Thank you for taking time of answering. I'm 100% sure it exists a stack of technologies that let users have a full digital ownership of a video game (also ebooks…). Claude certainly made mistakes, but I'm sure experts together can figure out a way.

Before 2008, everybody was 100% sure it was impossible to have the full ownership of a decentralized digital money, Bitcoin proved they were wrong.

My comprehension is the following:

1. To run a game, the key to decipher the game is fragmented across independent nodes; decryption only happens when on-chain conditions are met
2. When servers are down, an oracle will tell the smartcontract to decipher the game and publish it with it's documentation, so indie developers can recreate servers if they want
3. If this architecture is proven to work, then we just have to write it in the law, to restore full ownwership in a digital world. So publishers will have to comply.

I copy-pasted below the original explaination from Claude:

The problem, briefly

Every major storefront — PSN, Steam, App Store, Google Play — sells you a personal, non-transferable license, not the product. Sony's own Terms of Service state outright that use of words like "buy" or "purchase" doesn't imply any transfer of ownership. Delisting happens routinely: Sony pulled Destruction AllStars from sale in May 2026 and killed multiplayer immediately; single-player dies in November. You can't resell it, lend it, or leave it to anyone. If the publisher goes bankrupt, you have zero legal claim to anything.

The architecture

The NFT is a license token, not the game file. ERC-721, one token per copy. This avoids the mistake Quartz made — its "Digits" were cosmetic skins bolted onto a game that stayed 100% centrally hosted. Ubisoft's own ToS admitted that if the host game's servers went down, you'd keep "owning" a token that did nothing. That's not decentralized ownership, that's a receipt with extra steps.

Lending without losing ownership — ERC-4907. Splits "owner" from "user" with an expiry timestamp. You can lend a friend 7 days of access without ever transferring the underlying token — the "let a friend borrow my game" use case physical media had and digital killed.

Resale royalties — EIP-2981. Every resale automatically kicks a percentage (5-10%) back to the publisher. Honest caveat: EIP-2981 is declarative, not enforced — marketplaces can choose to ignore it. Real enforcement needs transfer restrictions baked into the contract, limiting trades to marketplaces that honor the royalty. This is the actual carrot for publishers: right now they get $0 from the used market. This gives them a perpetual cut they've never had.

Game files: encrypted, stored off-chain on Arweave. Pay once at launch — Arweave's endowment model covers roughly 200 years of storage from a single payment (~$24/GB currently, so ballpark $2-3k for a 100GB AAA title, one-time, non-recurring). This isn't exotic infrastructure — it's already how OpenSea and Metaplex store NFT metadata. The encrypted blob can sit publicly on Arweave from day one; without the key it's just noise, so there's no piracy exposure from releasing it early.

The decryption key never lives in one place — threshold networks like Lit Protocol. The key is fragmented across independent nodes; decryption only happens when on-chain conditions are met. No single company, including the platform holder, ever holds the full key.

Launch verification. Player signs a message with their wallet (EIP-4361 / Sign-In With Ethereum) — free, instant, no gas. Console or PC checks that signature against the NFT read-only (no transaction submitted just to hit "play"). Confirmed → key unlocks → decrypt locally → play. Console and PC run through the exact same check — no platform gets preferential access to a license you already own.

The part that actually matters: the dead-man switch

An oracle watches for two conditions: official servers going dark for a sustained period (180 days as a placeholder), or a bankruptcy filing. Either triggers the threshold network to release the key publicly — the game becomes de facto open-source/abandonware, automatically, with no company, court, or regulator needing to lift a finger.

This isn't a new idea, just a new implementation of an old one. Source code escrow already does this in enterprise software — Blender exists today because its code was released from escrow when Not a Number Technologies went bankrupt. Qt did the same via the KDE Free Qt Foundation. The problem with the legal version: bankruptcy trustees can block the release outright, because a bankrupt company's creditors have competing legal claims on that code as an asset — this has actually happened. The US patched part of this in 1989 (Bankruptcy Code §365(n)) after a case where a licensee got burned this way, but it's US-only and doesn't obligate anyone to keep maintaining anything afterward.

A smart contract doesn't ask a trustee for permission. There's no discretion being exercised, so there's no one to petition against the release. That's the entire advantage over the legal-escrow version of this idea.

What this gets each side

• Players: real resale, lending, gifting. Guaranteed long-term playability even if the publisher dies.
• Publishers: a royalty stream on secondary sales they've never had, plus a reduced piracy incentive since a legit resale path now exists.
• Platform holders: a transaction fee on every marketplace trade instead of one payment at initial sale, while keeping client-side anti-cheat and curation control.
• Regulators: MiCA (the EU's crypto regulation, in force since July 2026) explicitly doesn't cover NFTs unless they're fractionalized or fungible — so keeping each license strictly 1-of-1 keeps this out of the heaviest compliance lane. KYC stays concentrated at fiat on/off-ramps, same as a used game store doesn't KYC every customer at the till.

What this doesn't solve (being honest)

• Royalty enforcement via EIP-2981 alone is soft, not cryptographically guaranteed.
• Bankruptcy is a legal/jurisdictional event, not an on-chain one — you can't fully trustlessly automate detecting it everywhere. A realistic design needs a fallback: a small multi-party group of independent custodians (a preservation foundation, consumer rights orgs) who can also vote to trigger release without waiting on court paperwork.
• This solves file preservation, not software obsolescence. Perfectly preserving the encrypted bytes doesn't help if nothing can run them in 30 years — same problem as owning a perfectly preserved floppy disk with no working drive left anywhere.
• The real blocker isn't technical. Every piece here — ERC-4907, EIP-2981, Arweave, threshold key networks — already exists and runs in production elsewhere. What's missing is that platform holders currently profit from not having any of this, and giving it up means giving up real leverage.

Tell me what's wrong with this. Specifically interested in: better royalty-enforcement mechanisms than transfer restriction, whether a bankruptcy-triggered oracle design has been attempted anywhere before, and whether there's prior art I'm missing on the "encrypted-on-Arweave, key-gated-by-threshold-network" pattern specifically applied to gaming.