Steam users free to resell their digital games, court rules
www.gamingbible.com
Those who purchase digital games are free to resell them, the Court of Justice of the European Union has ruled.

Finally some good news! I’ve been waiting for quite a while for such a ruling.

Edit: Seems this cites an article from 2012, I didn’t notice that (and it’s still news to me). Though there’s still hope that it’ll happen, EU is slow, but usually eventually gets shit done.

  • ryannathans
    1·
    7 months ago

    I don’t mind tradable game items too, it would be cool if valve didn’t have a monopoly on community trading. They could still even take an automated royalty cut with NFT trades

    • Pxtl@lemmy.caEnglish
      31·
      7 months ago

      Problem there is the gas cost of blockchain is too high. Recording transactions on chain is expensive. It might be worthwhile for full game transfers, but for cosmetics? I doubt that.

      • Sonori@beehaw.org
        3·
        7 months ago

        You could also achieve exactly the same benefits without adding in the expense of gas fees at all. Indeed that gives you quite a few other benefits like being able to reverse fraudulent transactions and being able to ensure the platform gets a cut.

          • Sonori@beehaw.org
            1·
            7 months ago

            Presumably becuse their the ones paying server costs to host the game, let you download it again and again on diffrent devices, and manage all the technical issues with the system of getting it to you.

      • ryannathans
        1·
        7 months ago

        What blockchain? There are many implementations, there’s no reason there has to be excessive “gas” costs. These are solved problems

        • Pxtl@lemmy.caEnglish
          21·
          7 months ago

          What blockchain doesn’t have high transaction costs once it scales up to large usage? Fundamentally blockchains are about hyper-redundant indestructable storage with expensive costs for writing to that storage to prevent flooding it with garbage. The most mature and sophisticated blockchain that doesn’t involve burning down a forest to solve sudokus is the Ethereum network, which is probably the one to point to when we’re talking about a large blockchain, and that’s one that uses the subcurrency of “gas” to model paying for recording into that ledger.

          Are there any blockchains that could handle transaction volumes on the scale of a game-store like Gog or Epic (much less Steam) without putting non-trivial prices on writing the transactions to the ledger?

          • ryannathans
            1·
            7 months ago

            One example already handling game item NFTs with super low fees https://loopring.org/#/ Another example of super high scalability with extremely low fees https://ripple.com/xrp/

            You’d obviously build a bespoke purpose built solution instead of shoehorning it into some random existing crypto network