Seems like a group of like minded individuals could easily form an identity that only had access to things they absolutely intended to share between them. This is already an issue with streaming services.

With online accounts you could prevent said identity from connecting to multiple online games at once but this is notably worse than old school physical games where you could have 3 games at 3 different friends houses while playing a fourth.

Makes me wonder if we should stop multiplying complexity beyond need and go back to cartridges except now they are $5 64GB usb drives.

Right. Taking it a step further, maybe the users could actually transfer the assets to unique addresses that are their friends, and send it back when a different friend wants to play. Would only take a few seconds, or a few minutes. Like assuming there are session checking that already exists, the friends could would have their unique id due to their unique address, but have the same gear or game access.

A unique mitigation could be to raise the barrier of sharing, like not only could you check for NFT ownership, you could look for a purchase transaction on an NFT marketplace. So now the friends would need capital to wash trade that, and they'd have to beat the bots looking for low value bids, and they would have to unnecessarily pay for transaction fees.

Not advocating for that, but oh well the idea is out there now.

People would have separate accounts for each game to prevent losing everything.

It becomes a long serial number that anyone who knows can transfer to another account.

But it wouldn't make sense to pay to transfer it over ($60-$300 gas fees) on an under $60 game.

I can see some real issues with your approach.

NFTs can't be used for products under a few hundred if you want to leverage the value as insurance.

only Ethereum mainnet has "$60-$300 gas fees", which is multiple orders of magnitude higher than everything else. there are a couple of networks that would maintain their low transaction fees even at the same transaction size as Ethereum and marketcap.

So the game would check against a blockchain that the signature is valid every time you want to play? What prevents you from just keeping a snapshot of the blockchain at a point when you owned it?

verification signatures don't use the blockchain, this is just public private key cryptography the same as PGP. the blockchain, for this purpose, just helped proliferate a standard application of that in a few years, where PGP failed at that for 25 years and counting as it has stayed very niche. many Web3 services use this for determining a user, or even accepting terms and conditions, while logging them in.

the client and the server would be checking nearest nodes for the latest block height. so any mismatch would prevent the user from keeping a snapshot of an old blockchain state as the max height would be too different.

it is also easy to disconnect a user if the assets moved when reading the current blockheight. many web3 applications just keep a websocket open to several nodes, this is boilerplate code at this point. reading from a blockchain is free. many services already check for onchain tokens to enable or disable access, for several years now. you can try gaming them to trick for access and see if you find anything.