bored and turn off their "xml signing server" because it's not profitable any more.

> That wouldn't be a problem with NFTs as they could just go to another game provider...

...nothing says an NFT needs to be arbitrarily transferable. Again, Ubisoft is launching an NFT that has a huge laundry list of conditions around who can own them and when and how you are allowed to transfer them.

If Ubisoft won't let you transfer your Ghost Recon pants NFT to whomever you like, why would they let you transfer an NFT representing a game?

> Such import functionality already exist to some limited degree right now with GoG, Steam and Co., but all of them require that your account with Ubisoft is still working. NFTs would work even if Ubisoft disappeared completely.

Again, this is not a technical problem, it's a legal and economic problem. And as you say, we already have this feature (without NFTs), so why do we need NFTs? I bought a copy of Satisfactory on Epic; I'd like to play it on Steam. There's is zero technical reason why I can't go through some basic oauth flow to verify that I control both accounts, and let me remove the license from Epic and add it to Steam. Or even better, let me press a button and turn my copy on Epic into a product key that I can paste into Steam, or resell on Ebay. Wouldn't that be cool?

And why doesn't this exist? Well, because the companies involved (markets and publishers) don't want it to. So, well, yes, you could also solve this is a much more difficult and expensive way (with NFTs), they don't want that solution to exist either.

Steam already had a very well functioning marketplace for transferring digital items including - in very limited cases - games between accounts. Why can't I sell the copy of Portal 2 I've finished? Again, no technical reason, but because that's the last thing they want people to do.

> Furthermore NFTs would allow used game sales,

Which is why publishers will never do that.

"...up to an including the fact that if you get banned you...lose your NFTs."

That cant be right, well Ubisoft could still fuck this up. I can sell my NFTs on marketplaces completely independent of ubisoft. Sure they could invalidate, not honor the NFTs, but i wouldnt expect them to do so unless criminal activity like money laundering is involved.

> I can sell my NFTs on marketplaces completely independent of ubisoft.

See the link I posted. As of right now, the stated plan is that you will NOT be able to do so.

I am not sure what to trust less. Ubisoft to not fuck this up or an ars technica NFT article.

Not if the NFTs are only minted and valid on their own marketplace/blockchain.

Then its good that they are not minted and valid on their own marketplace/blockchain. https://tezos.com/ https://rankchart.org/site/objkt.com/ https://rarible.com/

> I can sell my NFTs on marketplaces completely independent of ubisoft.

Even on a public chain, this isn’t true. It’s shocking to me how many people in this space really don’t know the basics.

An NFT is just a contract that implements ERC-721/ERC-1155. I can implement restrictions around the transfer functions however I like.

You're missing the point that this would motivate a marketplace where Ubisoft is not the only portal for these NFT-owned games. nftgamingportal.com could exist which accepts these NFTs (in addition to many others) despite whatever restrictions Ubisoft decides to impose (which they are free to do... they own the walled garden).

> nftgamingportal.com could exist which accepts these NFTs (in addition to many others) despite whatever restrictions Ubisoft decides to impose

Ubisoft's coin is on a public chain right now, and they have restrictions that prevent people from using arbitrary 3rd-party marketplaces to trade the NFTs. So it's a nice theory, but it doesn't seem to be working in practice; being on a public chain isn't currently preventing Ubisoft from restricting other portals.

I think people believed this portability was inherent to how NFTs work, that of course anything on a public chain would have to allow 3rd-party marketplaces. But I don't see what mechanisms actually exist to force that outcome; I think that's just a hope that people had rather than an inherent technological property of how blockchain contracts work.

Not really hope, but this is one of the biggest value propositions. If your NFTs give more rights/power to the owner they are going to be more attractive and thus more valuable.

On the other hand being able to have more restrictive tokens enables smart contracts to comply with regulations. But for gaming NFTs it really destroys any added value/utility which is something i should have expected of Ubisoft.

No, you’re missing the point. That’s just not how NFTs work.

I can create NFTs that cannot be traded on other marketplaces.

Its on a public chain: https://tezos.com/ They should be using: https://assets.tqtezos.com/docs/token-contracts/fa2/2-fa2-nf...

True they could implement arbitrary restrictions.

People have pointed to the fact that Ubisoft is using a separate chain, but I want to point out that even on Ethereum you're not guaranteed to have the kind of universal access that you want. Smart contracts are code, and an Ethereum contract can be coded to rely on a centralized service or to only allow selling through a specific marketplace. Additionally, even on Ethereum Ubisoft could monitor the sales and reject tokens or ban account that go through sales endpoints that they dislike even if they didn't code the restrictions into the smart contract. The blockchain makes that kind of historical monitoring and restriction really easy.

Of course, Ubisoft could in a theoretical world also not do that stuff, but the point is they could also allow you to transfer your games using a centralized service. The NFTs don't force them to be more open or customer friendly, if they were customer friendly they would already be allowing you to download games without DRM or transfer them around. They could already offer you a Steam key with every game you bought from the Ubisoft store; it's corporate politics and competition between Ubisoft and Steam that prevents this from happening, not technology.

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What Ubisoft demonstrates so well here is that the incentive structure behind NFTs also doesn't really seem bias companies towards being more open. There's no commercial incentive for any other game to integrate with Ubisoft's NFTs. Doing so would be a pure act of charity with no upside to those companies, and with a ton of liability since Ubisoft would be allowed to mess with those NFTs which would now be part of the customer experience on a separate game.

What you're seeing with Ubisoft is not going to be an exception, this is going to be the norm of how companies work with NFTs. A quick heuristic you can use: releasing a game DRM-free is easier, cheaper, simpler, and more directly beneficial to consumers than building a consumer-friendly NFT system; so whenever you look at a company that says they're going to work with NFTs, do yourself a favor and check to see if their games are currently DRM-free. Do they currently allow game trading/gifting? If they don't, then I think it's a strong probability that their NFTs are going to look more like Ubisoft's and less like the ethical systems that people imagine and hope for. Because I can't stress enough that it's not hard to build the systems and restrictions on the blockchain that Ubisoft has, it really comes down to corporate choice about how they proceed rather than the technology.

In short, NFTs offer no additional positive incentives to be more consumer friendly, and the technology doesn't make anything possible that wasn't possible before with good-old-fashioned OAUTH or signed public databases. If Ubisoft wanted to allow game transfers, there are dozens of ways they could do it today, many of which could survive as authentication mechanisms even if the company folded. Game ownership on the blockchain is not going to go through the kind of revolution that people suppose. My advice is, if you want a revolution in game ownership then lobby to reform copyright and/or establish a legal digital right of resale. If you want to more directly protect your games, boycott and criticize companies like Steam/Epic/Ubisoft/EA/etc that bundle DRM into their storefronts.

There's no commercial incentive for any other game to integrate with Ubisoft's NFTs. Doing so would be a pure act of charity with no upside to those companies, and with a ton of liability since Ubisoft would be allowed to mess with those NFTs which would now be part of the customer experience on a separate game

What about bootstrapping a new game?

If you were launching a new game and wanted to steal marketshare from Ubisoft, integrating their NFT's (if they are open and not in a closed ecosystem) would be beneficial

> integrating their NFT's (if they are open and not in a closed ecosystem) would be beneficial

How so? It is just another way of giving away in-game content to attract new players. But it would be technically more complex and would make your game dependent on a market that is controlled by a competitive third party.

I'm not sure I see how.

It would be more work and your new game would be subject to Ubisoft's whims. You're not getting any money from the existing NFTs, and you're not getting any money when people trade them. And the game-balance problems of trying to take an existing economy that's built around restrictions in another game, and then retrofitting that onto your economy without resulting in weird pay-to-win outcomes... oof, difficult problem.

If you want to bootstrap a new game that has a lot of content and freebees for new players, just give people a bunch of content, it's the same amount of work. Using Ubisoft's NFTs in your game still requires you to build the mechanics and still requires you to build all of the media assets around those NFTs. So you don't really get to skip anything, and now your digital assets/rewards are harder to balance.

And very importantly, you don't get any money out of it, Ubisoft gets money when you integrate their NFTs. I just don't see what the advantage would be.

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Edit: Well, okay, after more thought I guess maybe carrying over progress in some limited ways, but... who really wants that, either as a game designer or as a player? Nobody really wants someone who started playing Call of Duty 10 years ago to go into a new game in a different genre already dominating everyone else in the game because of pay-to-win mechanics. That's frustrating for designers, but it's also frustrating for players who want to feel like they're starting out brand new games on equal footing with each other.

I want to stress again, we could already be doing this stuff today using OAUTH/account-imports, and we're mostly not outside of a few random, often very limited promotions; and I would suggest the reason is that it turns out there's not a lot of incentive for games made by separate companies to do a lot of integration with each other -- otherwise we'd already see it happening.

It's all well and good to talk about bringing your Magic cards over to another Magic game, but... it's kind of a weird theoretical problem that NFTs don't help with, because first of all Magic isn't something that just anyone can make a game around, it's still a copyrighted game. And if Wizards is the one making all of the legal Magic games, they can use a centralized service to make cards transfer between them (they could also use that service for games outside of their control, but at the very least they don't need a blockchain for a bunch of games that they exclusively own). But second of all outside of Magic, it doesn't make a ton of sense to try and bring your Magic cards into, say, Hearthstone (which again you couldn't do in a literal sense because the card art and text is all copyrighted and Blizzard would get sued if they tried to import your Magic Online library). Hearthstone has separate mechanics, what would the mapping even be?

A lot of these collectable games like Magic/Hearthstone are collectible first and foremost not primarily for gameplay reasons, but as a way to make companies money by encouraging you to buy cards, and Hearthstone ends up incentivizing new players by giving a lot of free stuff away and then pulling players into a store ecosystem that they control. They don't have a lot of financial reason to make it so that giving Wizards money makes your Hearthstone experience better. Even a very small indie game with this monetization model would probably just prefer to give you bonus packs whenever you refer a friend or if you sign up during a promo period.

