Evil Genius Games vs. Netflix: Fight!

Best Selling RPGs - Available Now @ DriveThruRPG.com
Wizards never had standees or clings for D20 Modern in the 2002-2007 era and I’m pretty sure it sold better than EDH.
 
I assumed they were in deep shit and their products were selling like shit the moment I saw them selling every single product they've ever made including stuff that was only a month or two old in a Humble Bundle.

Nothing says "we're fucked, please buy our stuff" like selling new product in a big bundle for insanely low prices.
 
Voros said:
I can't imagine sticking around for a moment if they missed a pay period. I've ran a small non-profit and we never failed to make payroll. Not even close.
Click to expand...
The Canadian federal government has been missing payments, underpaying, and sometimes even overpaying staff for years. Just whisper "Phoenix" into a federal civil servant's ear and watch them run shrieking into the night.
 
I did once pull close to $30,000 one year from stock options from a dotcom. But then the next year, they let me go for "no cause" and screwed me out of another $45,000 or so I would have gotten from vesting that year. But I was earning a decent, if low-ish wage, stayed in the same office for five years (if not technically with the same employer), and I didn't have a certificate to my name. I say go for the moon shot, but pay rent FIRST. For companies, go for the moon shot, but pay your employees and rent FIRST.
 
Dr Jack Dr Jack for a decentralized, self-verifying ledger I could see recording transactions that are public record being a good use case. Land transactions would be a good example.

robertsconley robertsconley correct me if I’m wrong, but the NFT is separate and independent of the asset itself. In your example, owning the NFT of the pdf is separate from owning the pdf. Right?
 
Nakana said:
Dr Jack Dr Jack for a decentralized, self-verifying ledger I could see recording transactions that are public record being a good use case. Land transactions would be a good example.

robertsconley robertsconley correct me if I’m wrong, but the NFT is separate and independent of the asset itself. In your example, owning the NFT of the pdf is separate from owning the pdf. Right?
Click to expand...

I wouldn't want to use it for a land transaction, because I don't want my land hacked. Oh no my apes. To me, it would be like leaving the deed to your land in a safe on your porch that says "Deed to Land in Here," but it's got a REALLY GOOD lock on it.

Not only is the NFT separate from the rights of the asset, but many NFTs are for things the minter doesn't actually have the rights to at all in the first place. Someone could mint an NFT from my profile picture and I couldn't stop them. Many are not only not rights-granting, but infringing.
 
pawsplay said:
I wouldn't want to use it for a land transaction, because I don't want my land hacked. Oh no my apes. To me, it would be like leaving the deed to your land in a safe on your porch that says "Deed to Land in Here," but it's got a REALLY GOOD lock on it.
Click to expand...
I don’t mean to suggest some form of digital asset storage, is that a requirement? I mean simply a record of the transaction itself.

Edit: If there must be some digital asset associated with the record, I suppose you could turn the legal description into an NFT :hehe:
Then, you could sell the legal description as if it had some value :hehe::hehe::hehe:
 
pawsplay said:
Not only is the NFT separate from the rights of the asset, but many NFTs are for things the minter doesn't actually have the rights to at all in the first place. Someone could mint an NFT from my profile picture and I couldn't stop them. Many are not only not rights-granting, but infringing.
Click to expand...

Dune NFT for the win. Buying an NFT of a share in an art book doesn't actually give you ownership of the art in that book, whodathunkit?
 
Nakana said:
Dr Jack Dr Jack for a decentralized, self-verifying ledger I could see recording transactions that are public record being a good use case. Land transactions would be a good example.
Click to expand...

What possible advantage does a decentralized, "self-verifying" ledger have over the centralised record systems used around the world right now?

I've put the scare quotes about the "self-verifying" there because blockchain is completely incapable of verifying the thing that would actually matter about such registers: that the data going into it is valid in the first place. In fact, it'd be much worse at doing that any centralised system. And this is the problem that comes up time and time and time again about supposed uses of blockchain: they solve the problem we don't have whilst not actually solving the problem we do have, and being worse at doing (and/or more expensive and complicated) than existing solutions.

BitCoin is actually a great example of this. BitCoin is so incredibly bad at being a currency that the actual trading in BitCoin doesn't use BitCoin instead exchanges pretend to trade BitCoin to allow trades at a viable rate. The trades taking place in the exchanges take place only on the servers in the exchange and only far down the line does any actual BitCoin movement occur.
 
Last edited:
Nakana said:
I don’t mean to suggest some form of digital asset storage, is that a requirement? I mean simply a record of the transaction itself.

Edit: If there must be some digital asset associated with the record, I suppose you could turn the legal description into an NFT :hehe:
Then, you could sell the legal description as if it had some value :hehe::hehe::hehe:
Click to expand...

