Comment on Hideo Kojima ‘really sad’ about PlayStation killing discs, ‘frightened’ for future of ownership
agentTeiko@piefed.social 5 days ago
At the end of the day discs are not the important part consumer protection and the right of first sale in the digital space just need to be created to fix this mess. I also wonder if the Tariff tomfullery was a factor as they couldn’t have any consistency of cost and profit like before.
teawrecks@sopuli.xyz 5 days ago
That sounds nice at first, but if you think about it, the logical conclusion is that: rather than an artist making a sale per person who wants to experience their work, they would make sales proportional to the maximum number of simultaneous viewers. With digital ownership, it would be trivial to instantly transfer ownership, so the moment someone is done playing a game or watching a movie, they’ll sell it instantly to someone else.
The only content that could benefit in such an economy is low production value slop that seeks to go instantly viral and issue licenses while there’s still demand. Then by the time it dies down they’re on to their next slop hit. That and live-service titles that try to keep people holding their licenses. Short single-player experiences, and games from small creators who rely on passive income from a few new people finding their game over time would sell a few copies at first, and then the licenses out there would just always undercut the purchase of any new license.
Also the exchanges would make a bunch of money by taking a cut of each sale. Which is arguably better than just Sony or Valve taking their cut.
I don’t like it either, but we can’t act like right of first sale for digital licenses would solve all problems and not create any new ones.
Katana314@lemmy.world 4 days ago
The shorter version I’ve used to describe this concern is: Imagine game resale could happen through a script kiddy’s Python program. Rather than individuals arranging sales over chat, anticipate that most sales would be arranged by online sites that are copying the model of GameStop, and twice as scummy as CSGO skin gamblers.
You sell your copy of a game you bought for $50, down to $20. It’s bought instantly by an AI algorithm, and then relisted for $34.9.99. Then that one’s bought instantly to resell for $39.98.
teawrecks@sopuli.xyz 4 days ago
I’d be surprised if the arbitrage opportunities are that broad, but yeah, it would be dominated by automated trading. It would be the same as trading stocks. Every piece of content would effectively have a bid/ask spread for its licenses, and people would have bots that are constantly speculating on them. I suppose when trade volume is low and prices vary, the swings could be quite wide trade-to-trade.
But this is what NFTs are, just with a decentralized exchange so that no single company can take a cut of every trade, and we already know how people felt about that.