I'm sure that's true. It's not surprising to me that most of the implementations of NFTs in gaming I've seen is from really small projects. It actually surprises me that AAA developers are interested at all, because they have the player base to justify expenditures on managing their own solutions, and seem to have more to lose from the concept of reusable digital items.

But to me that's all NFTs are. They're data. It's a database that you can query and know that the data on the chain is extremely reliable, you can allow users to interact with that data amongst themselves, you can have financial value freely exchanged without concern, you can ignore everything that happens between all of them, and then you can query balances and know that data integrity is preserved. Your point of failure that you have to worry about (other than typical client-server communication) is how you handle that single touch point between the blockchain data and your game.

I wouldn't call it a paradigm shift, but I will say that I have the technical capability to confidently implement NFT checks, but I would absolutely not trust myself to set up a data solution for a live item marketplace, even if you take financial transactions out of the equation.