Tim Sweeney, founder and CEO of Epic Games, says his company “definitely won’t” follow Minecraft developers in banning non-fungible tokens (NFTs).
As previously reported, Minecraft developers Mojang Studios banned NFT integration on Wednesday, believing that the speculative aspect of NFTs combined with the rarity, exclusion risks, and scams supposedly associated with NFTs go against the game’s principles.
The move was seen as highly controversial in the NFT community, while being praised by a group of crypto-skeptical players.
Sweeney is the creator of the widely successful battle royale game Fortnite, also seen as the Metaverse. While Epic Games is not necessarily pro-cryptocurrency or NFT, the CEO said the company is not looking to force any views on the matter to its users:
“Developers should be free to decide how their games are created, and you are free to decide whether you want to play them or not. I think stores and OS makers shouldn’t get in the way of imposing their opinions on others. We certainly won’t.”
In response to the post, Twitter user Low5ive asked Sweeney if Epic Games’ policy on banning “hateful/discriminatory content” differs from that. In response, Sweeney suggested that Epic Games make “editorial” rulings, but that NFT is not currently subject to them.
“The store can choose not to make such judgments and host anything that is legal, or choose to end the prevailing accepted standards as we do, or only accept games that conform to the owner’s personal beliefs,” he said.
The ban on NFT by Mojang Studios left one particular project called NFT Worlds a huge problem to solve, given that it was built on one of Minecraft’s open source servers.
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The community-driven Play for Profit (P2E) platform has an entire crypto and NFT ecosystem built around it, with NFTs generating 51,000 Ether (ETH), or $80.8 million worth of trading volume at the time of writing. However, since the news slump, the minimum price of NFT has fallen from 3.33 ETH to 1.01 ETH at the time of writing, while the original WRLD token has fallen by 55% over this time frame.
Following Mojang’s announcement, the NFT Worlds team said they now “brainstorm solutions” on how to move forward. The team stated that they are working on contacting Minecraft to see if a possible solution can be found. Otherwise, a hub for a “Minecraft-like game engine” or the GameFi platform was selected as possible options.
