15 or so years ago people were saying the same thing about decentralized social media. Yet here we are.
No we weren’t, Email has been a thing for much longer than that. Everyone always knew decentralized social platforms were possible.
In any case you’re only scratching the surface of my points which is why you think they’re shallow, you haven’t answered a single one of them in any satisfactory way. Your answers get it 80% of the way there (which is the easy part that anyone knows how to do), but the last 20% is what makes this impossible in any practical sense of the word.
The main problem that Steam/GoG/Itch/etc solve is not selling games, but providing a secure validated platform where games can be sold. And this is the hard problem to solve on decentralized platforms. To answer you question, why do I buy games? there are 2 main points:
- It’s convenient
- I want to support the devs
Neither of those points work on a decentralized platform. It’s not convenient because of the payment hassle and trying to figure out if something is legit or not. When you buy stuff at Amazon even if it’s sold by someone else you’re safe that if you get scammed you will get your money back, on a decentralized platform that’s not the case, you will need to be extremely aware of who’s the seller, which instance is it being sold on, etc, etc. This alone completely obliterates the convenience of pressing a button and getting a game, so in this any decentralized platform will be worse. And the second point also is related, I can’t know if I’m supporting the devs or some random person who’s re-uploaded the game. Sure, PGP signatures would be nice, and we can use that to add a checkmark next to someone, except you need a centralized PGP public signature registry, so you’re no longer fully decentralized, and if you add a solution to it (e.g. blockchain of public PGP signatures of known sellers) it’s still possible to simply create another seller with a similar enough name, or create the official name before the official entity does it so you look more official than the actual official site.
In short people would not easily know if they’re buying from a pirate or from the devs, so that takes away convenience and support for the devs, the only two reasons I buy games. Valve/GoG/etc manage this very easily because they’re a centralized platform that control what gets on their store, so they can easily validate if the thing they’re selling is being sold by the actual dev, and even so there have been cases of indy games getting plagiarized and re uploaded by a different party. But in those cases, Valve took the loss, refunded the users and took the game off the store, in a decentralized platform that won’t be possible because the scammer is the only person with the power to do that, so again, less convenient, less secure.
Which leads me to payment, you think that just integrating something like Paypal is enough? first of all the moment you do that you loss the decentralized battle, now everything is centralized on the payment method and they can arbitrate stuff, so you haven’t solved anything by being decentralized.
Finally with all of this if you’re a company developing games why would you choose this platform? it provides nothing to you and there’s a 100% chance that anything you sell there will immediately be copied and resold by someone else. Which means that on corpo-mind if they wanted to get in there, they would strengthen their DRM policies to try to prevent this.
It’s a nice dream, but there are too many things that make this very difficult if not impossible to happen. Proving ownership of external stuff in fully decentralized systems is simply impossible, which is why stuff like HTTPS relies on centralized nodes for validation and why NFTs while a great idea on paper are synonym with scams on most people’s mind. Even if someone was able to create such a platform, no one would use it, so it’s just pointless. Which is not to say that there aren’t strives we can make in that direction, e.g. trying to enforce a common protocol for APIs which would allow multiple stores to be accessed from a single app is a nice start, a blockchain for ownership of games that can be part of that API used by stores to allow to cross-buy is another interesting idea (although the store would probably still charge something to activate the product, but essentially we’re moving the fee from the publisher to the customer in exchange to allow him to only pay a fee to activate the same game on multiple systems). Etc, etc, etc, there are plenty of nice ideas on how the situation can be improved, but a fully decentralized store should not be the end goal.
PS: The fact that you didn’t mentioned OpenBazaar in your reply is a relatively good indicator that you haven’t given this problem enough thought to understand the pitfalls you’re missing.