It couldn't replace the DRM, just the license check. Some DRM spyware from the publisher will still have to check if you can prove ownership via the blockchain instead of checking a CD key against the publisher's license server. If you can't, it will refuse to launch the game. Someone will crack the game and provide a DRM-free experience that is better.

I struggle to see how the NFT provides any value in this setup.

It doesn't, except that I guess the publisher doesn't have to run a license server. IMO this would be better achieved by simply not having a license check, at least on some terminal version after which no updates will go out.

Have an interface that interacts with MetaMask or WalletConnect within the game.

What I mean is: the point of DRM is to regulate play of the game whether a person has rights to run the software to play it.

How do NFTs help if I have the binaries on my machine and can just patch the check for NFTs to always return "Yes this user is authorized?"

You can patch the check with binaries? Wouldn’t you need to modify the source and build?

I’m not familiar enough with tampering, cracking software like that so I can’t really say.

No problem. So in general: yes, it's not always trivial to crack a locally-hosted binary but it's generally possible. It can often be done by actually modifying the binary itself (it's just machine code; if, for example, the entire check is evaluated by one "Call out to the server to find out if we're authorized" function that returns a boolean, you can just replace the first few bytes in its machine code with "LDA $FF # true ; RETURN" and the function will think you're always registered. If it's more complicated, you could maybe run a proxy server locally that pretends to be the check server and always returns "authorized" for the query.

Assuming everyone's playing by the rules, I can see how an NFT could be used to indicate when someone has an ownership license to play a game (but not the mechanics of how that right would be enforced were someone to patch their local copy to just ignore the rights check). If the game is cloud-hosted, this is easier to enforce.

Ooh very interesting, thanks for explaining!

From reading others replies too, it does looks like client-only mechanism on its own is weak compared to having checks on both the client and server..

Patching out these checks has existed for literally decades.

Even in the 90's (And possibly 80's and before), this was common. Games distributed on floppies would have a check that involved asking you what the 13th word of page 4 of the manual was, or would have some sort of decoder wheel. And it wasn't hard to find cracked versions that had those checks patched out.

When games started coming on CDs, there were copy protection tricks that could detect if the game was running from an ISO image (via Daemon Tools or something) or even a copied disc, and those were all patched out.

GameCopyWorld was a very popular website in the early '00s. It served up these cracked versions of games. How it still exists is beyond me, tbh.