Most PC gamers have a Steam library worth hundreds or thousands of dollars. They cannot sell any of it. They cannot give it away. If they die, their heirs can’t access it. If Valve decides to shut down Steam — or simply bans their account for a terms-of-service dispute — that library disappears. Steam’s terms are explicit: “Subscriptions are non-transferable and may not be sold.”
This isn’t a Steam-specific quirk. Every major digital game platform operates the same way. The $70 you paid for a game bought you a revocable license to access it under conditions the publisher controls. You don’t own a game; you rent it indefinitely, until you don’t.
This is the gap that blockchain-based game ownership is designed to close. The question worth asking honestly is: can it actually close it, what are the real costs of that change, and what has the industry’s track record with the attempt looked like?
What “Ownership” Means in Digital Gaming Today
When you buy a physical game disc, you own the disc and the rights that come with first-sale doctrine: the legal right to resell, lend, or give it away. GameStop was built on this principle. When you buy a digital game, you receive no such rights. You are purchasing a license.
This legal structure benefits publishers in every dimension:
- No secondary market competition. Every used copy sold is a first-sale revenue opportunity destroyed. With digital games, there is no used copy.
- No lending. You cannot give a friend access to a game you bought.
- Forced platform loyalty. Your library is locked to one storefront. Switching platforms means buying everything again.
- Server-dependent access. When EA shut down the servers for games including Command & Conquer: Generals, the online multiplayer — often a key selling point — became permanently inaccessible.
The gaming industry framed the shift from physical to digital as a convenience improvement. For publishers, it was also a structural improvement in their extraction of consumer value: the first-sale doctrine ceased to apply.
The NFT Proposal: On-Chain License Ownership
The blockchain gaming ownership model replaces the platform login with a wallet. Your game library isn’t a list of accounts in Valve’s database; it’s a set of tokens in a wallet you control. When you “buy” a game under this model, a token is minted and transferred to your wallet on-chain. The smart contract encodes the license: proof that you purchased and own this game.
What this technically changes:
The token is not controlled by the publisher. They cannot revoke it. They cannot delete it from your wallet without your private key. On a public blockchain, anyone can verify you hold the token.
What it doesn’t automatically change:
The game client still needs to check the token and allow access. If the publisher writes client software that only works with their authentication servers, the NFT is still dependent on those servers to be useful. The token ownership is real; the access is still mediated by software the publisher controls.
This distinction is important. A token proves ownership. Whether software respects that ownership is a separate question that depends on how the client is built. The most robust version of NFT game ownership requires open-source clients or community-maintained servers — not just a token.
Permanent Storage: What Arweave Actually Does
Standard NFTs have a fragile dependency. When an NFT is minted, it typically stores a URL pointing to the asset — an image, a file, a game. If that URL goes down, the NFT is a token pointing at nothing. The NFT boom of 2021 produced thousands of “broken” tokens as hosting services disappeared.
Arweave is a blockchain-based permanent storage protocol designed specifically to address this. The core premise: you pay once to store data, and it remains accessible permanently, backed by a mathematical guarantee derived from economic incentives for storage providers.
Projects including Solana’s Metaplex metadata standard use Arweave by default. Several high-profile NFT projects — including some Art Blocks pieces and portions of the Bored Ape Yacht Club’s asset hosting — have used Arweave for asset permanence.
What Arweave actually guarantees: Data stored on Arweave is replicated across a network of independent miners who are economically incentivized to maintain access. In theory, the data persists as long as those incentives hold. In practice, Arweave has maintained near-perfect uptime since 2020 and has a multi-hundred-million-dollar endowment fund specifically to sustain storage long-term.
What Arweave doesn’t guarantee: It doesn’t guarantee that a game runs on future hardware. Storing a game’s files is different from ensuring those files remain executable. A Windows 95 game stored perfectly on Arweave today still won’t run on native ARM hardware in 2040 without emulation. The storage layer solves the availability problem. The execution problem requires something else.
Secondary Market Economics: Who Benefits and Who Doesn’t
The traditional physical game secondary market — GameStop-era used game sales — was a direct transfer of value from publishers to retailers and consumers. Publishers received nothing from used game sales after the first transaction. They opposed it, consistently.
The NFT secondary market introduces a mechanism that changes this dynamic in one significant way: programmable royalties.
A game item minted as an NFT can encode a royalty percentage directly in its smart contract. Every time the item is resold, the contract automatically routes a percentage — say 2.5–5% — to the original developer. On a $50 resale, that’s $1.25–$2.50 to the developer, automatically, without any intermediary.
This is genuinely impossible with physical goods. GameStop sold millions of used copies of EA games; EA received nothing. With on-chain royalties, developers participate in the secondary market they’ve historically only been harmed by.
