Minecraft developer Mojang has explicitly banned all NFT technologies from anything to do with the game, and has set the price of one project directly related to the title.
In a new blog post (opens in a new tab), Mojang offered an “early look” at its new policies around Non-Fungible Tokens and blockchain technology related to Minecraft. The short version is that “integrations of NFTs with Minecraft are generally not something we will support or allow.”
Mojang explains that Minecraft’s usage guidelines allow server hosts to charge for access, but that “all players should have access to the same functionality.” This ideal conflicts with NFTs, which “create models of scarcity and exclusion that conflict with our policies and the spirit of Minecraft.”
“NFT implementations associated with Minecraft” already exist, but Mojang says the scarcity inherent in tokens and concerns that “some third-party NFTs may not be reliable” means the developer is taking a firm stance. The post explains that “blockchain technologies are not allowed to be integrated into our Minecraft client and server applications, nor can they be used to create NFTs associated with in-game content, including worlds, skins, persona items, or other mods. ”
All of this is extremely bad news for the NFT project ‘NFT Worlds’, which sells Minecraft seeds – the codes used to generate the worlds you play in – as non-fungible tokens. According to Vice (opens in a new tab)NFT Worlds has generated more than $75 million in transaction volume (at current prices), but the project may not have much longer left — the value of the worlds fell more than 70% in the hours following Mojang’s announcement.
Terrible news for projects like NFT Worlds, which is just a layer on top of Minecraft. Their token price and NFT floor prices have both crashed more than 70% on the news. pic.twitter.com/9DImzqfxHs20 July 2022
NFT Worlds developers criticized the ban as “a step back in innovation” in a statement (opens in a new tab) posted on their Discord channel. The developers say they are trying to get in touch with Mojang to find out “what the true internal motivations might have been,” and “how we can even find an alternate outcome.” If those efforts fail, however, the team says it may be forced to pivot to a new engine or platform “with Minecraft and Microsoft completely out of the picture with no way to stop us.”
The NFT bubble appears to have burst after widespread attention throughout the latter half of 2021. It prompted some developers – notably Ubisoft and Square Enix – to take a look at the technology, but Ubisoft’s “Quartz” scheme quickly proved extremely unpopular, with the game it was originally associated with, Ghost Recon Breakpoint, set to receive no further content updates.
Start from scratch? Here is our list of best minecraft seeds to check out.
