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this post was submitted on 06 Apr 2026
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Sounds pretty centralised to me if it can just be turned off that easily.
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.
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.
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.
That's pretty much all blockchain stuff tbh, it's all centralized to the extreme around 1 or a few major services.
Yeah, the irony is that I'm sure you could do some sort of blockchain-based DRM that didn't need a centralized server. Does such a thing exist? Patent pending...
It would be possible, I considered implementing such a proof of concept years ago for fun (when blockchain was not exclusively cryptocurrencies). But then I remembered I don't like DRM so I never released anything about it.
The problem is that game sellers would need to be able to add games to the blockchain so that they can be traded. But how do you implement a trusted entity in a trustless decentralized system?
I was thinking of something like LBRY for the backend and like x402 for payment using stablecoins. This could all be neatly managed and allow to skip expensive transferal costs where a piece of content could even cost like less than a penny
It looks like you don't need to add a game to the chain, just build a chain of trust and check the signature of something like that. But maybe that has downsides and with an unpopular blockchain it may as well be centralised