It's maybe possibly a nice idea to have some kind of artifact of achievement in a game that lives beyond that game, but it's not an idea that NFTs seem to really help with or encourage.

It wouldn't make a lot of sense financially. The cost to create all the assets, and stay in sync with Ubisofts asset database would be high. Your only incentive would be to try and capitalize on future sales, but without any guarantee that they'd buy the asset from you.

You'd basically only be appealing to people who are bought into the hype...without getting any guarantees in returns.

Just to be clear, they are not using their own chain, its on https://tezos.com/

This is a good point, thanks for the correction. It's not even that Ubisoft could theoretically put the same restrictions on a public chain, they are already actively putting the restrictions on a public chain; just on a different one from Ethereum.

The same mechanisms that blockchains use to verify ownership and to trace ownership history are the same mechanisms that Ubisoft (or any other company) can use to block NFTs or add restrictions around them. But of course, the companies don't need to be so clumsy about how they restrict the tokens, they don't need to have off-chain monitoring and coordinate to block NFTs. They can also just code this stuff directly into the smart contract. Being on a public chain offers no guarantee that individual smart contracts will be decentralized.

Public chains like Ethereum/Tezos that implement smart contracts also inherently give companies tools to use those smart contracts as DRM and centralization mechanisms. In a weird way, the only thing that's decentralized about Ubisoft's NFT system is the enforcement of their DRM and the liability when a token gets stolen, lost, or hacked.

> An NFT is just a fancy signed receipt.

That may be how some NFTs are utilized. But it’s probably better to think of an ERC20 (tokens) and ERC721 (NFTs) as self executing code on the Ethereum Virtual Machine. The difference between the two is that ERC20 standard is self-similar and the ERC721 standard is uniquely identifiable.

Sure you can mint an NFT with “whatever record” you want in theory, if the NFT isn’t minted within a given self-executing smart contract, then your NFT is immediately recognizable as bullshit.

You are simultaneously suggesting there is no need for a technological solution, the answer if forcing Ubisoft to act a certain way, whereas the technological solution removes the need to trust Ubisoft to act a certain way or force them to when they don’t.

How exactly would the embedded program force Ubisoft to act?

Self-executing programs on EVM would entirely remove the need to force anything, which is OPs “solution”.

We have seen it time and again with centralized services right?

Just take any one of the horror stories where PayPal has shutdown/frozen accounts. People have been frozen for months/years/indefinitely with funds they need to live and feed their families.

You don’t need to force PayPal to unlock you account/funds if you can take your seed phrase/private key and access my funds on any other wallet.

I understand the frustration with centralized services. What I don't understand is how an embedded program on a blockchain service would guarantee my access to a Ubisoft service or game.

Is the game distributed and executing on the blockchain? If not, you're close to understanding how NFTs very expensively do not solve this problem: the blockchain state doesn't remove Ubisoft's control of their software and servers. What would help is a legal contract with user-friendly terms (which they could offer now if they wanted to, but they don't) or consumer protection regulation (which has no need for a blockchain).

> Is the game distributed and executing on the blockchain? If not, you're close to understanding how NFTs very expensively do not solve this problem…

Games can be deployed on IPFS right? Access to play games on IPFS be trustless, such as holders of NFTs, right?

That is not the only way to employ blockchain technology to avoid a centralized company removing access to games you paid for, but not knowing your familiarity with the current state of the technology that is low hanging fruit.

Also let’s not pretend there isn’t a legal contract between Ubisoft and users, but it’s that very contract that gives them the legal right to take away access to games you have paid for by the rules they dictate. Even if Ubisoft breached the contract, no one is going to hire a lawyer to sue Ubisoft over breach of contract over the cost of a game…don’t forget to take into account legal fees and costs when calling the blockchain expensive.

> Games can be deployed on IPFS right?

They could, but IPFS is not a blockchain and putting it on IPFS would be a competitive disadvantage since you'd still need to pay for hosting but your users would see lower performance than competing options.

> Access to play games on IPFS be trustless, such as holders of NFTs, right?

No. If it's on IPFS, it's globally accessible to everyone on the internet. You could host encrypted blobs but publishers are unlikely to do that because it would mean that any breach of any purchased decryption key would mean that people who did not purchase it could download the same thing paid customers get, and there'd be no way to rotate the keys without breaking access for paying customers.

Moreover, IPFS would only matter if the game is either completely standalone or allows you to run your own servers. If that's not true, what really matters for most people is whether the servers will allow you to login, where again Ubisoft would have complete control about whether they care about your NFT. In the absence of a signed contract, that's “hahaha, no”.

> Also let’s not pretend there isn’t a legal contract between Ubisoft and users, but it’s that very contract that gives them the legal right to take away access to games you have paid for by the rules they dictate. Even if Ubisoft breached the contract, no one is going to hire a lawyer to sue Ubisoft over breach of contract over the cost of a game…don’t forget to take into account legal fees and costs when calling the blockchain expensive.

That is rather the point: Ubisoft has those terms because they created the game and the legal systems in most of the world give them a lot of control over how they grant access to their work. Blockchains aren't magic pixie dust which allow you to redesign their business how you want it to work and, as we've already seen from this same company, if they chose to use a blockchain they would structure the terms to preserve the same favorable position they currently enjoy.

If, as I do, you think that games should have resale rights or there should be some required process & means of recourse before terminating access, what you want are laws. Copyright is a legal creation and your elected officials can adjust the terms for it. Sure, that's won't happen without hard work but a blockchain has no authority to make anything happen at all so why not spend your effort on something which has a chance of working?

> But it’s probably better to think of an ERC20 (tokens) and ERC721 (NFTs) as self executing code on the Ethereum Virtual Machine.

Right, and Ubisoft is making NFTs right now, that will use that self-executing code to implement customer unfriendly restrictions on who can own and transfer the NFTs.

If your self-executing smart contract says "you lose the games when Ubisoft bans you or goes out of business", then you've gained nothing. "Ah", you say, "but what if Ubisoft decided to be nice and customer friendly?"

But this is Ubisoft. That's not going to happen. :)

NFT's are stupid. It's just the NFT idiots trying to find an actual legitimate reason for them to exist by saying it solves every problem, which it doesn't.

But supposedly a “correctly implemented” NFT would solve the problem.

It's one solution to the problem, but it's not the only one.

And probably the most complicated solution

"Have fun staying poor"... the most used argument to do something with NFTs.

Coming back to the main topic, I would suggest looking into Lateral thinking with withered technology. Nobody cares what technology is used for consumer facing products. Nobody cares if its web1 or web25. What people care about is usefulness and purpose.

Cutting-edge tech has always been here, but the break-throughs are mostly coming from cross-pollinating existing tech and remixing something into a better, cheaper, faster version.

Sure but there is a paycheck in it for some of the people who post on HN. Always follow the money.

I dunno - when MP3s became thing, in my country you were allowed to convert your CD to MP3. But you need the CD to prove your ownership (technically - I don't know if there ever was a court case where somebody produced the CDs).

It seems to me in that sense a NFT could help - you can get the MP3s anywhere, but the NFT proves you actually paid for it.

Of course there would have to be a way to get the Ubisoft games, or they would have to play along.

I don't get how this would be even remotely helpful in real life. It's just a solution for a manmade problem. I know there are a lot of manmade problems getting circumvented by code but this time it's just all on us.

Well you could own digital goods without having to rely on centralized services that can cancel your accounts.

I don't think thats feasible in a fiat world.

What if it was all on chain? See https://ultra.io (a Steam competitor) for an example of this:

"All the content you buy from Ultra, such as games, DLCs, and virtual items, are on-chain digital goods you truly own. On Ultra you’re in control of your assets as though they were physical items. These assets can be sold, traded and given away to your friends within Ultra, or outside of Ultra, through 3rd party marketplaces and mobile apps."

Does Ubisoft have to honor that Blockchain though by providing you services in perpetuity?

They might if they contractually agreed to honor it. But even if they were inclined to offer such licenses (lets say consumers everywhere demanded it), there's not many meaningful enforcement advantages of shoving NFTs in the mix.

As a consumer such a contract could (including transferability) could exist without an NFT, and be just as enforced by the (centralized) judicial system or consumers voting with their feet.

I own a physical copy of Diablo 2 that does not work anymore. License is dead and I don't know why.

Owning a physical copy is not helping me play the game as Bliz has decided that license is no good.

An NFT could have the same experience. Nothing forcing the vendor to honor it.

Seems if NFT game licenses worked the way they are being talked about in this thread then there would be no way to ban players for bad behavior because it would be out of the hands of the developer. Which clearly isn't true.

There is a an open implementation that you might be able to use: https://github.com/AbyssEngine/OpenDiablo2

Game preservation is a solved problem: piracy. Not legal but it works.

No company is going to give a shit about what they sold to whom 10 years ago. Hell chances are they're already out of business.

Yeah, what if? Your serial key would be in the chain? No, it won't, then everyone can access it. Ubisoft has the power to revoke a serial key, and they want to retain that right. I also want them to retain that right, as I want them to ban cheaters (or hellban them in an underworld together). I just don't want them to unrightfully delete an account with games attached (inactivity is a bad reason).

I wonder if this train of misleading information is gonna keep on chugging, or if people are going to realize that they really just own a string of alphanumeric characters that are just arbitrarily interpreted by centralized software. No different than how virtual items are done today.

Maybe I am also salty that I was one of the "early adopters" who saw this glaring flaw and missed out on a fortune because I understood the technical side. Right about the technology, wrong about the adoption I guess.

A correctly implemented NFT would mean that he could still sell the game to someone else, he should still be able to take the NFT of his games with him and make a new account theoretically. If they provide no way for him to auto export his NFTs then nobody should bother buying NFTs of games since as you're suggesting, it's pointless.

export nfts? doesn't that make it fungable?

