On the one hand, yes.
On the other hand, if some centrally-run MMO were to use NFTs that they issue for its items (or, I guess probably maybe they shouldn’t be non-fungible really, because one “hammer of smiting” should probably be equivalent to any other “hammer of smiting”, no point keeping track of them as separate entities when you can just keep track of who owns how many of each. But that is beside the point),
Well, the game devs still control how these items actually behave in-game.
If they want to take away someone’s mystic scepter of lightning, they can just make the game cease to acknowledge the existing “mystic scepter of lightning” token, and give everyone other than that person a new token for “mystic scepter of lightning” and have the game recognize this new token.
So, sure, this person gets to keep their token, but it no longer has the in-game effect or appearance.
So, what’s the point? If the salt loses its saltiness, it is no longer good for anything, except to be thrown out and trampled underfoot.
Someone could make another game which does use the token, but, if this is an mmo, a large part of the value requires the other players. (As, otherwise, why bother making it an online game at all? Just make a local single player game, where the developers can’t change what is on the player’s computer (unless the player chooses to update) anyway,
so unless this other game can get a substantial player base, why would this make the old token for the lightning scepter useful again?
So, for [this strategy of using tokens for items in the game with the goal of making people really possess the items, not at the mercy of the people running the game] to make sense, the entire game would have to be decentralized, or something like that.
(The Cryptokitties thing was kind of like that iirc, in that the page to render them and whatnot was just released as a self-contained thing over IPFS, and while the developers could, of course, release a modified version of it later if they wanted, the original version would still be available and working as long as people wanted to continue using it. Also iirc other people made alternative clients for it which rendered the cats in different ways? So, that kind of fits the idea of “some other game including the scepter token” I guess?)
But if an mmo game is to have like, continuing updates, for new content and such, that doesn’t really seem compatible with the “you really own the items in a meaningful way”.
I suppose it could be set up such that players who didn’t want to update could continue to play an old version, with some degree of compatibility between earlier and later versions? But you can’t trade a Lugia from pokemon Silver to pokemon Blue (though you can trade a Paras from Silver to Blue).