I don't understand how NFTs would solve the problem I described. Even if all of my Oculus games are NFTs - if I'm banned and can't access my account to download the games then I'm out of luck.

the games wouldn't be released on exclusively on a closed system because they have other paths to monetize

the games you possess and the digital items you possess would have an independent record of your possession and continued access

if you did use a company's platform because of its convenient UI, even if you lost access to that company's platform you should still be able to access all of your games and items

in the Web3 paradigm and idea, the closed systems build themselves around open systems just to make them convenient, and aren't strictly necessary. the open system allows the records of assets to be tapped into and re-rendered in other games, or marketplaces. Think about it like Web 1.0 with updated technology and requisite pieces that were missing back then.

In the NFT scenario , what would prevent people from sharing licenses?

TEE (Intel SGX; AMD will have to follow suite to keep up). It’s unfortunate that this will most likely reverse the current trend of increased cross-architecture compatibility and ARM64 will probably get the short end of the stick unless something unexpected happens.

I’m not a fan at all of that kind of DRM. Cryptographically prohibiting the owner of the machine from inspecting what code is running on their machine is a different league than obfuscation but I’m pretty sure that’s where we’re heading regardless with DRM. PCs will become more like video game consoles in that sense.

Or of course, streaming cloud gaming, where your local machine is more of a thin client. In this case the NFT is really just a token you present to the proverbial gatekeeper every time you want to play. So you can still be blocked, but at least you’ll have irrefutable proof of which games you paid for and have an obvious case in small-claims court.

Especially the former will probably mean I’ll just completely quit gaming altogether.

address signing. if you give someone your address in order to access the game, they are also accessing all of your digital items and can transfer them to their own address. this is risky enough for the user that they won't do that, or learn not to. there won't be a customer support to help them, you can try to build that kind of customer support if you want though.

the system would check your signature and/or check for current possession of the necessary NFT.

trusting a friend to experience that is up to the user at their own risk.

the game producer's goals are not really about preventing shared access any longer, as they are still selling items and doing things for creation of items (engagement), just like the most lucrative games already do now.

Seems like a group of like minded individuals could easily form an identity that only had access to things they absolutely intended to share between them. This is already an issue with streaming services.

With online accounts you could prevent said identity from connecting to multiple online games at once but this is notably worse than old school physical games where you could have 3 games at 3 different friends houses while playing a fourth.

Makes me wonder if we should stop multiplying complexity beyond need and go back to cartridges except now they are $5 64GB usb drives.

Right. Taking it a step further, maybe the users could actually transfer the assets to unique addresses that are their friends, and send it back when a different friend wants to play. Would only take a few seconds, or a few minutes. Like assuming there are session checking that already exists, the friends could would have their unique id due to their unique address, but have the same gear or game access.

A unique mitigation could be to raise the barrier of sharing, like not only could you check for NFT ownership, you could look for a purchase transaction on an NFT marketplace. So now the friends would need capital to wash trade that, and they'd have to beat the bots looking for low value bids, and they would have to unnecessarily pay for transaction fees.

Not advocating for that, but oh well the idea is out there now.

People would have separate accounts for each game to prevent losing everything.

It becomes a long serial number that anyone who knows can transfer to another account.

But it wouldn't make sense to pay to transfer it over ($60-$300 gas fees) on an under $60 game.

I can see some real issues with your approach.

NFTs can't be used for products under a few hundred if you want to leverage the value as insurance.

only Ethereum mainnet has "$60-$300 gas fees", which is multiple orders of magnitude higher than everything else. there are a couple of networks that would maintain their low transaction fees even at the same transaction size as Ethereum and marketcap.

So the game would check against a blockchain that the signature is valid every time you want to play? What prevents you from just keeping a snapshot of the blockchain at a point when you owned it?

verification signatures don't use the blockchain, this is just public private key cryptography the same as PGP. the blockchain, for this purpose, just helped proliferate a standard application of that in a few years, where PGP failed at that for 25 years and counting as it has stayed very niche. many Web3 services use this for determining a user, or even accepting terms and conditions, while logging them in.

the client and the server would be checking nearest nodes for the latest block height. so any mismatch would prevent the user from keeping a snapshot of an old blockchain state as the max height would be too different.

it is also easy to disconnect a user if the assets moved when reading the current blockheight. many web3 applications just keep a websocket open to several nodes, this is boilerplate code at this point. reading from a blockchain is free. many services already check for onchain tokens to enable or disable access, for several years now. you can try gaming them to trick for access and see if you find anything.