I assume "export" here means transfer it to a wallet that the user controls, rather than Ubisoft. You can change ownership of the token without changing the token itself, so its still non-fungible.

Their ToS doesn't give me ownership of the nft that would be fraud.

How does your correct implementation force Ubisoft to do something against their will? If they want to block someone, opening another account will work only to the extent that they don't really care — otherwise their terms of service would be meaningless since everyone could just crank out sock puppets.

That's the whole point, the producer doesn't have control and therefore you own what you bought, instead of renting it.

I understand that this is the vision used to sell tokens but that's why I asked what reason we have to think that Ubisoft will start doing something which they could already do any time they want without sharing revenue. Their terms of service are what they are because that's how they want them to be, and there's nothing forcing them to use NFTs at all much less implement them with far more generous terms of service.

This is the only way their tokens would sell themselves (and arguably more so) is if they guarantee that even if you lost your account, you could still transfer your NFTs to a new account. Also the ability to sell games you've bought is pretty awesome. Heck under this scheme, if you buy a game plus DLC but you already own the base game, it should let you gift / sell the game to a friend if you paid the full amount of the game + DLC.

I seem to remember a time when people were able to sell games and buy games on the Steam market.

Why should we believe that gamers will reverse all of their past history and start demanding the ability to resell games? They could do that now, and that would avoid the substantial extra cost of the NFTs.

> If they want to block someone

The point of NFT is to use ownership to provide access. If they use another system, like an account system, well obviously it's no longer NFT and then obviously it no longer has the advantage of NFT. Even if they don't use NFT to provide direct access but instead access is provided behind another wall (like an account), the other advantage of being able to transfer its ownership to someone else is still there, and again if they block that, well obviously, they really don't support NFT at all.

An NFT is not a receipt, it's the actual ownership.

The real question is whether any games will ever really support NFT, that's a whole other question. It will takes times before we find that out as currently, with the amount of cash it bring for barely providing anything, it's not clear whether an actual full featured game will comes out or it will all be glorified visualizer.

In other words, an NFT cannot force Ubisoft to do anything they don't want to do and if they do want to allow this they don't need an NFT. Since blockchains are too inefficient to store content and the publishers are unlikely to put anything important on a system with no fraud recovery mechanism[1], there will always be a set of services which are what actually determine whether you can use the game and the only thing which matters will be the policy they enforce there.

> An NFT is not a receipt, it's the actual ownership.

This is incorrect for most NFTs since they lack a contract assigning ownership rights. Ubisoft certainly could add that but, again, why wouldn’t they do that now if it’s something they want?

1. Even if a blockchain could be efficient enough to publish the client software, few companies are going to allow their software to be published somewhere which allows anyone in the world to download it without a mechanism to prevent a single leaked key from making it irrecoverably free to anyone on the internet.

How is that different than me just being able to transfer a software license to another account?

What's your definition of "correctly implemented"? Because the NFT platform Ubisoft went with has all kinds of restrictions on it, and I imagine they consider it to be "correctly implemented."

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).

If you can't be confident of your ownership of and access to what you buy, why do you buy it?

Because people want to play the games, and there's not an alternative way to buy them that does give you that confidence.

> 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?

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.

> Don't copyrights preclude meaningful competition here?

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.

Do you think the first sale doctrine makes the book market more inefficient? Because that's along the lines of what people want for digital goods.

> 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.

Government being involved in issues like this is the point of government.

In the case of the article Ubisoft is both the developer and owner of the store

Yes, you're right, I had missed that.

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.

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.

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.

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.

> The terms are not a negotiated contract

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.

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.

It would be a contract if you agreed to it. Without a meeting of minds and agreement there is no contract.

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.

IANAL

to participate in the cultural works of today's digital world.

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".

You're entirely missing the point of the comment if you think it's about games. It's about digital goods.

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.

Two that immediately come to mind are online textbooks and Adobe Creative Cloud.

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)

You're on a forum called "Hacker News" and you can't think of a single digital good that's not recreational?

In any case the biggest examples would be software.

Are there any examples of software providers revoking access in this way?

(I personally have no experience with such things because I will never use or pay for software that is provided in this way.)

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.

Kindle books?

Those are recreation. (Except for edge cases like online textbooks, which another poster just upthread mentioned.)

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.

how is recreation not part of culture?

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.

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.

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.

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.

I would be interested in knowing if that would be legal. As might you technically have purchased your license?

Generally speaking, it's uploading/transferring content to others that is illegal, not downloading it for yourself. At least, de facto if not de jure.

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.

>A downloader can only be sued for the retail value of what they downloaded

Is this the actual law?

I remember hearing about people being sued for $100k+ just for downloading a few albums back in the Limewire days.

Most likely they were also distributing (uploading), not just downloading.

Reading the EFF's history (and thinking about how the technology works for one second!), it seems this was how the lawsuits were put forth.

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.

But is it that particular copy? If I backup a digital file that I buy and it gets deleted and I have to restore from the backup, is that offside?

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.

Not necessarily[1].

[1] https://www.justice.gov/archives/jm/criminal-resource-manual...

Good point.

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.

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.

https://codes.findlaw.com/us/title-17-copyrights/17-usc-sect...

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.

But you can.

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.

In many jurisdictions it's not a legal infraction to steal back some property since it was legally yours.

It's the same argument as vigilante justice.

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?”

Well, sadly if something is legal then they can actually do that thing. I don’t like it myself, but that’s unfortunately how it works.

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.

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.

It's definitely fine morally, but unfortunately it's illegal anyway.

Who cares if it's illegal? It's not like you're gonna get caught. Just use a VPN.

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.

Dont you worry about Malware, Viruses and suchlike?

Not from reputable uploaders. It's about reputation, and people like, say, Fitgirl have a hell of a lot better reputation than Ubisoft or EA.

If you use a private tracker you will usually be fine.

What good private trackers still exist and are possible to join?

TL, must be run out of an embassy or Transnistria lol

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.

GGn

Yes. From Ubisoft. It's the pirated version that lacks the rootkit ;)

you mean DRM and anti cheats ?

> Dont you worry about Malware, Viruses and suchlike?

Nowadays DRM are running in kernel mode so I'd say that the pirated version is safer in a lot of cases ...

Is that really practical these days given the frequency of updates developers put out for their games?

I don't want to be forced to install one-way updates just to play a single-player game.

Apple's iOS App Store has normalized how updates can remove and disable (or just break) features, and there's no way to downgrade.

I don't buy games in a broken state hoping they'll be good later. Either I wait until they're done or don't buy them at all.

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.

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.

I wouldn't feel guilty but I just do not want to bother. Half the reason I pay is I don't want the trouble.

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.

In the NFT scenario , what would prevent people from sharing licenses?

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.

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.

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.

People would have separate accounts for each game to prevent losing everything.

It becomes a long serial number that anyone who knows can transfer to another account.

But it wouldn't make sense to pay to transfer it over ($60-$300 gas fees) on an under $60 game.

I can see some real issues with your approach.

NFTs can't be used for products under a few hundred if you want to leverage the value as insurance.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

Of course you can alter the ToS, I'm sure Steam and the likes are open to contract negations before you buy a $70 game.

It’s better to negotiate after, that way there’s a whole bunch of precedent around sales.

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.

There's always the bay way.

> 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"?

> If they ban me, do I lose my thousands of dollars of games?

Generally yes, and this is obviously bullshit.

whoops! you didn't drive your car for a year during the pandemic, we own it now. /s

This type of anticonsumerism would get so much attention if it were in another field. I can only hope it happens here.

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

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.

> 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.)

Yes they often are.

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.

https://www.slashfilm.com/574053/amazon-sued-purchased-movie...

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.

> 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.

a lot of games have actual Steam DRM

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.

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.

Wouldn’t mind the music I’ve purchased remaining mine, too.

That's why I only buy from Bandcamp and HDTracks.

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.

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.

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?

Tokenized game licenses could presumably be transferred to a different wallet without depending on whatever game company to do the right thing.

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.

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.

> Even with licensing, you couldn't play offline?

That’s a good point. The GOG DRM-free model wouldn’t work here. Someone smarter than me could likely give you an answer.

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.

In this context it doesn't add much, except perhaps a public ledger cryptographically verifying the purchases and license ownership.

> 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?

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.

or you could keep a copy of your receipt

But you're still completely dependant on the game company to do the right thing.

A license exists so that it can connect to the license server -- which is owned by the game company -- which then allows you to play.

You're still at their whims.

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”)

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.

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.

Yours is a decentralised solution though and we should point that out lest blockchain and decentralised become synonymous.

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.

Blockchain isn't going to let you download a 100gig game a decade later.....

How do the block chains that rely on hoarding hard drives work if you can't download the contents from the disks to verify?

> 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)

You can only be offline for a set amount of time with Steam (last I used it), and the check is made before you go offline.

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.

Source: am indie game dev

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.

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.

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.

> 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...

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).

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".

Something like "buy a 1 month subscription".

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.

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.

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.

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.

>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.

It's almost impossible to buy a DRM free book.

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.

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.

How to profit from written material without some sort of government enforcing my rights to ownership? Do I have to go begging on social media?

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.

Okay I pour hours into content and go begging. What is my compensation if it doesn't succeed?

You write a book and nobody buys it or reads it. What's your compensation then?

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.

>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’.

Is it more likely that the other person reported you a bunch of times and that Sony does not employ people to check that reports are legitimate?

If I ever make a game, I would make sure there is no public chat, and that you could only chat with people you add as friends.

Imagine how easier it is to moderate, and how polite people become if you do that.

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'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.

A law to force them to partially refund people would create the insentive to no longer be "trigger happy".

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.

I recently wrote about this very topic: https://den.dev/blog/software-rentals/

> This article is a great example of why we need legislation around ownership of digital items.

