Brian Fargo - Launching Robot Cache

Good luck running against the almighty good old games and steam. This endeavour sounds too shady for me to dip a toe in.

TomRon said:

I'm highly sceptical of cryptocurrencies, but I have to say Steams 30% cut is ridiculous. I'm all for the developers getting a bigger piece of the cake.

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This!

abharsair said:

I never understood why no one was able to break Steam's (almost) monopoly. The reason most people prefer Steam over other services is because they want to keep all their games in one convenient place.

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You literally answered your own question right there.

The reason they have a monopoly is that they did it first. Steam does the job, they don't do a great job, but I could say that about almost every huge monopolistic company (*cough* Google).

Hrm, I think the idea is quite good. Don't think it's a scam. But will be interesting if this actually lives for a couple of months or dies a horrible death.

Btw: thanks to all the mining Graphics Card prices are now back to the level they had when I bought my GTX 1070 in September 2016. Pretty insane.

Whether you like or do not like Fargo, the blockchain is the near and immediate future of the coming world economy. Looking beyond the level of currency, the backbone of world society and day to day life as we know it, will be soon very quickly be reintegrated with the blockchain. Its coming.

beldurax said:

Whether you like or do not like Fargo, the blockchain is the near and immediate future of the coming world economy. Looking beyond the level of currency, the backbone of world society and day to day life as we know it, will be soon very quickly be reintegrated with the blockchain. Its coming.

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Perhaps, and when my paycheck is in "iron" or salt or whatever they want to call it, then maybe I'll make the switch.

Kordanor said:

Btw: thanks to all the mining Graphics Card prices are now back to the level they had when I bought my GTX 1070 in September 2016. Pretty insane.

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By the way, if someone is mining coins in the US (or Europe I suppose) they're doing it wrong. They should ship the computers to a country like Venezuela, my family there pays about $1/month for electricity, that includes lights always on, an air conditioner in each room pretty much 24/7, etc. Just rent a studio apartment there put some motion activated machine guns in it for robbers, and enjoy.

The whole concept of crypto mining is wasteful and extremely stupid. If crypto currencies ever become useful as currencies, it will have to be without that crap.

Also, the VB article is kind of odd. A currency can not be an "alternative to the app stores". That makes no sense at all.

wolfing said:

motion activated machine guns

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You can never have too few of those.

I think currency and block chain are somewhat used interchangeably here, which is a bit misleading.

Interesting interview with Brian here
http://www.pcgamesinsider.biz/inter...digital-retail-brian-fargo-talks-robot-cache/

I think the attempted lure is to get publishers since they won't charge nearly as much as traditional platforms. Not sure EA or UBI will go for it (though UBI sort of uses steams). I think the reason steam leads the pack is that not only was it first but it works without issues. Many of the earlier platforms had a lot of issues or have gone defunct (like directdrive and stardock). UBI is (imho) awful; EA i don't really have any complaints other than well it is EA. I personally worry about security these days and really don't want to add more platforms.

Hum. One thing I missed from the rpgwatch post is that they seem to want you to be able to sell used games.

you said:

Hum. One thing I missed from the rpgwatch post is that they seem to want you to be able to sell used games.

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Which is kinda nice. If it wasnt tied to that specific currency.

But I wonder how they really plan to do that. Will customers be able to resell on the same platform? How will the pricing work, and how would that compete with non-used games?

Cacheperl said:

Which is kinda nice. If it wasnt tied to that specific currency.

But I wonder how they really plan to do that. Will customers be able to resell on the same platform? How will the pricing work, and how would that compete with non-used games?

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Yep, interesting questions. I guess it will first be like an experimental platform for some own or tiny games.

In the end most of the income is generated in the first weeks after release and after that sales and key resellers eat up a lot of the profit per sale anyways.
So if they make it that a game cannot be sold for X% of the original price (let's say 10%) or that the developer gets a fixed amount of money for every resale (let's say 5€ or a percent value of the initial price) than it might generate more income than the "usual" way.
My understanding of blockchain and crypto-currency isn't really that huge. But as far as I understand every transaction is stored decentralized in the net. This basically means that you also could easily see through which hands each key went.
And while you could argue that it's also possible now to track keys, then yes, but often enough it's hard to make people understand why this was a bad idea and their key got removed.
I think with a system like that it would be much more apparent and obvious why a key is removed and the seller doesn't receive the blame. In addition, depending on the system of the input they might be able to avoid chargebacks in the first place, but this would limit the amount of customers drastically.