Fair point. Smart contracts can only enforce digital property rights insofar as the digital property is constituted by smart contracts. So this would work with

Fair point. Smart contracts can only enforce digital property rights insofar as the digital property is constituted by smart contracts. So this would work with NFTs, as they are blockchain-based assets, but not classical video games, which are not. So what would work is if the providers of the game assets are governed by a decentralized protocol on the blockchain. An example would be a game which is dependent on a remotely provided computation element to run - say a massive collectively rendered virtual world - and this element is provided by a distributed set of providers who are compensated via a smart contract, mechanistically, upon the blockchain validating proof of work they provide to a smart contract. Such a game could provide a person with a guarantee that a particular NFT will have indefinite access to that virtual world, because the guarantee will be enforced by immutable smart contracts. >>People maintaining an infrastructure just so they don't have control over it is also a pipe dream They do it for the same reason Ethereum validators stake their ETH and validate blocks on the Beacon Chain: to earn income. But what they earn is enforced in a decentralized way, according to the rules encoded in the protocol, to make it maximally immutable/interference-proof.