They have to prove their marketplace provides value. One value GameStop had is that I could walk in with my Gameboy game and trade it for a Playstation game. Right now the gaming marketplaces are becoming increasingly fragmented. I can’t put credit on my xbox account and spend it on a Sony game, even though I own both systems.
It’s not a sure bet by any means. They need their customers and brand loyalty to support it. They have like a million psychotic Redditors holding shares they bought for $300 ready to unleash on the publishers and shit to meme this into existence. Social media pressure works. It fixed Sonic in the movies. It got Microsoft to back off their Xbox Live price increase. It got Trump elected.
I’m dreaming a bit here but I don’t think this is that crazy. GameStop had no hope, and now they do.
If gamers en-masse say “fuck your closed platforms, let us be FREE” and sales go down, publishers may have to play ball.
Remember Microsoft tried to do this with the Xbox One before they pulled back.
There’s incentive for publishers to allow this. As long as it’s through a channel they get revenue from with each resale.
Yup. Gamestop takes 4%, publisher gets 4%. Don’t forget they need to sell those initial tokens (the New copies) to populate the marketplace. They’d get mostly full cut of that.
Plus, they wouldn’t have to maintain their own storefronts anymore.
Sure but the blockchain isn’t that.
There’s nothing stopping me from transferring an NFT from my wallet to yours. Thus I can easily resell games without Gamestop or the publisher’s permission.
If they find a way to lock that down, then you are just right back at a centralized system that isn’t actually using NFTs or crypto, which means the build-out required for Gamestop to support it is even more massive an undertaking.
Who is actually going to do that? Yeah I can sell my oranges from a stand out on the corner but it’s way easier to sell them to Wegmans and let them find buyers.
We can do that with real money too, yet Ebay exists.
To further that analogy, I could sell my used games to kids at school before, but GameStop was a thriving business.
Huh?
This is the whole legal premise of G2A. It’s a whole marketplace so you can sell your digital game keys for money (the caveat being that you can’t play the game first). There are whole reddit groups for trading and selling game keys. Lots of digital game codes get resold on ebay. I’m pretty sure facebook marketplace has a bunch too.
So yes, if I can sell my game to gamestop for $30 or sell it to another person directly for $35, I will do the latter. Gamestop is always going to sell it for less than a direct person would buy it from because otherwise Gamestop wouldn’t pay me that much to take it back.
You act like it’s trivial to sell it on facebook or ebay or any other 3rd party marketplace that publishers can’t touch. You know, the places where physical and digital games are heavily sold today.
That’s the key difference. I think they’re going to try to build a market where you can play the game, then sell your key back.
Right but they would have to do that while preventing peer to peer transfers, otherwise the existing free market will take advantage of the profit and publishers will be left in the cold for second hand sales.
I’m saying this won’t be any more of a problem than it was before. There’s a reason people traded in to Gamestop instead of selling games to their friends. It was easy, instant, convenient, and you could turn around and use that credit right away.
If you want to shop your token on Facebook Marketplace for days to beat GameStop’s price by $5, go for it.
But that’s the point I"m trying to make. It won’t be a problem more than it was before, which means Publishers will not sign onto it. They will only sign into a system that enables used resell (which isn’t possible digitally today) if they can capture a significant amount of the resell value.
Which is exactly my point. Their NFT push has absolutely nothing to do with used game selling and it’s not worth getting excited about.
Being able to resell digital games is going to be a multi-multi year initiative and cost a ton of money (not only in licensing and wooing but in actual development costs). This NFT push is 1000% not that.
NFTs can do this already and it is one of the selling points of the technology. The original minter can set the terms of the contract where they get royalties on every sale down the line. Since this is all very new stuff, the logistics are not yet airtight and the royalties can generally only be earned for sales that happen on marketplaces that support them. You could just sell the NFT on a different marketplace to get around paying royalties. But this concept of royalties is an important feature for NFTs and work is being done to iron out these wrinkles.
That’s the crux of it though. Unless an NFT is going to prevent me to move an NFT from one wallet I own to another without paying a royalty those transfers will almost always happen off marketplace. Capitalism will see to that.
From the article I linked:
Zach Burks and James Morgan authored an “Ethereum Improvement Proposal” or EIP-2981 to create an ERC-721 Royalty Standard. The main motivation of this is to create a modified NFT standard so that NFTs created, purchased, or sold on one marketplace still pay out royalties regardless of the next marketplace it is sold on. With this standard, it would be possible for the artist to set a royalty amount that can be paid to the creator on any marketplace that implements these tokens.
Yes, even still I assume you could do an exchange off marketplace but if the vast majority of the buyers and sellers are using established marketplaces, it might not be worth the time and effort to find a buyer through other venues. In fact it’s almost exactly like selling a used physical copy of a game. You don’t HAVE to sell through an established marketplace (say Gamestop or Ebay) if you want to avoid paying a service fee, but many people do because it’s so much more convenient.
There’s no incentive with the market as it is today. I think that’s going to change with consumer demand.
If they can get a piece of the trade every time, as the previous posts suggest they can, this will be the future. Assuming, of course, the market demands it. This is a win for consumers if it pans out. The publishers will have to participate or watch their sales dry up.
Let’s say a small indie publisher buys into this concept and they post some data that their NFT game sales are yielding 20% more revenue than selling directly on the console storefronts. And it’s continuous revenue as their users trade the game. You can be sure the big players will get in on it.
There’d be competition in other forms. Game Pass is still a thing, for example.
You realise there’s nothing* stopping the console manufacturers implementing this right now, without having to bother with NFTs? And that they’d have to be involved (and taking a cut) if this were what Gamestop is doing, because they need to give the new owner the licence? Why would they let Gamestop take a cut when thy could just implement it themselves on their own platforms? You’re getting way over your skis here. There’s like a 95% chance this is about digital gaming tchotchkes. And a 4% chance they have no idea what it’s about and just don’t want to miss the boat.
- Nothing, obviously, beyond the same things that make it extremely unlikely this is what Gamestop is doing, namely that the publishers don’t want them to do it and hold all the cards, unlike physical sales.
Edit: Also, I love the idea that the total take will be 8%. More like 80%.
Timex
1904
I’m not seeing why they’re going to see getting money as users trade their games as being a feature.
They could just prevent trading games, and still get money from people who are buying their games. The people who would normally be buying a “used” game would just be buying a new one.
And ya, Ginger makes a good point… even if you wanted to do this, you don’t need Gamestop to do it. They would be adding zero value to the equation.
Absolutely. Gamestop in general has been 95% about physical gaming tchotchkes for a while now. In addition, they’re riding the Gamestonk/cryptocurrency/NFT memes as high and as far as they can. I’m rolling my eyes at it while acknowledging that it’s a sensible direction for this company to go.
You’re probably right, to begin with, because that’s way easier. But don’t they need the publishers permission to sell those tchotchkes too? I can’t sell a Witch Mercy NFT without Activision’s consent. And even then, what’s stopping Activision from doing it themselves?
Are they instead going to sell things like Super Mario Speedrun WR? Blitzchung’s Free Hong Kong moment in the Hearthstone World Cup? Won’t they again need the publisher’s permission?
Publishers are (mostly) fine about selling thotchkes, as long as they get a cut. They already do. It’s additional revenue, not cannibalised new game sales. They are not fine about selling used games. They can’t stop physical sales, though they tried for a while with multiplayer codes and the like, but they can stop digital ones.
