GameStop To Remove Crypto Wallets Citing 'Regulatory Uncertainty' (coindesk.com) 11
Video game retailer GameStop said it will remove its support for crypto wallets citing regulatory uncertainty in the United States, just one year after rolling out the service. From a report: "Due to the regulatory uncertainty of the crypto space, GameStop has decided to remove its iOS and Chrome Extension wallets from the market on November 1, 2023," according to its website. Customers will have access until October 1. The wallets, which were rolled out just about a year ago, allow users to manage crypto and non-fungible tokens (NFTs) throughout decentralized apps and enable transactions of GameStop's NFT marketplace.
Thank you SEC... (Score:4, Funny)
Because game NFTs could have evolved into the most elegant, and non-invasive form of DRM we've ever seen by a wide margin. Use case:
Buy a game online.
Game company mints a NFT and sends it to your wallet.
Your wallet is connected on your gaming device.
You hate the game? Your buddy can buy it for 50% off by slipping you some cash and his wallet address.
No piracy, resale rights and no draconian kernel level crap.
Re:Thank you SEC... (Score:4, Insightful)
"No Crypto" isn't what's preventing that from happening, and crypto doesn't solve the reasons it hasn't happened.
Pretty much all digital games are already tied to accounts, so there's nothing technical stopping Valve, Epic, MS, Nintendo or Sony from allowing people to 'sell' a game from one account to another. Valve has had an active digital item store (Steam Community Market) for selling items between players for over a decade. And people sold accounts with games to one another years before then - people were doing it unofficially at least back in the Warcraft 3 days and almost certainly before then. (It still happens, there are a bunch of 'accounts with playstation plus' for sale on ebay, for example).
But the corporations don't want to do it for money reasons, not technical reasons. And NFTs don't solve that problem, they way they haven't manage to solve any of the others they were supposed to.
You're missing the **obvious** connection (Score:2)
There is something legal and regulatory blocking Gamestop from even contemplating entering that market with a novel new business model.
OMG, it would be a small, indy market at first... but Gamestop can't even consider this option because Gensler won't acknowledge the reality that crypto is a regulatory nightmare and distraction from the SEC's core mission until Congress clarifie
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The only difference between an NFT-based in-game economy and the type of in-game economy which has been used for decades is the offloading of a portion of the bookkeeping to the etherium network. That's it. There is no functional advantage to the player wha
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Correct... You have to build the ecosystem and contracts outside of the blockchain. Then you put it on the blockchain in order to make the data resilient to failures or interference.
Game publishers could push the headache to license/account management to the users, but I also suspect it wouldn't be very popular in practice.
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Or a simple database of game keys -> accounts on the game providers side; except they'd rather the friend pay 100% for a copy rather than 50% to transfer it from you, so they have no incentive to provide any mechanism to transfer game licenses.
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This could be solved without crypto. Log onto your gaming account, click "sell", put in the other guy's ID, and they get the temporary ability to use the game, while you get your cash. The NFT part is not needed because the game company controls the vertical, so just a simple database transaction assigning new ownership to a CD key would do the job without any NFT or blockchain stuff needed.
Nothing wrong with NFTs and crypto. For example, if I were selling tickets to a show, I could mint NFTs for them wh
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Video game resale rights, sounds like something the big game companies would fight tooth and nail.
Because they want to know what they're being paid? (Score:3, Insightful)
Oh, crypto! You just paid me in cryptocoin, which is worth, um, $3000, no, an hour later $2000, an hour later $5000 (because you did a pump) and now is worth $500 (becuase you did a dump).