If you show me well-written legislation that doesn't have generous handouts for cronies, I'm all for it.

> I generally hate getting the government involved in things, but

Why do you hate your elected representatives safeguarding fairness against large corporations like this?

Because it's flawed. It's an easy bet to say that regulation will end up being ineffective and/or worsening things.

Asking for regulation is kind of "gnome underpants" plan where regulate -> X -> profit. X is extremely complicated.

> 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.

we let it happen with music before, where apple and spotify and others can just delete stuff you purchased from your library...

this actually sounds like the only beneficial use for NFTs i can think of

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.

The only way to own is to pirate nowadays.

And people want you to believe that "it is not ethical".

And sadly this basically locks you out of many multiplayer as DRM titles

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.

> 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.

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.

> I generally hate getting the government involved in things

The general idea behind a protection racket is that once you paid the goons, they protect you against aggression, from themselves, and others.

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.

> 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.

> We may also close long-term inactive accounts to maintain our database.

How many kilobytes takes too store ownership data? I can just imagine that tracking data is thousands of times bigger.

> The crazy thing about this is that it’s perfectly legal for video game companies to delete your account regardless of whether you’ve spend zero or a thousand dollars on their games

It's a shame that we are going to fight for our digital rights because currently we have almost none because justice does not understand technology.

You have the right not to pay money to companies that won't give you the guarantee of ownership and access that you want.

But if the lack of that guarantee is right there in the company's terms of service, and you pay them money anyway, you don't have the right to insist that they change the terms you signed up to when you paid them just because you don't like the consequences.

> You have the right not to pay money to companies that won't give you the guarantee of ownership and access that you want.

I have way more rights than that. Or if not I will fight to get them. I do not want to depend on the good will of corporations. I want fair laws that control their behavior like we have with physical goods.

> I have way more rights than that. Or if not I will fight to get them.

So let me get this straight: companies are offering a recreational product, games, on terms you don't like. But instead of not paying them money, so they will be forced to either change their business model or go out of business, you want to get the government involved? For games?

> I do not want to depend on the good will of corporations.

Good luck with that. Your ability to post on this website depends on the good will of a corporation. Your ability to buy groceries and other necessities depends on the good will of corporations. I could go on and on.

> For games?

No, for money.

These actions are always dismissed on the basis that they're not selling something important. But setting aside the question of whether that's valid, they are selling in exchange for something important.

> These actions are always dismissed on the basis that they're not selling something important.

No, it's on the basis that the buyer knew the terms perfectly well before the sale, and bought the thing anyway. The fact that it's a game that was bought just makes it even more unreasonable for the buyer to want to retroactively change the terms of the sale.

I can see why that argument might work for a laissez-faire libertarian, but we have innumerable laws on what is contractable. That this should be singled out specifically as something which shouldn't have any such protections seems in my experience to be attributable to the fact that people don't consider games important.

Besides which, I challenge your claim that the buyer knew the terms perfectly well. The terms are often dozens of pages long and written in dense legalese, with clearly little belief or intention that the buyer will read them, and arguably specifically to dissuade the buyer from reading them.

But it's reasonable for the same corporations to "update" their Terms and Conditions under your feet while your only recourse against is to completely severe the relationship? Which party has the power in this relationship? Why do you consider the "terms of sale" to be the only important aspect of contract relationships?

Are you also against regulations on food sales? Why can't a corporation just sell whatever bad and spoiled food they have and let customers decide by themselves if they want to be food poisoned or not? We do have rights to protect us, customers, in unbalanced power relationships.

Personal/individual responsibility only goes so far. If you like to be stomped by more powerful entities than you because you don't like governments, good luck. Just remind yourself you have never experienced a world where you don't have safeguards provided by your government to keep your life somewhat safe and somewhat more fair.

How would this work in more "classical" software where I only get presented with the EULA after purchasing it, downloading it, and launching the installer? Money was already exchanged. How could any contract made after that be enforceable? Wouldn't that mean you're obligated to retroactively give away rights you aquired through the purchase minutes before?

> you want to get the government involved? For games?

The government is already involved, I cannot copy the games from my friend because the government does not allow me to do it. The government protects Ubisoft from me hacking them, or from paying in a fraudulent way.

The government is fully involved in all the steps, I just want that my interests are represented in that involvement.

> Good luck with that.

I do not live in the USA.

> I cannot copy the games from my friend because the government does not allow me to do it.

No, you can't do it because the seller of the game does not allow you to do it. There is no law requiring sellers to lock down their games with DRM or other forms of restriction.

> I do not live in the USA.

So what? Are you saying you can magically get access to this website without Y Combinator's cooperation and goodwill because you're not in the USA? Are you saying you can magically ensure that you can buy groceries without a corporation providing them to you because you're not in the USA?

> No, you can't do it because the seller of the game does not allow you to do it. There is no law requiring sellers to lock down their games with DRM or other forms of restriction.

DRM is usually bypassed within hours or days of the game release. After that it is still illegal to copy the game from your friend.

> No, you can't do it because the seller of the game does not allow you to do it.

What are you talking about? The game doesn't have the ability to allow or disallow anything. It's just data on an information medium. You can bypass any protections put in place by the developers unless you need to violate the laws of physics in order to do that. Last time I checked, there was no such thing as an uncrackable game.

There is instead a law requiring me not to do that. There are laws, which are enforced by the entity with a monopoly on violence (-- the government). The game developer can only point the government at the people breaking the law. Whichever way you look at it, the government is still involved. ANYTHING related to property has the government involved. Because the concept of property is something guaranteed by.. you guessed it.. the government.

I really don’t understand libertarians. You hate the idea of a government having any power that could theoretically/historically be used to oppress you, but when corporations do it, it should be celebrated.

Thank God it was IRS LLC that put me in their private prison for not paying my Land Ownership Subscription instead of the government.

> So let me get this straight: companies are offering a recreational product, games, on terms you don't like. But instead of not paying them money, so they will be forced to either change their business model or go out of business, you want to get the government involved? For games?

No, for digital rights, not necessarily only games. Also, games cost money, money is my time on Earth being converted into cash through my labour, I deserve to have my only real resource (time) protected from being taken from me due to shitty business practices. A ToS/ToU/T&C isn't a higher law than national laws just because I clicked "I accept" and I hope that my government will get involved to protect me from more powerful entities than a single individual can take on, doesn't matter if it's games or any other digital goods, it costs money, I get protections.

Or you can live in this cyberpunk-ish hellhole where corporations can dictate what is legal or not and your only power is to choose to not buy from them, I much prefer my government and the society that supports it to be dictate what these corporations can do rather than the goodwill of a for-profit corporation.

It's all checks and balances, goodwill isn't really compatible with the morality of chasing profits so we need something else to imbue morality in this system (aka, a government), you liking it or not.

> So let me get this straight: companies are offering a recreational product, games, on terms you don't like. [...] you want to get the government involved? For games?

That's an absurd argument, just because it's "games" it does not invalidate the argument here. Would you not raise the same concern if Apple/Google closed your account tomorrow and you lost access to all of your movies? They also count as "recreation".

Or one day, Microsoft/Apple deem your account to be causing abuse and terminate it. Your Windows license/macOS data is bound to it, and your computer is suddenly unusable because logging in returns an error. You're bound by a EULA and they're fully within their right to do this, you're just licensing the software. Would you still think "I will just not pay them money and go to someone else"?

What the large print giveth, the small print may not taketh away. If the large print says "Buy", the small print may not alter that to "License for a limited time that may be ended whenever we feel like it." The small print may clarify what the large print says, but direct contradiction is a form of false advertising.

I just now checked Ubisoft's website and clicked on a random game. Yes, there is a big "BUY" button, but once I click it, I get a page that asks me what length of time I want to purchase a subscription for. So it's quite clear, at least for that one game, that what you are buying is a subscription to something, not a product that you get ownership of indefinitely.

The game sellers, if someone did actually try to make the "false advertising" argument, would probably argue that it's common knowledge that "buying" a game from their online store does not mean you get indefinite ownership. It would be an interesting case if anyone ever did try it.

I also have the right to petition my local congress critters to crack down on whatever hairbrained schemes publishers are pulling like cutting off access to something I bought to save a kilobyte in a postgres database somewhere.

> you don't have the right to insist that they change the terms you signed up to

Oddly enough, publishers DO have the right to change ToS and frequently do, and "your silence is considered consent".

This reminds me quite a bit of the gift card nonsense where you'd be charged for not using a gift card, for using it, using it too soon, letting it get too old, etc. Now the rules around gift cards are extremely strict because it was abused by merchants. It sounds like we need something similar for digital items - if you yank my ownership, you owe me back my money and in whatever currency I paid you in, not your store funny money.

> you don't have the right to insist that they change the terms you signed up to when you paid them just because you don't like the consequences

Oh please. Virtually nobody reads that stuff. Chances are the handful of people who cared enough to read won't actually understand it. Are consumers supposed to consult lawyers before they spend money on products now? Even if you read, understand and agree to the deal, they can just change the terms later and there's nothing anyone can do.

I don't even want to stop paying them. I want them to stop their obnoxious bullshit so I don't feel like I'm a dumbass for trying to support creators every single time.

> It's a shame that we are going to fight for our digital rights because currently we have almost none because justice does not understand technology.

Reminds me of NFTs and people here arguing against what they don't understand.

NFTs aren't complicated. People understand them.

NFTs wouldn't help here. I can have NFTs for the games on my steam account but if steam bans me who is honoring my NFT to provide me access to the game? No one. It's about as good as a paper receipt for a company you didn't purchase the item from.

If steam gave you the NFT it would be prove that you actually bought the game.

Steam could ofcourse still refuse to honor the purchase.

I can already do that with receipts, so it doesn't really solve anything for this purpose.

