It’s quite different, and your purchase seems more sensible to me.
When you buy a skin, you’re buying an asset that you’ll see and use in your game. Sure, it’s just cosmetics, but it’s kinda usable cosmetics. If the game goes down, your skin is probably lost as well, but at least you had some fun with it.
When you buy an nft, you buy your rights to a link to an image. It’s way more “protected” than simply buying a skin, in a similar way to how owning crypto works. Your right to that link is saved on a blockchain and you become the sole “owner” of that link. You could technically resell it (not sure if it’s allowed on Reddit though), but if a server hosting that image goes down, you’re left owning a broken link.
And while there’s no other way to get an asset into a game other than to buy it (or mod the game), you could just save an image you like and use it as an avatar anyway, so you’re not even required to buy nfts to use those as an avatar/banner. It’s more of a trading service.
That technology seems great for proving your rights to some documents or IDs, but it’s still weird to me that people decided to use NFTs for selling link rights to generated jpgs. You don’t even get the licence or usage rights to an image itself, it could be copyright-protected and owned by someone else.
The thing I don't get is that, afaik, there's no real limitation on the size of the nft. To my knowledge there's nothing stopping you from making a Blockchain that supports full images in each nft. However, instead they decided to sell receipts.
Blockchain is very limited when it comes to storage. Bitcoin for example, is limited to grow by 1MB every 10th minute. That’s 1MB for all users globally. Other blockchains allows for plenty more, but still enough to store entire images.
The reason why there are limits is because it’s supposed to be possible for anyone to download the entire blockchain to their computer and verify. This is not practical if the blockchain becomes 100TB or so.
Mostly because hosting an image within the blockchain would require so much computational power and excess energy usage, that it wouldn’t be profitable even for the most successful scams.
And I’m not sure whether calculating proof of work for a blockchain that holds images within is even possible using the current algorithms. But I’ve looked at it a while ago, could be that some updated system already exists. But it’s still very much not free, and quite damaging environmentally.
Fun fact, you don't even buy the rights to the link. You can make an infinite amount of NFTs that go to the same link. It is a common scam tactic to try and sell duplicated NFTs.