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Steam and Mastodon. (lemmy.blahaj.zone)

submitted 1 month ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 26 points 1 month ago (4 children)

How do you imagine decentralized gaming? Every game comes with it's own launcher?

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

Every game tied to it's own console.

[–] turtletracks 1 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Unironically I would buy a UFO 50 console

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 month ago

My friend down the street had an LX back in '83. It was an amazing device but sadly way too ahead of its time.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

My fantasy is that PC games become similar to roms, where it's a single file. Maybe encoded is the system specs, OS, etc.

Then the "emulator" just works.

Of course, no financial incentives and a lot of work just to exist. Not to mention, it'll be impossible to do for modern games. But maybe every game that's older than 10 years old gets this treatment.

Also I'm not a OS engineer and maybe this is what Proton is doing with Linux.

Then pure decentralized gaming on any OS - computer, browser, raspberry pi, "smart Fridge", whatever has the specs. And the game just works.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 month ago (1 children)

The idea is for games to be launcher independent/compatible with many launchers. If I wanna play a game I got on gog I could use the official launcher, heroic, mini galaxy, or I could even use no launcher and just download the game installers directly

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

And how would a launcher identify you've actually purchased the game? You still need a central source for that. Hypothetically I guess there could be an activitypub like protocol that all storefronts could use to sync purchases, but that opens up a whole other can of worms, such as account linking, purchase duplications, refunds. The main questions with this hypothetical are

Why would stores implement this when they don't really benefit from it?
Why would the users want it when it means creating more accounts and linking them? Why not just stick to one platform that best covers your needs? I guess there would be the "what if Valve turns bad?" argument, but company turning bad is at best a once in a decade situation. If that's the only reason then the feature won't be used 99.99% of the time.
There's also a question of who pays for the data? Games are huge and the cost of keeping storing them is factored into the price of the game. However, if you buy from store A and download in store B how is store B supposed to stay afloat when they only eat the cost of storing the game.

As for going completely launcherless, how do you solve updating the game? Steam was originally made to solve the patching problem, because each patch would effectively shut the entire game community down while everyone waited for everyone else to patch their game.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

I think will be something more like gog or itch io

[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 month ago

What makes either of those decentralized?