[Tenoke]

People already play a lot of games where items are bought and sold for real money (not just gacha but e.g MMOs, Diablo etc.) so you can look through gaming forums to find what drives them.

>Also, unless the game itself is open source and any forks / successors honor the same chain, how is that any better than just storing who owns what in a SQL database?

I also don't see that many benefits to be sure it's worth it but there are some in theory. One people mention is that games can easily share items - e.g. owners of a cool sword NFT for one game can use it in another or cryptopunks can have cryptopunk skins etc. Trading would be more streamlined.I guess another potential benefit is you can also have them listed forever like Xbox achievments that can be looked at by others even if after the game is no longer active.