Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney has said that the firm won’t ban NFTs, as devs “should be liberal to decide a way to build their games.”
Epic Games founder and CEO Tim Sweeney says his firm “definitely won’t” follow Minecraft’s developers in banning non-fungible tokens (NFTs).
As previously reported, Minecraft developers Mojang Studios banned NFT integrations on July 20 because it believes the speculative aspect of NFTs, together with scarcity and risks of exclusion and scams supposedly related to NFTs being against the game’s principles.
The move was seen as highly controversial within the NFT community, while it’s been met with praise by the cohort of crypto-skeptic gamers.
Sweeney’s company is that the creators of the widely successful melee game Fortnite, which is additionally seen as a Metaverse platform. While Epic Games isn’t necessarily pro-crypto or NFTs, the CEO said the firm isn’t looking to enforce any views on the topic on its users:
“Developers should be unengaged to decide a way to build their games, and you’re liberated to decide whether to play them. i think stores and package makers shouldn’t interfere by forcing their views onto others. We definitely won’t.”
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.
— Tim Sweeney (@TimSweeneyEpic) July 21, 2022
In response to the post, Twitter user @Low5ive asked Sweeney Epic Games’ policy on prohibiting “hateful/discriminatory content” differs from this. In response, Sweeney suggested that Epic Games does make “editorial” judgements, but NFTs don’t currently be them.
“A store could opt to make no such judgments and host anything that’s legal, or value more highly to draw the road at mainstream acceptable norms as we do, or accept only games that conform to the owner’s personal beliefs,” he said.
The NFT ban by Mojang Studios has left one particular project dubbed “NFT Worlds” with a serious problem to unravel, as long as it had been built on one among Minecraft’s open source servers.
The community driven Play-to-earn (P2E) platform has a whole crypto and NFT ecosystem built around it, with its NFTs generating 51,000 Ether (ETH), or $80.8 million worth of trading volume thus far. However, since the news dropped, the ground price of its NFTs has dropped from 3.33 ETH to 1.01 ETH at the time of writing, while its native token WRLD has plunged by 55% within that point frame.
After the Mojang announcement, the NFT Worlds team stated it’s now “brainstorming solutions” on a way to move forward. The team mentioned that it’s working to urge in reality with Minecraft to work out if a possible solution will be found, otherwise a pivot to a “Minecraft-like game engine” or GameFi platform has been outlined as possible options.
We've just shared the following announcement on our Discord regarding the current @Minecraft & @nftworldsNFT situation. pic.twitter.com/ARbKABRK4A
— NFT Worlds (@nftworldsNFT) July 20, 2022
