Who knows? Honestly, I doubt Gamestop knows. They just seem to want to hire some people to figure it out.
It’s just fascinating to me that the sole purpose of blockchain is to give up computational efficiency to gain trust, and yet people keep trying to find applications for blockchain that require the participation of trusted institutions. It will always be more efficient for those institutions to supply the same functionality without blockchain.
I agree, I don’t see any evidence this is about reselling games. Even if it is about reselling games, there’s no problem here that blockchain or NFT would help solve. If Steam wanted to let people resell their keys, they could. They could even guarantee some perpetual royalty system.
I mean, it could conceivably “solve” a problem outside the established controlled ecosystems, for, I don’t know, Matrix Games or someone like that who sells direct to consumer. But it would likely be a tiny fraction of the market (and only on PC and maybe Android of course, not that anybody buys Android games to begin with).
IMO reselling digital games doesn’t even make sense, even without a blockchain.
Ok so I publish a game and sell it for $60, which nets me $42 after the 30% platform fee. So then you beat the game and put it up on the officially sanctioned marketplace where you’ll get $30 back because someone else is paying maybe $50. The maximum royalty I can get from that sale is $20 (difference between what the seller got and the buyer paid for).
Why would I want that when I can just put the game on sale for $50 and get $35 after the platform fee instead of maybe $20 (less than $20 really because the marketplace itself will have a fee too)?
Edit: The only case there is if more people would buy the game at $50 or $60 if they can potentially get money back, but no one has real data for how true that is or isn’t and if it’s enough to make up the lower royalty via resell. The fact that games are increasing by $10 in pricing shows that enough people are still willing to pay full price for games without this incentive, and those who want it cheaper are fine waiting for the inevitable surprise sale.
I can imagine that there’s a possible triple win scenario where publisher, distributor and customer all benefit if the customer does some of the marketing “work” of finding a person to resell to. E.g., you beat Super Witcher Bros II and convince your friend who was otherwise not going to buy it to buy your copy at a steep discount that gives a 10% credit on your next game.
However the fact that I can imagine it doesn’t mean that it’s really a viable business model compared to the existing one. Nor that adding NFT would do anything other than attach some crypto buzz to the concept.
The only way I can imagine publishers going along with it (and ignoring platform holders for now), is if the royalty or whatever you want to call it is way higher than that. Basically it would be priced more in line with physical resale, with the seller getting a tiny fraction of what the buyer pays. Especially given the assumed convenience of this marketplace, all the seller needs to get is a buck or two to make it worthwhile to them, and it just needs to be cheaper for the buyer than new. Maybe they offer a little more either way to attract users to the marketplace, depending on who’s running it, but it would still be the vast majority of the revenue going to the companies, not the users.
This is something I could see Nintendo being all over, because they love artificial scarity.
Only 30,000 copies of New Super Mario 3D 40th Anniversary Ex will be sold! Get one now! Then they reap premium off resales of those 30,000 copies for years when they sell for 10x what they retailed for.
Imagine if Nintendo could get a cut of the resale price of the NES Mini when it was selling for hundreds? They’d be all over that.
Heat drone detected a cannabis farm but instead it was a bitcoin farm running off stolen electricity
Timex
1918
“The blockchain industry”
Next time they should inject the Botox directly into his frontal lobe.
Subtle way to subsidize the power industry?
ShivaX
1921
I hear Texans are super happy with how their power infrastructure works right now.
Well if the damned liberals who control everything in Texas from the statehouse to the boardrooms hadn’t banned fossil fuels and stolen all the jobs from the energy industry and sent them to Mexico, Texas would be in great shape!
Timex
1925
Funny that the feds recovering money transferred via Bitcoin caused the price of Bitcoin to fall.
vyshka
1926
People shitting themselves that the feds managed to track it.
RichVR
1927
But why only $2.3 million? They paid $5 million. Did they spend the rest to disappear?
Lantz
1928
Apparently they got back 63.7 of the 75 bitcoins. The dollar disparity is mostly due to the price of bitcoins being a lot lower.
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