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[–] 204 points 7 months ago (6 children)

Sounds pretty centralised to me if it can just be turned off that easily.

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  • [–] 1 point 7 months ago (2 children)

    Am I misundersnding somethings here? It's the ownership/license that is decentralized. So a user could do whatever they wanted with that license (keep it, resell it, give it away). But at the end of the day there always needs to be a way to use that license to download the game files. That's the bit that is shutting down.

    This distinction likely doesn't matter to the people losing access to the game, but most of the comments here seem to fundamentally misunderstand the setup here.

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  • [–] 3 points 7 months ago (1 child)

    Tbf this is the first time I’ve heard of it so have no deeper knowledge than what’s presented here, but it does state a platform shutdown so I assumed the whole lot is being disabled.

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  • [–] 2 points 7 months ago

    Ya for sure in this case the platform that hosts the downloads is going down, but that was never the promise of distributed platforms like this. It's more like owning a CD that still requires an internet connection to download the updates.

    You're free to give that CD to anyone you want, but if the publisher shuts down the server you're shit out of luck.

    In theory someone else could come along, leverage that some blockchain and let people get access to their games again (this isn't actually going to happen)

    Now I know I'm making a lot of assumptions on how this platform actually implemented blockchain and such, but that is how the technology under the hood works. The part that I assume breaks this is that i bet that the company actually maintained private keys on behalf of the users, and if users didn't actually have their private key then there was actually no benefit to the blockchain and it was just a marketing ploy.

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  • [–] 145 points 7 months ago (2 children)

    We made it so decentralized that you can't play games that are already on your computer without phoning home for authorization!

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  • [–] 91 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (3 children)

    Doesn't say great things about their marketing that the first time I (a chronically online gaming nerd) am hearing about this company is their notice of shutting down.

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  • [–] 7 points 7 months ago (1 child)

    They advertised everywhere like at all the crypto conferences, all the mobile microtransactions conferences, and all the conferences for business execs who demand movies/TV based on video games to focus on "the non-gamer".

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  • [–] 92 points 7 months ago

    "Yay Blockchain! But we control all of it, can shut it down whenever we want and you get to keep nothing. Yay!"

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  • This is why DRM is a scourge.

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  • [–] 50 points 7 months ago

    TL;DR:

    Welp, we've made all the money out of you suckers that we can. Fuck y'all.

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  • [–] 32 points 7 months ago

    This is the kind of shit that makes Stop Killing Games' mission so important. If a random company can just revoke your access to games you purchased and downloaded in a situation like this, then any game storefront can do it too.

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  • [–] 23 points 7 months ago (10 children)

    Pretty much everything 'new' is a scam these days.

    Unless you're really involved, it's best to wait awhile and jump onboard only after the guinea pigs have proven its worth.

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  • [–] 11 points 7 months ago (4 children)

    I don't know anything about this platform in particular, but I will say that early adoption and support for new web services, platforms, and software that try to break conventional molds or even just exist as competition in the current landscape is an important way to combat enshittification. I mean we are all on lemmy which is an example of this, as are a lot of newer OS and privacy tools/apps. It's always risky, but new things can't start unless some people are willing to take that risk early. Especially things that aren't backed by endless dollars.

    But in this case super shitty everyone lost everything they purchased

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  • [–] 6 points 7 months ago* (3 children)

    On the flipside, when we had the Discord age verification thing a few days ago, I saw a lot of Slop "alternatives" being promoted. All with bold claims and shiny at a first glance. But the chance of them going anywhere is slim to none. And the quality of the ones I checked was crap. So I kind of empathize with the argument. Like half of the new stuff is a trap, and you really need to pay attention.

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  • [–] 5 points 7 months ago (2 children)

    I guess the question becomes if people mass migrated to those platforms would they grow and improve or remain shitty, which is always hard to tell. But small projects without many people are always going to be..at best janky right out the gate. Which discord alternatives did you feel were a trap, so I can avoid those ones?

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  • [–] 4 points 7 months ago*

    The biggest one I saw was https://fluxer.app/ it has all the right marketing and investing, but also it had a single dev dumping assloads of code per day, but somehow it wasnt ai coded at all. I'm still watching it, because it got a lot of funding in the last push to see if it failss or if it actually goes well.

    I wouldn't trust anything important on it though.

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  • [–] 1 point 7 months ago

    Sorry, I didn't keep bookmarks. I got them from various random places. And some of the posts (in the Threadiverse) got removed. Warning signs are, all files got touched in the last few days. No or little stars, issue reports... A single contributor who programmed a mere 4 days at super-human speed... And if you're familiar with the programming language, you can spot more. Weird project layout, remnants from previous agent runs and the user figuring out how to prompt. Overly verbose comments or none at all...

    I'd question if these projects take off after a while. I mostly wasted time with what I tried anyway. Either it works. But it's not even close to the feature set it claims to have and what's available with real Free Software projects. Or you'll find out after a while, the install instructions were made up and none of it runs in the first place. I didn't spot anything in between, that mostly works but is just a bit shitty.

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  • [–] 3 points 7 months ago (4 children)

    Is it a scam or just a filed business?
    How can you tell the difference?

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  • [–] 3 points 7 months ago (2 children)

    That's a great question! But before we get into that, there are opportunities that only a such a keen investor such as yourself will be able to take advantage of; let's talk about my web 3.5 startup venture that's virtually guaranteed to pay out a minimum of 30% annually to early adopters. It's called dongchain; an innovative NFT platform for your dong pics, enhanced with our proprietary AI algorithms. It's fully decentralized and completely reliant on our company existing in order to function.

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  • [–] 18 points 7 months ago

    1000% if they tried even slightly they could have passed the server to the community to support legacy gamers, but are choosing to just shut it down instead because crypto bros are always psychopaths

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  • [–] 13 points 7 months ago

    Oh no who could have predicted this.

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  • [–] 10 points 7 months ago

    Funny how a "decentralized" platform can be shut down just like that. Does the word even mean anything at all?

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  • [–] 12 points 7 months ago

    Ha ha ha ha

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  • [–] 17 points 7 months ago (8 children)

    How could their costs be high enough that they can't survive more than ONE month after launch? But we all dodged the bullet I guess, can you imagine this happening a year in when people actually had a chance to buy multiple games from them? What a pitiful response. It'll be harder for anybody to enter the market when things like this happen.

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  • [–] 30 points 7 months ago (7 children)

    Robot cache was founded 8 years ago.

    This post only says that it will be shut down in 30 days.

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  • [–] 13 points 7 months ago (3 children)

    I mystified what it was that I read in that post that made me think that they only lasted a month to begin with, before announcing they were shutting down in a month. And even more confusing that I've literally never heard of them, that seemed reasonable when I thought they were a month old.

    Some people are going to get screwed pretty hard here then, if they've been buying games there for years. Pretty horrific management of the situation if they can't work out a deal with steam to save people's games.

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  • [–] 11 points 7 months ago (1 child)

    I understood the same - the post title implies that it has only existed 1 month. Should say "shuts down in 30 days".

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  • [–] 3 points 7 months ago

    Yeah, thanks - that must have been it. I read their post with the inference I took from the title in my head and didn't re-examine it after reading their message. And they didn't say anything like "it's been a great 8 years" like a lot of similar posts might to dispel it.

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  • [–] 2 points 7 months ago (2 children)

    Sure it was founded 8 years ago but when did they begin actual operations, not book operations?

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  • [–] 8 points 7 months ago

    lol, is P2P not good enough?

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  • [–] 7 points 7 months ago
    [–] 1 point 7 months ago

    It reminds me of https://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com/ where companies say "fuck you and thanks for the money."

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