this post was submitted on 13 Oct 2024
999 points (98.2% liked)
Technology
59374 readers
3794 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
That is so bad. They clearly don’t understand the appeal of decentralized systems…
At the same time people on here are defending the centralization of PC gaming on Steam so even fediverse users don't understand decentralization
How do you imagine decentralized gaming? Every game comes with it's own launcher?
Every game tied to it's own console.
Unironically I would buy a UFO 50 console
My friend down the street had an LX back in '83. It was an amazing device but sadly way too ahead of its time.
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.
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
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
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.
I think will be something more like gog or itch io
What makes either of those decentralized?