Tim Sweeney, CEO of Epic Games, stated that the company will not outright forbid NFTs since developers “should be free to decide how to build their games.”
Tim Sweeney, CEO of Epic Games, said his company “certainly won’t” follow the lead of the creators of Minecraft by outlawing nonfungible tokens (NFTs).
As was previously reported, NFT integrations were prohibited by Minecraft’s creators Mojang Studios on Wednesday because they consider the speculative nature of NFTs, as well as their scarcity, dangers of exclusion, and potential for scams, to be incompatible with the game’s core values.
The action was seen negatively by the NFT community, but positively by the group of gamers who are skeptical of cryptocurrencies.
Fortnite, a hugely popular battle royale game and platform for the Metaverse, was made by Sweeney’s business. Although Epic Games isn’t always in favor of cryptocurrencies or NFTs, the CEO declared that the company has no intention of imposing any opinions on its users:
“Developers should be free to decide how to build their games, and you are free to decide whether to play them. I believe stores and operating system makers shouldn’t interfere by forcing their views onto others. We definitely won’t.”
Twitter user Low5ive responded to the post by asking Sweeney if Epic Games had a different policy on “hateful/discriminatory stuff” than this. Sweeney responded by saying that while Epic Games does make “editorial” decisions, NFTs do not currently come under them.
“A store could choose to make no such judgments and host anything that’s legal, or choose to draw the line at mainstream acceptable norms as we do, or accept only games that conform to the owner’s personal beliefs,” he said.
NFT Worlds, a project that was created on one of Minecraft’s open source servers, now faces a huge challenge as a result of Mojang Studios’ NFT prohibition.
The community-driven play-to-earn (P2E) platform has a whole cryptocurrency and NFT ecosystem built around it, and its NFTs currently generate 51,000 ETH, or $80.8 million in trading volume. The floor price of its NFTs has fallen from 3.33 ETH to 1.01 ETH at the time of writing since the news broke, while the value of its native token, WRLD, has decreased by 55% during the same period.
The NFT Worlds team declared following the Mojang news that it is currently “brainstorming solutions” on how to proceed. The team said it is attempting to contact Minecraft to see if a potential answer may be found. If not, switching to a “Minecraft-like game engine” or the GameFi platform has been suggested as an alternative.
