“STORES AND OPERATING SYSTEM MAKERS SHOULDN’T INTERFERE BY FORCING THEIR VIEWS ONTO OTHERS”
Tim Sweeney, the CEO of Epic, said that the company won’t stop selling games with NFTs on its Epic Games Store platform. He said that it’s wrong to “interfere” with how game developers make their games.
Mojang, the studio that makes Minecraft and is owned by Microsoft, said in an article on Wednesday that it has no plans to add NFTs to the game. Players have been happy about this news.
Someone on Twitter asked Sweeney if Epic would be taking the same stance.
Sweeney said, “Developers should be able to choose how to make their games.” “And you can choose whether or not to play them.”
“I think stores and people who make operating systems shouldn’t force their views on other people. We most certainly won’t.”
NFTs are unique, non-exchangeable pieces of data that are stored on a decentralized ledger called a blockchain. This lets users buy and sell digital assets like in-game items or artwork.
When asked later in the thread how this rule would affect a company that wanted to publish hateful content on Epic’s platform, Sweeney said that the company does have editorial guidelines, but that NFTs don’t currently break them.
Sweeney explained why the controversial technology won’t be banned outright by saying, “A store could choose to make no such decisions and host anything that’s legal or choose to draw the line at mainstream acceptable norms as we do or accept only games that fit the owner’s personal beliefs.”
hey @EpicGames it’d be really nice to see the same opinion from the epic games store. please get rid of every last one of those games on the store @TimSweeneyEpic https://t.co/lTXX0x1MFg
— Joe (@DicklessRichard) July 21, 2022
In a statement released on Wednesday, Mojang said that using NFT technology would be against the Minecraft Usage Guidelines.
“To ensure that Minecraft players have a safe and inclusive experience, blockchain technologies are not permitted to be integrated inside our client and server applications, nor may Minecraft in-game content such as worlds, skins, persona items, or other mods, be utilized by blockchain technology to create a scarce digital asset,” it said.
Adding collectible NFTs that players could buy or earn would go against Minecraft’s “values of creative inclusion and playing together” and “create a scenario of the haves and the have-nots,” it said.
In the Game Developers Conference’s annual State of the Game Industry Report, over 2,700 developers were asked about their work. Seventy percent of those asked said they had no interest in adding NFTs to their games.
In June, sales of NFTs hit their lowest point in a year. This was due to a general slowdown in the cryptocurrency market, which had gone from being worth around $3 trillion in November 2021 to being worth less than $1 trillion.