Maybe it would help in scenarios where receipts don't make as much sense (international online transactions perhaps?), but all parties involved still have to agree that the NFT means something.

The only way I could see NFTs being useful for proof of ownership is if the specific society you're part of has enforcement or regulation that recognizes them as legal contracts of ownership. Unlike cryptocurrency, they don't really provide that until you imbue them with it through a trust mechanism outside of the token itself.

On the other hand two weeks ago I tried to delete my GOG account which was a very annoying and unnecessarily complicated process.

Companies just like to decide what is 'good for us', which ends up being what is good for their own metrics.

In a world where malicious parties might break into your (say) GOG account and try to delete it, there are "non-evil" reasons for GOG to make account deletion somewhat difficult.

Is it unnecessarily complicated though? I feel like while “stop paying more” should be an easy process, “permanently lose access to a thing I already paid for” should be difficult in order to guard against unexpected things, since it is a potentially irreversible event with negative monetary consequences for the user.

Exactly. I found out that I can't remove games from my Steam account even if I want to. I can only hide them.

I figure that's intentional so people can't change their mind about games they've removed and give grief to Steam support. It also helps prevent accidental removal, or malicious removal (e.g. you're still logged in and your kid is upset with you and tries to remove your favorite Steam games from your account).

Steam seems to have a "remove from account" option. Does that not work? Does it depend on where you live maybe?

I have a feeling that "it's perfectly legal" doesn't work in every country.

When possible, try to prefer DRM-free versions of games. If there's DRM, then one doesn't really own it. PCGamingWiki [1] is a great resource that will list the DRM status of a given game for different distributors (yes, some stores may have DRM while others do not). In general, GOG [2] is all DRM-free games.

[1]: https://www.pcgamingwiki.com [2]: https://www.gog.com

Lack of DRM wouldn't help if you don't have any way of getting the copy or getting past the license check.

Wait, but DRM free means that there no license check..

Not what we usually mean when we say DRM though. The check can be done entirely offline.

Who is "we"? How is checking for a licenso offline not drm? If there is no license key present the software still misbehaves in that case, no?

Doesn't DRM-free literally mean that you get a full local installation without any reliance on online licensing or any other digital restrictions?

Sure, just like the olden days. But you still need a license key or equivalent - for an offline check. And in the case of an app store that is handled by the app store, you never get or see the key. So if you are banned that doesn't help.

And even if you had a key you still don't have access to the install media. You could try to extract it from your drive but there is no guarantee that will work on another computer or OS-install since the installer might optionally install what is needed on that computer.

This at most technically right and definitely wrong in practice. I am unsure if there is an existing exact definition of DRM (free) or you're using an uncommon definition of "license" but in practice services like GoG advertising DRM free and people buying DRM free all mean that there is no licensing check whatsoever.

A GoG game comes with a single installer executable (single as in it is the same for everyone, no built in license) that and the resulting game it installs can be freely copied and used on as many machines as you like without any requirements. For example you do not need to have an internet connection or be running the GoG store application.

So if you have downloaded and backed up the installer of the game you bought on GoG then for all intents and purposes you own this game. It does not matter what GoG does from this point on. You will always be able to use it.

I will concede that the meaning might has changed with time. But at a point DRM was synonymous with online-checks and/or invasive spying and infecting the operating system. And that holds in spirit in today given all the criticism about DRM. It has never been about the inconvenience of entering a serial number (even though that indeed is a bit inconvenient it is most certainly not the source of the (justified) DRM hate we have today).

The license key you entered and the following offline check when installing from CD/disk was/is considered something entirely different.

I'd argue that the only reason that games today skip the license-check has absolutely nothing to do with DRM but with it being out of fashion and not considered to fulfilling its purpose anymore.

> The license key you entered and the following offline check when installing from CD/disk was/is considered something entirely different.

There was never a time when the definition of DRM didn't include license key checks.

The one exception to this is that a key for multiplayer access in mostly single player games is sometimes not included in the DRM definition. GOG has a number of games with codes needed for online access via central server; this is needed to be able to ban players for abuse and is still technically DRM but I personally consider it different type of thing when the game is primarily offline. Best is when there are multiplayer alternatives to the central server that don't require a key but that is fairly rare. Personally I don't use multiplayer anyway.

All in all, the experience from GOG is much more customer friendly than other game stores (there are only a few other tiny stores that I know about that are DRM-free and don't require their client to be able to buy and/or download games). They aren't perfect but you can download the installer directly from the website if you want or use a client if you want. Games work fully offline with no code needed. You can refund a game for essentially any reason within 30 days even if you have downloaded and played the game (there is some unspecified limit to number of refunds but it isn't tiny if you are just refunding a few you don't like). I'm not 100% certain but I'm fairly sure they don't ever remove inactive accounts.

Unfortunately, the value of DRM-free is often reduced somewhat by the "release a buggy mess and if it sells well enough fix it eventually" philosophy that most developers have these days. Not having access to updates can worst case make the game unplayable and often makes it less pleasant (of course, there are also cases where updates make it worse :/). So DRM-free isn't a complete solution for not being able to access an account, but at least once you have played a game you can play the same version again even if you can't access your account.

Well, you could argue that requiring to login to download a game is DRM as well.

While to some degree that is technically true but it is not what the whole DRM debate has been about.

You still need to download it. There are plenty of situations in which you might not have downloaded it yet or might have lost/deleted your copy, knowing you can download it again.

Also, I think the DRM people are referring to here is the kind that consists of rootkits, monitoring software and similar or, in simple cases, refuses to run or gives you some kind of penalty when it detects certain other software.

Imagine if someone bought something for pickup from a store, never picked it up, and the store went out of business and liquidated. Did they ever really own it? I don’t know.

I don’t expect any guarantees from digital goods being stored for free in a digital warehouse, unfortunately many do. One doesn’t own the nebulous copy on the distributor’s server, they own whatever copies they downloaded.

If you get the game legally DRM free. You get an installer you can just backup. If license keys are needed you get that too.

From that point on, even if you get banned you can still use your local installer copy.

DRM-free games generally do not have any license key (I’ve never seen one with it, but that’s anecdotal).

I’m not sure if an offline-only key check would be considered DRM; maybe is. Realistically such a check doesn’t do much, so what’s the point in including it. Back in the day it was often required to have one of the discs inserted to play—that is definitely DRM.

There's a lot of heritage in archived and emulated computer games from 80's and 90's. Further, I still have some games in their original boxes somewhere and being nostalgic enough to not have thrown them away I own my copies of those games in the true sense of the word. Same for music on compact discs. I have ripped most of them for myself but I still own the original copies in a closet.

Now, 30 years from now or roughly 2050, there will be a cultural and historical blackout because anything people are "buying" now are basically revokable privileges to temporarily hire games, music, and movies. There will be no single server up and running to provide today's games for people who are today young but will be middle-aged few decades from now. And, even before that, judging based on Ubisoft it looks like the "purchases" will be long gone before the service itself.

What a waste.

Something here is very fishy

>“Please be reassured that Ubisoft does not automatically close inactive accounts,”

but

>inactivity warning from Ubisoft in his spam folder dated January 20th. The email stated that his account had been temporarily shut down and will be permanently closed if he didn’t click the provided link within 30 days.

So not automatic closures...but there is a live system to automate it?

Unsurprising. I have found Ubisoft customer support pretty abysmal.

I pre-ordered the latest Assassin’s Creed directly from Ubisoft thinking it was better than buying it from Amazon. It got delivered to the wrong address, so I opened a ticket. They ignored the ticket for weeks despite me sending follow ups every few days, so I eventually raised a dispute with PayPal to get a refund, which I received.

Ubisoft finally responded to the ticket at that point, saying that I “may have issues making purchases from the store in the future” due to the reversed payment. So basically, they no longer want me as a customer because I tried to get a refund for a game they failed to deliver.

I paid extra for a disc version of the PS5 for exactly this reason. If I buy a game today I want to be able to play it 20 years from now. I can bet money that none of the mainstream digital stores of today will be operational by then.

Is that even a guarantee though? In particular, I know that you could buy the Orange Box (HL2, TF2, and Portal) on DVD in retail stores, but you needed a Steam account to play anyway.

I think most console games will run without any issues even if you pop in the disc to the console without any kind of Internet access.

There's a Twitter account that documents if games work without having access to the console's network/stores: https://twitter.com/DoesItPlay1/status/1474819155173908484

It isn't. Even discounting day 1 patches, every console assumes an internet connection. You're at the mercy of the game devs, and unless you are checking for "internet connection required" (and believing the lack of such on the box means you really don't need one), you can still end up with something that will refuse to boot unless it phones home.

> every console

Except the Switch.

Well, they're all -functional- without one. They also all have games that are only sold digitally, check in the background for patches for both the system and the games, and may refuse to start if you're running a version of the OS that is older than what is known to exist at the time of printing a physical copy. The Switch is no different there.

For PlayStation it is, but I think it is the only one. The console can operate 100% offline.

I typically do the same. (Ps2-4). I wonder though since a lot of these games now (typically ps4 onward) have fairly large “patches” downloaded when you play them how well the un patched games will play.

Ugh Xbox drives me up the wall with their "ownership" scheme. A disc doesn't actually contain the game, It's a _license_ for the game. When you insert the disc, your Xbox downloads the entire game to its drive, but the game won't launch without the disc inserted.

It's the worst of both worlds. After the Xbox store shuts down, none of your discs will work because they don't _do_ anything. And you can't even launch the game without messing with discs because you can't rip the license from the disc- it MUST be in the machine to launch.

At least you can still sell the disc. For now...

I don't think that's correct. If you disconnect your xbox from the net, the game will still be installed (from the disc), and you'll be able to play it. Everything will still work after the Xbox store shuts down. You just won't get any updates or DLC.

This statement is not accurate. There are games that ship as licenses rather than binary blobs on discs.

What kind of numbers are we talking here? All of the 15 or so games I own have had the game on the disc.

