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Comment by cinntaile | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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?

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