Royalties on secondary sales were presented as a property of non-fungible tokens themselves, and creators built businesses on that assumption. The enforcement was always happening somewhere else, and that turned out to matter enormously.
The token standard never carried the rule
The common standards define ownership, transfer and approval. They contain no mechanism that inspects a sale price or diverts a share of it to an original creator.
A transfer is a transfer, and the contract does not know whether it accompanied a payment, a gift or a move between two wallets belonging to the same person.
Royalty information was published as metadata that marketplaces could read, which made it a request rather than a condition of the transaction.
Marketplaces were the actual enforcement layer
A marketplace controls the contract through which a sale settles, so it can deduct a royalty from the proceeds before forwarding the balance to the seller.
While the major venues all did this, the arrangement was indistinguishable from enforcement by the token itself, and very few people examined the difference.
The dependency only became visible once a venue decided to stop, at which point the same tokens traded without any payment reaching the creator.
Competition made the payment a disadvantage
Sellers compare net proceeds across venues, and a marketplace that skips the royalty offers a better price for identical goods.
Once one venue made royalties optional, volume moved towards it, and the others faced a choice between matching the policy and losing their sellers.
The outcome was determined by ordinary competitive pressure rather than by anyone's view of whether creators deserved the income.
Technical enforcement has real costs
Contracts can restrict transfers to an approved list of marketplaces that honour royalties, which makes the rule binding at the token level.
The restriction also limits where the asset can trade and who can move it, which conflicts with the idea that the holder owns it outright.
Collections have taken different positions on that trade, and buyers increasingly treat transfer restrictions as a characteristic worth checking before purchase.
Primary sales absorbed the shift
With secondary income unreliable, projects moved value towards the initial sale, pricing mints higher or releasing supply in stages.
Others attached ongoing benefits to holding rather than to trading, so the creator's relationship with the collection does not depend on transactions they cannot see.
The broader lesson applies well beyond this market: a rule that lives in an application rather than in the asset lasts only as long as the applications choose to apply it.