The royalty enforcement caveat: This mechanism only holds if marketplaces enforce it. The 2022–2023 NFT marketplace wars — driven primarily by Blur’s market share push — saw major marketplaces move to optional royalties to attract volume. By late 2023, most secondary volume was flowing through platforms where royalty payment was discretionary. Gaming-specific NFT ecosystems can build in contract-level enforcement (refusing to execute transfers unless royalties are paid), but this requires keeping trading within a controlled ecosystem — which somewhat recreates the walled garden problem being solved.
| Model | Developer Secondary Market Revenue | Consumer Resale Rights | Used Copy Competition |
|---|---|---|---|
| Physical (disc) | None | Full | Yes (GameStop) |
| Traditional digital (Steam/PSN) | None | None | No |
| NFT with royalties | Percentage of each resale | Full | Yes |
For consumers, the secondary market restores something lost in the digital transition. For developers, it turns the secondary market from a pure negative into a potential revenue stream. For publishers, especially those selling at high margin with platform exclusivity, it represents real competitive disruption.
What the Industry Has Actually Done
The history of NFTs in gaming is short and mostly unhappy. Understanding it accurately matters more than the theoretical upside.
Ubisoft Quartz (2021)
Ubisoft launched “Digits” — Ethereum-based NFT cosmetic items for Ghost Recon: Breakpoint — in December 2021. The rollout was widely mocked. The YouTube announcement video received approximately 1,500 likes and 38,000 dislikes before Ubisoft disabled ratings. Players objected to the concept of paying for cosmetics that already existed in the game as non-NFT items.
Ubisoft’s EVP Nicolas Pouard defended the initiative in an interview, arguing that players “don’t see the value” yet and that “what we’re seeing is really a change in paradigm.” The program was quietly discontinued in 2023 with Ghost Recon: Breakpoint itself being shut down.
The Ubisoft case illustrates a genuine tension: players conflated “NFT cosmetics” with “paying more for things we already had” rather than “owning transferable items.” Whether that’s a communication problem or a fundamental incompatibility with player expectations in triple-A gaming is an open question.
EA
In late 2021, EA CEO Andrew Wilson called NFTs and play-to-earn mechanics “the future of our industry” in an earnings call. Within months, facing severe backlash from both players and gaming media, EA reversed its public position. By 2022, Wilson said NFTs were “in the very early stages” and EA would proceed cautiously. The company has made no public NFT gaming launches as of 2026.
Valve / Steam
Valve banned all games containing NFTs and cryptocurrency from Steam in October 2021. The stated reason was preventing games that “issue cryptocurrency or NFTs” to avoid “items that have real-world value or…can be exchanged for real-world currency.” Steam remains the dominant PC gaming storefront — approximately 50,000 games as of 2025. NFT games must distribute outside Steam, significantly limiting their addressable market on PC.
Epic Games Store
Tim Sweeney (Epic Games CEO) took the opposite position from Valve: “We welcome the developers who want to try to do that with games on the Epic Games Store.” Sweeney has said personally he doesn’t like NFTs but believes platform neutrality matters. Epic Games Store does host NFT-integrated games, though its market share remains far behind Steam.
Axie Infinity: The Cautionary Precedent
Axie Infinity, built by Sky Mavis, was the template for what large-scale NFT gaming success could look like. At its peak in late 2021, the game had over 2 million daily active players, many in the Philippines and other developing countries earning meaningful income through gameplay. Axie NFTs (the creatures used to play) were trading for hundreds of dollars each.
Two things ended it:
- The Ronin bridge hack (March 2022): $625 million in ETH and USDC was stolen from the Ronin bridge — the infrastructure connecting Axie to Ethereum. It remains one of the largest crypto hacks in history. The subsequent liquidity crisis damaged player confidence and the in-game economy.
- Unsustainable economics: Axie’s earning model required a constant influx of new players buying into the ecosystem. When new player growth slowed, the economic floor collapsed. The price of Axie NFTs and the in-game SLP token dropped 90%+. Analysts noted the game’s economy had characteristics of a Ponzi structure — unsustainable without continuous growth.
Axie demonstrated both that blockchain gaming can attract massive user bases and generate real economic activity for players, and that the economic model requires extremely careful design to avoid collapse. Many subsequent NFT games copied Axie’s play-to-earn format without solving the underlying economics.
Gods Unchained
A more modest but more durable example: Gods Unchained is a collectible card game from Immutable X (now Immutable) where card ownership is on-chain. Players can trade cards freely on secondary markets. The game has maintained an active player base and a functional in-game economy since 2019 without the collapse dynamics Axie experienced, partly because the core game design (deck-building strategy) stands on its own merits independent of card prices.
The Platform Gatekeeper Problem
Apple and Google each take 30% of app store revenue. Steam takes 30%. Google reduced its cut to 15% for smaller developers; Epic Games Store charges 12% as a competitive differentiator; Steam has made no concession. The 30% “gatekeeper fee” is a known, documented friction point that has prompted Epic vs. Apple litigation, EU Digital Markets Act enforcement actions, and sustained developer complaints.
An NFT-based distribution model, running peer-to-peer without a storefront intermediary, would theoretically eliminate this fee. Developers would capture the full purchase price minus blockchain transaction costs.
In practice: wallets, marketplaces, and aggregators still charge fees (typically 2–2.5% on secondary sales). But that’s materially different from 30% on primary sales. The economic case for direct-to-wallet distribution is real for developers who can establish audience relationships without platform discovery.
