“It would be great if people had to buy more of the thing,” says guy who makes money selling the thing.
What needs to happen is regulation. Pro-consumer governing bodies (which don’t exist in the US, but the EU has been on a roll) mandating the right to transfer a digital license.
As for the stores, Xbox offers GameStop a small percentage of the revenue from every digital game purchased on a console sold by GameStop. That feels like a healthy compromise for an all-digital business model.
mandating the right to transfer a digital license.
Even for the EU that is not an easy thing to deal with in practice. First they would need to outright ban practices where you rent your license for an unspecified time instead of owning it. (this is how it is with everything in mobile app stores, Steam, Epic etc…) And transfer of digital licenses in general is a very hard nut to crack. How do you simply prove who the license owner is? What about accounts being tied to licenses? (Imagine the EU asking software companies that all products above the value of €25 must be sold with a hardware key to run them & if the key is damaged they are mandated to replace it at the manufacturing cost of said hardware key, or use a central EU ran entity to handle these keys that the companies would need to buy from them. Pretty far fetched, isn’t it?)
Decades of lenient legislation made all this night impossible untangle…
And transfer of digital licenses in general is a very hard nut to crack. How do you simply prove who the license owner is? What about accounts being tied to licenses?
Another big problem is that the digital license must be transferrable even if the original digital store is deactivated.
The above seems to be the only legitimate use case of Blockchain to me, but the chain must be operated by the state to ensure digital licenses continue to be transferrable
I mean - if the button says “buy” or “purchase” it’s not renting a license, no matter what the fine print in the terms say.
That’s at least how it should be.
First they would need to outright ban practices where you rent your license for an unspecified time instead of owning it.
Why?
People were able to rent games in the past. What happened then that was so bad?
i’m not sure if you understood my comment. The issue is that they sell you software for the full price, but there is a fine print on there somewhere that clearly states that they can remove your access at any time due to a variety of reasons. For example I have lost games due to Apple policies forced the dev to remove them from the app store and then I could not reinstall them anymore.
