Technology
Core Pillars
Since the main objective is for the system to never go down regardless of the storefront's or developer's will, we must choose our technology accordingly while prioritizing a decentralized-first approach and keeping in mind certain core pillars:
The developer must never be able to control what the players do with the game licenses after they've bought them.
The player should have ownership of their game licenses.
The system has to be appealing enough for both parties to adopt this new paradigm.
Transactions & Ownership
To process our transactions and keep track of who owns what, we're deploying multiple smart-contracts starting on the Polygon chain to ensure maximum decentralization and lightning-fast, low-fee transactions. In fact, most of the store's backend will be operating on the blockchain:
Each game will have an associated smart-contract that developers can easily manage and interface with to update their game. This contract will also control access to the game's download.
The royalties of each game's resales will have a smart-contract with a deterministic formula fully personalized by the game's developer, allowing for full customization and transparency of the game's resale monetization.
All of this will be managed by the main smart-contract, functioning as the bridge between these different contracts and the developers and players.
You can catch up with our smart-contracts on GitHub!
Game Downloads & Ownership Protection
To distribute the game's files, we aim to ensure game downloads are always accessible no matter what, and only the righteous owners of game keys can actually access the content. As such, we've come up with two main mechanisms to help us achieve this goal:
Access and Ownership: Each game's smart-contract has access to different links, allowing players who own the game to download any version of it that has been released. After downloading the game, the file will be gated by a digital rights management software (DRM), requiring players to sign in with their cryptowallet to be able to play. This software will be very easy to integrate into games and barely an inconvinience. Players do not always need to be online to verify their key: they can need only authenticate their key every few days so that they can keep playing even without an internet connection.
Peer-to-Peer Downloads: After accessing the download links in the game's smart-contract, players will be able to download the content through IPFS, a decentralized file-storage system that maximizes availability and transparency with no additional costs for developers or players.
Upgradeable Smart-Contracts
Smart-contracts may be immutable, but Hash Game Store is ever-evolving. As such, Hash's contracts are being built to support the Beacon Pattern - This means that deployment and updating of our contracts is simple and optimized.
Essentially, all 'proxy' contracts will only store information while lower-level contracts will store all the code - developers will be paying next to no fees to deploy their game on the chain!
Future Integration - HGS API
The way our technology is assembled makes it extremely simple for other storefronts to easily integrate our smart-contract and start selling games on our behalf while every party involved (players, developers, third-party stores and HGS) gets a piece of the pie. Hash Game Store isn't swimming against the current - it is helping everyone surf the Web 3.0 wave. Besides having easy integration with other videogame stores, Hash Game Store is being built to host any kind of software licenses, further opening up the possibility of expanding to other industries in the future.
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