Steam is already 18 years old, where is your confidence they won't make it another 20 coming from?

In that sense, Steam is not tied to a single hardware platform. They are a bit more platform agnostic and that means they can keep moving with the times. Steam doesn't require a custom steam PC using proprietary hardware.

A good example of these online store going down would be the Wii and Wii U/3DS stores. The Wii store is already gone - it lasted 13 years.

The Wii U/3DS stores will no longer accept any payments starting 18th January 2022 as a first step towards shutting the services down. Wii U is 9 years old, 3DS is 10 years old.

Only yesterday a friend of mine fired up his Xbox 360. While the online system is still running it is a question of how long until MS will simply drop the entire thing even if it is a very minor thing to run.

MS are a special case as they keep the Xbox 360 store & library up for BC reasons, even adding older games to the catalog when they get publisher rights. I would actually trust them to keep it online. (And Sony recently changed their mind on shutting down the PS3 store and are keeping the PS3 download CDN up)

As for Nintendo, I'm unsure but optimistic -- the Switch is their first console that seems planned to be (able to be) used with 100% digital purchases, I'm not sure if games will be buyable forever but I bet they'll be downloadable.

Nintendo is an interesting case, because while the stores are gone/going away (though there was a Wii->Wii U transfer period), a lot of the games themselves aren't gone, and what you already downloaded will continue to work so long as you don't delete it. More importantly Nintendo itself is still around (and will probably be in another 20 years -- there are many long-lived entertainment companies) it's just that they (and others who re-release on the new stores) want you to keep re-buying the same games over and over.

I have a similar desire to paxys in that I want to be able to play most of my games in 20 years, where such a concept is even valid (I do sometimes enjoy multiplayer games and other things "of the moment" where I have no expectations of playing the same game tomorrow due to a sweeping patch or upgrade or shutting down, let alone in 20 years). It's just that digital store risk, especially of Steam, is the least of my worries.

That's a good point but odds are gmail won't be around in 20 years. The most popular email 20 years ago was aol later hotmail. Most popular search yahoo, altavista are gone. ICQ is mostly gone.

Myspace is gone. Facebook is dying slowly hopefully to be replaced with some form in the meta world.

To make it 18 years is special but it's going to take a lot of reinvention to keep up for the next 20 years. They have the best odds but so did myspace

Those services existed only for a few years before fb, google etc took over

AOL had been around since at least 1991 and was still extremely popular well into the mid 00's.

Hotmail launched in 1996 and GMail didn't get popular until at least 10 years later. (IMAP was added in 2007~ and the beta was lifted in 2009 iirc).

That's a lot of time to be relatively dominant, but they're reminiscent of zombies these days.

AOL still exists and still provides email accounts.

ICQ is very much alive, and popular in Russia for example.

Hotmail transitioned to Microsoft outlook.com, and you can still use your hotmail domain email, even if you can't register new ones.

As far as I know aol mail is still available.

Myspace is still live, including all the old pages and you can probably listen to music uploaded to it in the past as well.

Losing popularity does not mean shutting down.

Yahoo search and Altavista are not the same, since you did not upload information to them nor bought something. Though Yahoo search is still alive anyway.

I hate to defend Sony in any way, but I can still download my PS3 games, that system is 15 years old now.

Funny that you mention it. Sony announced earlier this year that they would be shutting down the PS3 store permanently (including the ability to download past purchases), and only delayed the move due to public backlash. They did shut the PSP store though, so those games are unplayable now.

The email I got from Sony back in March said that they were only disabling new purchases, "You will still be able to download your owned PS3, PS Vita, and PSP content, including games and video content." Full text: https://paste.debian.net/1224883/

Now that they've backed down, I'm pretty sure you can buy new PS3 games as well.

You can, but they made it more difficult in that you need to add funds over the web or through a PS4/5 or gift card. Also that the prices now tend to be the original list prices which never go on sale but do for PS4/5.

Too bad you can't play most games offline anymore and I'd you're online they'll probably stop you from playing when your account isn't valid.

Can you be sure your plastic disk will still be readable in 20 years? Without redundancy, you're just shifting the point of failure elsewhere

That is of course true, but nothing lasts forever. The disc may deteriorate, or be stolen, or their house might burn down, but that's life. At least by owning the physical disc, GP commenter can take full responsibility of its condition and accept the risks of "shit happens", rather than being at the mercy of arbitrary decisions or failures of a remote faceless organisation or of its future owners/creditors.

A few months ago I pulled my PS1 collection from storage to rip to ISOs, for emulation and backup. I was too late as the discs, despite being in fully opaque containers, were damaged and partly unreadable, one disc was 50% unreadable. And this is all for emulation -- if I wanted to play on a console I'd need a modchip to read CD-Rs, so if you backed up your Blu-Ray PS5 discs today, you wouldn't be able to play them on a legitimate console in the future.

The PS5's optical drive is paired with its motherboard[1]. If you replace it, even if you take the disk drive from another PS5, it will not be able to read your PS5 game.

I imagine that 20 years from now you are going to have a hard time finding a working PS5 with its original disk drive.

[1] https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/PlayStation+5+Teardown/13828...

It's not just that, a lot of games today are assuming some server somewhere is up regardless of single-player vs multiplayer.

Between that and day-1 patches that made games playable, the data on the disk will almost certainly not be enough to play games in 20 years

Ubisoft claims accounts with games on it will never be up for deletion. I could see this being a bug, but could also just simply be that... the person is confused and that specific account didn't actually have a game on it? Could it be a different account maybe? That seems a more likely and simple explanation to me, and this right now just comes down to a he said / she said.

Obviously it's not great that the ToS has wording protecting Ubisoft's ass against such mistake, but again, everyone here is just taking the word of this one person as gospel, but I don't really see any solid evidence provided.

I don't know what your experience with Ubisoft is, but based on mine, I would always default to mistrusting them.

Along the years I also built the same approach, so far, I am usually not a corporate fanboy, but somehow I found myself in the situation that if a game is not on Steam it doesn't exist, and even there I have some publishers I never buy from, like EA, Ubisoft, Bethesda, Microsoft..

It's fine to mistrust them, I also generally stay away from UPlay, but I still don't like taking accusations like this as facts without more evidence. And if it is indeed true that the person did buy games on that account, there would be evidence to prove it, and I do not see a world where Ubisoft wouldn't restore the account.

It just feels strange to jump to pitchforks though based on so little.

> The company’s support page also cites the General Data Protection Regulation compliance and freeing database space as the main reason why they delete unused accounts.

Oh wow. That 1k of database data must really be dragging down their system.

Seriously, what kind of child's-first-attempt-to-use-a-database system are they using where this is even a consideration? :(

It could have been 1 kilobyte, but after numerous decisions to track everything to the Nth degree, the account was closer to 400 petabytes.

</sarcasm>

When I contracting at a large tech company, so had to implement a service that would delete any personally identifying information from the database for users that had been inactive for more than 18 months. Essentially this meant dynamically scanning the entire database schema for any columns that had a user ID and deleting any matching records. It was kind of a fun project.

Wow, glad I saw this - it explains a lot. Went to go and try to play an AC game again after giving up a year or two ago and couldn't figure out my login details. Guess this is (maybe?) why. Can't find a deletion email though, so it seems impossible to know for sure.

“This was a glitch, it shouldn’t gave happened.”

“We can’t recover the games after the account is closed.”

Noice.

“Ownership” is implied when you “purchase” something. If I own it, I should have certain basic rights like the right to keep enjoying it if the publisher goes out of business. To that end, I strongly oppose DRM or at least would favor laws that let me transfer my DRM’d content to another provider (or even require me to, if a provider “cancels” me or goes out of business).

It’s not so clear when the digital work requires ongoing effort from the provider, as in an online game that requires the provider to operate servers. In that case I think that providers should either be forced to provide the service as a rental instead of a “purchase”, or the provider should be forced to provide all information and code necessary for third parties to operate compatible servers.

People get arrested and put in jail because car rental company "mistakenly" declared them as thieves on a basis of their fucked up accounting.

I have a proposal. Let's extend the same courtesy the other way around. If I feel that company had stolen / interfered with enjoyment of my right to do certain things (which they in effect did) why don't police upon my complaint go and stick their CEO/Owner to jail with no bail and let them wait till the dust settles.

You know how the sale of M&M X Legacy was for some period of time disabled, because DRM was broken thus the game was unplayable? I'd seen a news that it got restored, so I login to Uplay (or Ubisoft Connect as they call it nowadays) and see... that my game is missing.

I frickin <3 Ubi /s

Intellectual property does not make sense on theory or in real life.

When you "buy" a game you are paying for convenience, for server access, for updates & support, and for other platform services like storing saves at cloud. You don't own a thing and pirating a game while illegal is trivial.

The issue here was putting money on a shitty service that does not care about it's customers experience. I have spent thousands of dollars on Steam. I don't expect my account to be terminated after 1 year of activity but I also don't expect it to last forever and to be able to pass it to descendants.

>I don't expect my account to be terminated after 1 year of activity but I also don't expect it to last forever and to be able to pass it to descendants.

Why? It doesn't have to be passed on to descendants -- you could for example sell it before you die. I'm not sure why any time limit would be imposed.

It's already happened to me -- EA Origin. I simply can't play my C&C Generals games anymore despite legally purchased them from EA. The only option now is illegal.

Actually C&C generals is still available on the Origin store, but only as part of a package

Right but you can't play multiplayer.

Some more great information in this same space: https://www.accursedfarms.com/videos/dead-game-news

A less legally sound argument for why games as a service shouldn't be allowed: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tUAX0gnZ3Nw

Ross is very odd but his opinions on this topic align greatly with my personal sentiment.

you will own nothing and you will be (un)happy

For auditing purposes these companies have to keep records of transactions. So I don’t understand the need to delete accounts and digital items. Sure they could delete non essential data like activity, game saves, screenshots etc. but how difficult is it to keep a login and list of owned games. It’s prob a few kb of data…

Keeping that list doesn't make them money. Forcing you to buy new games does.