A deed is a ledger of ownership of a piece of land. Same for a car title, most come printed for blanks to write in the new owner if you sell it. So, in this case, imagine someone walking up to your house, breaking into the safe, forging your signature, and then filing for a new deed with the county. And then, poof, it's theirs. "Code is Law."
 
pawsplay said:
A deed is a ledger of ownership of a piece of land. Same for a car title, most come printed for blanks to write in the new owner if you sell it. So, in this case, imagine someone walking up to your house, breaking into the safe, forging your signature, and then filing for a new deed with the county. And then, poof, it's theirs. "Code is Law."
Click to expand...
I guess it wasn’t considering deeds/titles as the ledger itself. They are documents that establish ownership (and yes, they have built-in tools for transference) but I considered the ledger itself as something different.
 
Nakana said:
I guess it wasn’t considering deeds/titles as the ledger itself. They are documents that establish ownership (and yes, they have built-in tools for transference) but I considered the ledger itself as something different.
Click to expand...

Wellll, in a de-centralized system, they aren't something different. See my point?
 
pawsplay said:
A deed is a ledger of ownership of a piece of land. Same for a car title, most come printed for blanks to write in the new owner if you sell it. So, in this case, imagine someone walking up to your house, breaking into the safe, forging your signature, and then filing for a new deed with the county. And then, poof, it's theirs. "Code is Law."
Click to expand...
Just to clarify, a deed isn't a ledger of ownership. It's a written instrument transferring interest, rights or title to a property. A deed is not legally significant by itself to claim ownership of a property, at least in New Jersey. You can forget a signature on a deed, but the deed means nothing until all the signatures have been legally acknowledged by a duly authorized officer of the court and recorded by a country clerk.

There is also no "poof" moment where the forger just gets to have the property because they submitted a phony deed. Even if a clerk erroneously accepted it, a defective title on a property can be thrown out. If you could steal houses by stealing a slip of paper, we would see a lot more of it. Land ownership is one thing society does not screw around with.
 
Baulderstone said:
Just to clarify, a deed isn't a ledger of ownership. It's a written instrument transferring interest, rights or title to a property. A deed is not legally significant by itself to claim ownership of a property, at least in New Jersey. You can forget a signature on a deed, but the deed means nothing until all the signatures have been legally acknowledged by a duly authorized officer of the court and recorded by a country clerk.

There is also no "poof" moment where the forger just gets to have the property because they submitted a phony deed. Even if a clerk erroneously accepted it, a defective title on a property can be thrown out. If you could steal houses by stealing a slip of paper, we would see a lot more of it. Land ownership is one thing society does not screw around with.
Click to expand...

Those are the differences between an actual deed and a blockchain item. With blockchain, the "acknowledgement" is done by a network, there is no clerk inspecting the paperwork, and there is no central record of the signature or change of ownership. The blockchain is both instrument and record. My example of setting the deed on your porch and letting someone forge your signature is ridiculous, but that's because it's an accurate analogy to a blockchain deed. In real life, you can sue someone who files faulty deed paperwork. With a decentralized system of software validation, there is no higher authority to appeal to.

Some cryptocurrencies have had to deal with massive fraud or theft. Some networks have simply accepted the losses as the cost of doing business. In cases where they decided to do something about it, correcting the "theft" required a software fork.
 
Nakana said:
robertsconley robertsconley correct me if I’m wrong, but the NFT is separate and independent of the asset itself. In your example, owning the NFT of the pdf is separate from owning the pdf. Right?
Click to expand...
Yes, that is how most are set up. But understand you can shove anything into the data portion. A proof of ownership version would store a hash of the original file, its digital fingerprint, so to speak, rather than the text link to a URL. You watermark the PDF before handing it to the customer so every PDF sold would have a unique hash as they are all slightly different.
 
pawsplay said:
In real life, you can sue someone who files faulty deed paperwork. With a decentralized system of software validation, there is no higher authority to appeal to.
Click to expand...
Unless there is a legal framework. There are many examples of fraudulent deed transfers, all fees properly paid and recorded, that were later contested. For example, scammers target an infrequently visited vacation property.

 
robertsconley said:
Unless there is a legal framework. There are many examples of fraudulent deed transfers, all fees properly paid and recorded, that were later contested. For example, scammers target an infrequently visited vacation property.
Click to expand...
Four years later and the (former) owner still hasn't gotten the house back that was fraudulently sold out from under them. A lot of jurisdictions use a variant of the Torrens system, where the registered owner is the owner full stop. If person A fraudulently registered a transfer to themselves then the owner can get it back from them, but if person A then sold to person B and person B didn't have any knowledge of the fraudulent transfer then person B owns the property and the now-former owner's only recourse is to go after person A. The benefit of this system is there's no need for complicated paper trails - just go to a registry, check the last name listed, and away you go.

I can't see any value in establishing final-and-conclusive proof of unique ownership in an RPG context. If you wrote and published a kick-ass adventure, wouldn't you want every gaming group in the world to play it, and not just one group so that one player could claim they have the one sword that slew the bad guy? Even if proof of ownership of that sword could only transfer through your proprietary system and you took a cut of any transaction, you'd still need a big player base to have other people who want that sword and want to buy 'title' to the sword through your system.

I'm not sure that targeting ultra-rich gamers for unique expensive micro-drops is a lucrative strategy. But I admit I am not a marketing genius.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Banner: The best cosmic horror & Cthulhu Mythos @ DriveThruRPG.com
Back
Top