The counterargument is that platform fees buy something: discovery, user trust, customer service infrastructure, and access to 130 million Steam users or 1.5 billion iOS users. Independent distribution cuts the fee but also cuts the distribution. For established IP with an existing audience, the math may favor direct. For new games needing discovery, it’s less clear.
The AI Compatibility Layer: Vision vs. Reality
The idea that AI could automatically translate old game code to run on new hardware — removing the need for manual ports or remasters — is compelling and speculative in roughly equal measure.
What AI has actually done in gaming: AI-powered texture upscaling (NVIDIA DLSS, AMD FSR) is deployed at scale and does genuinely improve the quality of older assets. AI has been used to automate portions of game testing. Models trained on code have assisted developers with porting and compatibility work.
What hasn’t been demonstrated: Fully automated translation of game executables from one architecture to another without human intervention. The challenge isn’t just syntax translation — games have hardware-specific dependencies, physics engine assumptions baked into timing, and rendering pipelines tied to specific GPU architectures. A DirectX 9 game ported to a new architecture isn’t just a code translation; it requires a full understanding of what the code was trying to do, not just what it says.
Emulation (the existing approach) solves this for closed hardware environments — RPCS3 lets you play PS3 games on PC. But emulation requires sustained open-source development effort, not automated AI translation. The AI compatibility layer is a plausible future direction, not a deployable present reality. Including it as an infrastructure component of an NFT gaming system today is a forward-looking bet.
Where Things Actually Stand
The theoretical case for blockchain-based game ownership is coherent. The gap between the theory and the current reality is significant.
What works today:
- NFTs can function as verifiable, transferable, non-revocable licenses
- On-chain royalties can direct secondary market revenue to developers automatically
- Arweave and similar systems can make game assets genuinely permanent at the storage layer
- Games like Gods Unchained show that NFT item ownership can function as intended in a live game
What remains unsolved:
- The game client must still respect the token — enforcement is social and economic, not purely technical
- Royalty enforcement breaks down when trading happens on non-enforcing marketplaces
- Consumer hostility to “NFT games” remains high following the 2021–2022 boom-and-bust; many players associate the label with scams and Ponzi economics
- Walled garden platforms (Steam, PlayStation, Nintendo) block NFT games by policy; PC is the only open testing ground
- The AI compatibility layer is a vision, not deployed technology
- No major AAA game has successfully launched with NFT ownership as a primary feature
The honest tension for publishers: An NFT-based ownership model is genuinely good for consumers (transferable assets, secondary market, royalties going to developers not retailers) and simultaneously removes publishers’ ability to force platform lock-in and multiple repurchases. The resistance from large publishers isn’t irrational — it reflects real economic interests. The asymmetry is that publishers’ economic interest and consumers’ interest point in opposite directions, which is exactly the dynamic that made physical used game sales a durable market and digital licensing a durable publisher preference.
The technology to implement durable digital ownership exists. Whether it gets adopted depends less on engineering and more on whether consumers decide it matters enough to prefer platforms that offer it.
Related Terms
See Also
- Are Layer 2 Networks Actually Decentralized?
- Why Smart Contract Audits Fail
- Swap crypto with ChangeNOW
Sources
- Valve Corporation. (2012, updated 2024). Steam Subscriber Agreement, Section 1. store.steampowered.com — “Subscriptions are non-transferable” licensing clause.
- Entriken, W., Shirley, D., Evans, J., & Sachs, N. (2018). EIP-721: Non-Fungible Token Standard. Ethereum Improvement Proposals. eips.ethereum.org/EIPS/eip-721
- Arweave. (2024). Arweave Yellow Paper v2.0. arweave.org — permanent storage incentive model and endowment fund structure.
- Nansen. (2022). Play-to-Earn: NFT Gaming Report. nansen.ai — Axie Infinity player count, SLP price collapse, and DAU data.
- Elliptic. (2022, March). Ronin Network Hack: $625M Stolen. elliptic.co — Ronin bridge exploit amount and attribution to Lazarus Group.
- Ubisoft. (2021, December). Ubisoft Quartz — Digits announcement. YouTube/Ubisoft channel — source for dislike ratio and Pouard quotes.
- Pouard, N. (2022, January). Interview with Decrypt. “Players Don’t Get It Yet.” decrypt.co — EVP’s defense of Ubisoft Quartz.
- EA Inc. (2021, November). Q2 FY2022 Earnings Call Transcript. investors.ea.com — Andrew Wilson “future of our industry” quote.
- Sweeney, T. (2021, October). Twitter/X @TimSweeneyEpic — “We welcome the developers who want to try” direct quote on Epic’s NFT policy.
- Johnson, D. (2023). Blur’s Rise to #1 NFT Marketplace and the Royalty Wars. The Block — optional royalty shift and creator revenue impact.
- Immutable. (2024). Gods Unchained: State of the Game. immutable.com — ongoing player base and economy data.
- U.S. Copyright Office. (1976, amended 1998). 17 U.S.C. § 109 — First Sale Doctrine. copyright.gov — legal basis for physical resale rights and why digital licenses are structured to avoid it.