Shit. I'm sure my account is removed too. Had quite a few games.

Is there something I can do about this? This is unclear to me.

"Blockchains don't solve this as Ubisoft can control (the view around, as well as other parts) this new database however they like." But why does this have to be Ubisoft's blockchain? Why does Ubisoft get to be the only portal in this scenario.

I expect NFT-represented games/content will find new portals which will permit access to the underlying IP regardless of who issued them (as they would meet some standard the same as ERC721 represents a generalized NFT).

I think it's interesting that all of the (*most vocal) blockchain nay-sayers do not appear to "zoom out" quite far enough. Or, arguing in good faith, they see some way this does not work that I'm not seeing but are getting stuck at the earlier points without fulling describing their criticism.

Not computer game, but this happened to me with Audible. I don’t have that many gmail addresses (2), and neither of them apparently own any books, even though I once had 20+ books.

I’m not getting that sh*t again.

Not saying this happened to you, but I once lost half an hour to figuring out wth I lost all my Audible books when getting a new device (phone). Turned out the app happily logged me in to audible UK without saying anything (silently creating a new account), which, of course was empty.

Once I figured out how to point the app to Audible US, all my content was back.

Inacitivity of a digital content account is usually a consequence of my indifference to that content & provider, which also means that I do not care about that account anymore.

Looks like it got hugged to death. It's 403'ing now.

It still loads for me, but anyway, here's an archive link: https://archive.is/HVMwm

If Steam did this I would've been deleted many times over. I buy a lot of those icons, don't have time to play, but hope that I one day will when I retire.

If you buy something with (uncracked) DRM, or don't have a copy in your possession, you are really just renting it for some unknown period of time.

I'm not blaming the owner of the email account, but maybe we need a technology which guarantees that emails won't get flagged as spam. Maybe even marked as important.

For example Ubisoft could register with Google for a program where they fetch a token from Google's servers, insert that token into the email header, and when Google notices this token in the header, then the email won't get flagged as spam.

Only for the most important mails.

In any case, I absolutely believe that Ubisoft has no right to delete the account. It's not like the user could download his account and use it without Ubisoft.

I believe a generalized version of this proposal is covered in RFC 3514.

Meanwhile Microsoft will just delete all your email and contacts data if say, you don't check your old email for a few years during college. I lost everything pre ~2016. I will never rely on a Microsoft product or service ever again.

Good thing Ubi hasn't released anything of interest to me in almost 20 years. Since the original XIII, really.

Pirating their crap as retribution is pointless. I went reading the original article expecting to see this happened in the US but no, it says Norway. While not EU, it's still Europe.

Shame on you, Ubi. Shame on you. This ought to be illegal. Fuck whoever came up and implemented this utter bullshit.

Interesting that they did this before launching their own NFT platform (Quartz)

Why is this interesting?

Because if those items are suddenly would be available as NFTs, they're worth a lot more.

Now it's just tough luck for the people... Old agreement about destroying someone's digital assets. People who want their items "back" are forced to play/pay again..

> People who want their items "back" are forced to play/pay again..

Therein lies the misunderstanding. The people didn't "own" the assets in the first place. In no way has ownership been transferred at any point - you only acquired a limited license to run the software in a specified way, no more, no less.

The license depended on an active account and thus was rendered null and void with the termination of said account. NFTs fall into a similar category - if bound to a license, they're just as useless in case something like this happens.

That depends, Ubisoft Quartz is on its own blockchain IIRC and there's no guarantee you can submit transactions without a Ubi account, or even that the signing key isn't just stored in your Ubi account.

Also, just to check on which blockchain it's on, I tried opening their FAQ page to see a "not available in your region" message (despite the Ubi store being available here, Israel). Hilarious.

True.. I guess that's also why there's not much adoption of their initiatives.

This is why DRM is evil and why I buy games on gog.com if I have a choice.

You don't buy a game but permission to play it...

Original: https://www.pcworld.com/article/559218/could-gdpr-policy-era...

Grepping for "GDPR" in these comments results in zero hits. I'm reasonably certain Ubisoft deletes accounts due to GDPR requirements.

If this behavior were really required by the GDPR, then Steam, GOG, etc. would all have to do the same thing, but they don't.

Decentralized ownership and file storage using NFTs on low energy blockchains would solve this. But no, let's keep complaining about the same problems over and over while we keep chanting that crypto is evil and can't be used to solve said problems.

You can't just say "blockchain" and magically solve it.

You used to be able to. "Web3" is the magic word now.

You can just as well use digital signatures with certificates, I don't understand why anyone would want blockchain backing this. In fact I have yet to see a practical application of blockchain outside of "investment"..

Downloading the files to your hard-drive solves this, which we've been able to do since always, and yet here we are. It's not a tech problem.

Does it? Because I was just thinking that it's not an issue with digital goods only, they can do the same thing if you have a physical disk and need to activate the right to it using a key, they can just disable the key and that's it, about the guy about talking about NFTs and problem, this is not a problem that happened and needs to be solved, this is a problem for users that has been implemented, I'm sure they would find a way to make it exist even if the ownership was blockchain based.

Yeah, honestly this makes me think that the warez scene may be increasingly important in the future.

My knowledge on blockchain is very limited so I don't understand how it could solve this problem. Can you elaborate?

He means you can mint an NFT to represent ownership, and store the game bytes on a decentralized file storage like IPFS.

It would be like driving a nuclear submarine to commute from Alameda to San Francisco.

This is why we need blockchain-based smart contracts and NFTs to enforce digital ownership rights. The political system is far too unreliable and corruptible to depend on for robust private property rights. If the nation-states can just maintain a free and open internet, decentralized opt-in protocols can do the rest.

None of that is going to be used the way you want it to.

You know what NFTs are REALLY gonna be used for in the gaming space? Digital property ownership of in-game assets that remit value back to the publisher whenever these fake goods get traded.

People are pretending that all these good things are gonna come out of smart contracts and tokens, when the reality is that the most useful thing to come out of them is going to be rent-seeking by digital creators.

Ubisoft isn't going to throw your ownership of a video game on the blockchain, and even if they did, their license and their service governs whether you have access to the game, not a token.

The biggest and most important use of NFTs in gaming space is going to be raising money on Kickstarter for an NFT based video game - and then disappearing with the money

Who exactly will enforce that providers look at the blockchain instead of their own database, if not a political system? People maintaining an infrastructure just so they don't have control over it is also a pipe dream. This all is just like saying "if only we'd be nicer to each other", but in tech jargon.

Fair point. Smart contracts can only enforce digital property rights insofar as the digital property is constituted by smart contracts. So this would work with NFTs, as they are blockchain-based assets, but not classical video games, which are not.

So what would work is if the providers of the game assets are governed by a decentralized protocol on the blockchain. An example would be a game which is dependent on a remotely provided computation element to run - say a massive collectively rendered virtual world - and this element is provided by a distributed set of providers who are compensated via a smart contract, mechanistically, upon the blockchain validating proof of work they provide to a smart contract.

Such a game could provide a person with a guarantee that a particular NFT will have indefinite access to that virtual world, because the guarantee will be enforced by immutable smart contracts.

>>People maintaining an infrastructure just so they don't have control over it is also a pipe dream

They do it for the same reason Ethereum validators stake their ETH and validate blocks on the Beacon Chain: to earn income. But what they earn is enforced in a decentralized way, according to the rules encoded in the protocol, to make it maximally immutable/interference-proof.

People won't like this, but we at Ultra.io are trying to tackle this exact problem by deploying certificates of ownership to a decentralized ledger as proof of your owning a game.

AKA, we want to mint NFTs for each game sold, which allows a user to prove they own it. People hate those words, but we think that the tech has real value and a use-case in the market for solving inequity between publishers and users.

This nonsense of revoking a license after a user bought it is just an extension of the larger problem that the games that you "buy" you don't actually own and can't do anything with.

How do you restore access if a user's private key is lost or compromised?

I'm not sure how this would prevent the scenario the article described.

I think the idea is that NFTs aren't deleteable.

From the article:

> Unfortunately, there’s also a clause in the ToS that no credit will be given back to the user in cases of account termination or suspension. The company’s support page also cites the General Data Protection Regulation compliance and freeing database space as the main reason why they delete unused accounts.

Again, how would NFTs fix this problem?

A solution to the problem described in the article would be a very trivial service that just logs in on behalf of the user at whatever cadence necessary to preserve account "activity", not NFTs...

sigh

Do you think the file is stored in the blockchain?!

In theory, sure, it has all the benefits of being immutably on the blockchain.

In practice, the whole ecosystem around NFTs is built to trust OpenSea's version of truth, so the records can be manipulated at will.

https://twitter.com/moxie/status/1454863786783875075

You can carve your game purchases onto a stone tablet if you want to, but it doesn't make any difference unless there's someone that actually honors that NFT.

Is this "Ultra" going to mint NFTs for my Ubisoft account purchases? If it does, who honors my Ubisoft Store NFTs once Ubisoft terminates my account? Is it Ubisoft, is it Ultra or is it even Steam? And if it doesn't, what is it minting? Stuff I buy on Ultra? Because at that point the NFT might just as well be an email receipt, since I'm now relying on Ultra to actually stay alive and honor my NFTs until I die.

Lovely, way to make a mess of a pile of shit. You solved nothing.

But my receipt proves that i own it . It's just that publishers don't care .

But it's not ~~decentralized~~.

Receipts aren't proof of ownership in a world where re-selling or trade-ins are possible (as IMO they should be, as they are with physical items).

How does this help even the tiniest bit?

You have proof you own a game and the publisher decides they don't want you to have access anymore... now what?

