Satisfactory was never given away for free.

I had Ark which I want to play for over five years by now but considering I never thought about it again till now it's probably not the biggest loss!

Death Stranding and the Bioshock trilogy. Still haven't played them though lol

I'm quite happy I never bit the bullet with them. Makes watching from the sidelines more entertaining.

What would this solve that a simple database couldn't? If the currency can only be used to trade for in game items, what practical value does it gain from being a crypto currency as opposed to just WOW gold or whatever? It's just some points that the game developer tallies up in a ledger somewhere, right?

The whole issue is that crypto is supposed to be an incentive for contributing compute resources to a Blockchain. The value of those tokens are inherently linked to the value of the applications the Blockchain supports. The downfall of every crypto system has been the inversion of this fundamental relationship - you can't bootstrap a Blockchain app just by pumping the tokens, because people holding tokens for speculation don't contribute resources to the mesh.

Blockchain needs a killer app first. And crypto needs serious anti-speculation measures which incentives liquidity of the tokens.

Basically, the crypto-blockchain ownership for gaming goods only becomes viable when you make the one big step:

Governments force the software vendors to support fair-use rules that give us the same control over digital goods as we have with physical products.

Right now, software companies get to write whatever copyright rules they like. They don't have to let you resell the software, or transfer it, or whatever. They don't even have to let you keep it beyond warranty laws in many jurisdictions. As soon as the warranty is over, any cloud-based purchases you still have access to are essentially just goodwill from the vendor - they can take the servers down or boot you out and you have very little recourse.

So while blockchains might be a good solution for giving digital goods the same advantages as physical goods - like if the ownership of my Overwatch skins, or of various indie-games were on the Blockchain, I could sell them used freely on used-product marketplaces just like I can the paperback books on my bookshelf. Of course, this would create new problems: with a robust used-products market, how does the vendor make money if people aren't buying so much stuff from them? Well, making new stuff still gives them new stuff to sell - they're the only ones who can mint new software licenses or digital good ownership tokens. They could also charge for access to servers, but then there's questions of whether that, too, is letting them write their own copyright since nobody else has access to the server hosting software.

If a major market country like the US or the EU laid down the law and said:

1. All digital-purchased goods must be transferrable, and

2. All digital-purchased software licenses must be transferrable (although only patch guarantees are up to the original warranty)

Then I could see many software vendors saying "I don't want to deal with supporting the used-stuff market I can see how much of a headache that was for Valve, I'll just offload managing your licenses to a Blockchain".

Of course, more likely everybody would just switch to a subscription model like cloud service companies.

I mean, if you made "you must publish your application-server software for free, as long as it checks with a respected 3rd-party like a blockchain for client validation" a rule, then what would happen to eg. Office 365? Would Microsoft be expected to give away free Office 365 server-software? Would each monthly or yearly subscription purchase also be a blockchain token? So like in addition buying a blockchain token of "1 stout shako" you could buy a blockchain token of "access to Office 365 from March 1 2024 12am UTC to March 1 2025 12am UTC". Then your subscription has all the same benefits of a physical good as well. Idunno.

Also there's always the question of whether blockchains can scale to this size without falling over. If it's too hard, then the gas costs of minting micropurchases are unsustainable or transaction times are too slow. In the reverse case, if it's too easy (ie ownership transfers at no cost and instantly), you could have a second-by-second lending library where you rent access to the Ghastly Gibus for the exact length of your play session and one Ghastly Gibus is being used by dozens of people per week and the benefits of owning anything goes through the floor and the vendors have to charge far more than before to own the software licenses and all the money goes into these hypothetical arbitrage rental blockchain services.

I'm a little more interested in this conversation now that Ethereum has proven out Proof of Stake, and so they're no longer burning down the world to power this stuff. But still, fundamentally Blockchain is a solution looking for a problem.