Your idea does nothing to force the service provider to retain your account, or even to provide you with access to the game media. Proof of ownership isn't the issue here. Ubisoft isn't denying that the user purchased those games. They almost certainly know exactly which games were purchased. I more or less trust the game services I use to keep a record of what I own in their central ledger. They could still deny me access, as they're doing here. Maybe some regulation should address this, but I think the market will probably handle it.

> Proof of ownership isn't the issue here.

Wouldn't having legal proof of owning a license to an IP, entitle you to then use a copy of the files covered by those IP rights, regardless of how or where you acquire them? (E.g. if you buy a license to Windows, you don't need to download the installation media for Windows from Microsoft in order for your licensed installation of Windows to be legitimate. You can get the Windows installation media from anywhere.)

You don't need a "game service provider" if you have legal dispensation to torrent the game. And, that being the case, you could replace a centralized service like Steam with the game-media equivalent of an app like PopcornTime: just a convenient way to browse for, and download, torrents of the IP you already legally own.

you already have proof of ownership.

You don't need NFTs for that. The proof of ownership is just a receipt. It could even be made verifiable by adding a digital signature signed by Ubisofts public key. Still, NFTs are not needed here.

You're right, you don't need an immutable ledger of visible IP licensing rights if that's all you want to accomplish.

But presumably, in a "legal piracy is commonplace, Steam goes out of business" scenario, the studios producing the games would still want to make the games verify your license ownership against something — e.g. to make sure that you're only using your license for one concurrent "seat", rather than using it to activate thousands of copies of the game (like a regular product keys — which usually are "local digital signatures" — would enable.)

Presuming that no central corporate authority could 1. profitably exist in such a market 2. with the right incentives, then a distributed immutable ledger would be a good alternative for storing those licenses in a verifiable manner. (Think of it as an IP licensing activation server run by "everybody." Each time a game wants to run, it would use your signing key to submit a TX incrementing a counter representing the current active uses of the license. Basically, a distributed, cryptographically-verifiable semaphore.)

Perhaps, but since the premise of the solution is that Ubisoft must be legally required to provide a certain service to the current bearer of the token, then it seems overkill to put this on a distributed database system with a complicated consensus model. If Ubisoft is already legally required to recognize it, then surely they can also be required to host a service for moving ownership or maintaining a usage counter in a publicly verifiable manner. Still, NFTs are not the solution here.

Legally obligating each studio to run a centralized service for license verification would be no better than requiring the publishers/distributors to run such license-verification services; in both cases, the backends would die with the economic actor.

The nice thing about an NFT (per se, a deed), is that you still own it, and it still has legal effect, even after the entity that originally created it ceases to exist. A distributed ledger will remember that Ubisoft granted you an IP license for X, even after Ubisoft stops existing as such, with all their assets sold off or lost. And any games built to check that distributed ledger, will continue to find your license there, and start up just fine.

But those games are running on hardware that you control. You therefore also control what version of the ledger the games can observe, and you can choose to show it an old version or a fork that has been mined with a tiny amount of PoW, so things like activation counters wouldn't actually give you the guarantees you are claiming. Perhaps for online gaming, the peers could require proof of ownership via the central ledger. But I would imagine that everyone would just apply a crack to disable those checks, because spending crypto fees whenever you join a server just to protect the IP rights of a defunct company is such an overkill solution, and frankly I find the use case highly contrived. I don't think it is realistic to assume that gamers will accept that what used to be a simple license check now involves downloading and verifying gigabytes of ledger history.

Just use off-ledger verifiable receipts. If Ubisoft goes under and sells off its IP, then the buyer should be legally obliged to run a similar ownership service with the digital receipt being the proof of ownership OR release the games to public domain without license checks.

> legal proof of owning a license to an IP

Like a receipt and a bank statement for instance?

The problem isn't getting the media, the problem is the license.

If you get Windows and MS has blocked your key, it doesn't matter that you own the key: Windows will talk to their server and the server will say "that's not a valid license I don't care who owns it"

Likewise, it doesn't matter where you get a game from, unless you break the DCMA and modify the binary, DRM enabled games will phone home to the "game service provider" to verify your license.

It's been a long time since games locally verified licenses, that's why you don't see keygens and also why they all require launchers to function

If they take down the servers or block you specifically, proof of ownership does literally nothing...

> Likewise, it doesn't matter where you get a game from, unless you break the DCMA and modify the binary, DRM enabled games will phone home to the "game service provider" to verify your license.

If you own the license, then downloading a pre-cracked derivative work of the installation media also isn't illegal (provided that the cracker has put the crack itself in the public domain!)

To resume the analogy: Microsoft might not like it that you're using a pre-cracked version of Windows that doesn't phone home; but if you're using that pre-cracked version of retail Windows with a valid retail Windows license, then there's nothing they can legally do about that, even if they somehow find out. (This situation has come up many times in the past; pre-cracked versions of software are sometimes used in industry because of other customizations done during the cracking process that make them more robust for embedded use-cases.)

Now, of course, the cracking itself may have been illegal under the DMCA, but there's a simple fix for that: the cracking just has to be accomplished by someone who's not a US citizen. The DMCA doesn't apply to things that foreign nationals get up to.

(But really, the thing you'd want here is legislation that requires that games that "phone home" to check for IP licensing status, do so to some disinterested third-party IP licensing registry — which could be a blockchain-like immutable ledger, or even just the sort of "IP clearinghouse"-like services that modern commercial music sampling is built on.)

This is wrong on so many counts my head is spinning.

Your license defines exactly what software it's a license for, I guarantee you "pirated copy" is not part of that.

You're also making a copy of illegally distributed software (not just cracking that's a problem, distribution is too...), which opens you up to liability, since again, your license doesn't cover that.

And to top it all off, you're still not going to get the full functionality of the game if you just crack the software, multiplayer still requires their servers (and before I get the default reply of "I don't care about multiplayer", the fact the most played games are largely multiplayer indicates most people do)

> Your license defines exactly what software it's a license for, I guarantee you "pirated copy" is not part of that.

That's where DMCA anti-circumvention exemptions come into play. If I own an IP license for software X; but there are technological barriers in place preventing me from using the software for the purpose I paid for the license to enable; then computer programs that "fix the problem" to allow me to use the license I paid for, are explicitly a protected class of software under the law.

And the license, or Terms of Service, or anything else, can't say anything to the contrary (or, well, it can, but such terms would be legally unenforceable for reasons of public policy — similar to e.g. contracts stipulating that workers will work without legally-mandated protections, or a contract from a public educational institution granting access to a resource but not to legally-mandated accessibility aides for that resource.)

And that is enshrined explicitly in multiple existing exemptions related to abandonware, which would pertain in exactly the case where a service like Steam goes defunct and all the licensing schemes of its distributed games stop working. The various cracks to get those games working again? Legally exempt!

> multiplayer still requires their servers

Given that two existing DMCA anti-circumvention exemptions are:

> Computer programs that enable wireless devices to connect to a wireless telecommunications network when circumvention is undertaken solely in order to connect to a wireless telecommunications network and such connection is authorized by the operator of such network;

and:

> Video games in the form of computer programs embodied in physical or downloaded formats that have been lawfully acquired as complete games, when the copyright owner or its authorized representative has ceased to provide access to an external computer server necessary to facilitate an authentication process to enable local gameplay;

These clauses, read carefully by a competent lawyer, could be argued to in combination have a spirit that would extend to include a new exemption: of alterations to online games required to allow them to connect to the "telecommunications network" embodied by a white-room reimplemented private server for the game.

The short version is, please don't ever represent yourself in court.

Your license allows you to copy/install/etc. a piece of software. It will not apply to a cracked version of the game and you'll be no different than someone who didn't buy the game.

That's not even DCMA.

And the whole thing about "white-room private blah blah blah" really made me cringe.

It's a complete non-sequitur. 3rd part private servers have existed for ages and they involve insane amounts of work per game. It's not a solution to the actual problem: not being able to use official servers.

Not to mention "white room reimplemented" is nearly impossible. That's why these projects repeatedly get taken down. They resort to breaking copyright to provide functionality for a client that was never designed for.

Even modifying the game to have a concept of "connect to a server other than official.server.endpoint" is breaking copyright.

There is already proof that a user owns it, ranging from company sales records to receipts of purchase. Nobody seriously disputes the purchase and the company would not dispute it in a court of law. The problem is that you own something the company has a right to terminate.

So you've literally reinvented "but I have a receipt!"

But with a MUCH larger carbon footprint

People aren’t losing their receipts here, the games are being taken away even if they have them and can prove they bought it. More durable receipts won’t fix it.

they had a database entry linking his account to a purchase. it's not like his access to the game was forgotten. they just chose not to honor it. a blockchain proof isn't any more compelling than the info they already had + his payment records.

"We irreversibly logged an entry deactivating your account to the blockchain. Nothing we can do to reactivate it."

> People won't like this, but we at Ultra.io are trying to tackle this exact problem by deploying certificates of ownership to a decentralized ledger as proof of your owning a game.

How do you legally enforce that proof of ownership?

How does a NFT change anything to a license agreement between the publisher and the buyers?

The user can already prove they own the game. Ubisoft accepted the proof. The problem is they've chosen to configure their servers to reject sending the game client messages consistent with this proof.

They could, if they wanted, configure their servers to send network messages approving his login. But they choose not to.

If a company opts-in to using your NFT as the authority, they can at any time opt-out(just like Ubisoft did here) so it provides no extra guarantee. And companies that don't accept your NFT as proof will ignore it when it's presented as evidence.

Selling ownership, not licenses, is great. Both ownership and licenses can be sold with or without NFTs. How do NFTs help?

Ever heard of a thing called a receipt?

What's the tangible difference between this and email confirmations that you made a purchase?

If you lose track of the NFT that proves you bought it, that's no different than losing the email evidence. You're boned.

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