VC, ex-Candy Crush developer Lars Jörnow says NFTs in the game are irrelevant

Investors and entrepreneurs who invest their money in blockchain games as the future of the industry, promise players a world where they not only play for fun, but play to earn. But for a VC, the verdict is still out.

Lars Jörnow, founder of EQT Ventures and former head of mobile gaming at Candy Crush developer KIng, told Insider that his company was not “super bullish” on NFTs, the symbols used to reward players in blockchain games with decentralized ownership of unique objects.

“There hasn’t really been a problem with centralized ownership, so from that perspective I’m not sure how much better decentralized ownership of elements in the game is,” he said.

Supporters of NFTs have seen the idea as a means of giving players full control over collectibles in games by taking authority away from a centralized authority such as a game studio and giving users full control over tokens they can collect or use in the game. .

An example is Axie Infinity, a game to make money with about 2.8 million users, where players collect NFTs that represent small creatures that can be used to fight or hunt for treasures. The game, which has attracted partners such as Samsung and Ubisoft, was hacked in March, causing it to lose around $ 600 million in cryptocurrency.

For Jörnow, who spent his early days at King playing thousands of flash games, decentralized ownership of items offered by NFTs seems “irrelevant”, with NFTs themselves not seeming to make a game. more fun or offer something more besides enabling “speculation so you can buy and sell things”.

“When you talk about why an NFT game is more fun than a traditional game, when you have these arguments, you’ll finally get to the end. [conclusion] that users can make money buying and selling, so it’s almost like a financial instrument rather than a game in itself, he said.

“It allows speculation so you can buy and sell things, and in theory it allows for the decentralized ownership of items in the game, but without a game company running the game, the decentralized ownership of an item is irrelevant.”

Gambling games have met with similar criticism from other corners of the industry.

Valve, the developer of the game distribution platform Steam, announced in October 2021 that they would block crypto-based games. In February, Valve President Gabe Newell told Eurogamer that the move was made because he felt that much of what was involved with such games was “super sketched” and even “illegal.”

But venture capitalists and entrepreneurs are seeing dollar signs, amid broader interest in tokens.

On July 6, the American VC company Konvoy Ventures announced a new fund of 150 million dollars dedicated to games, with plans to spend around 20-30% of the new fund on blockchain games.

Earlier this month, Jason Fung, former head of TikTok’s gaming unit, told Reuters that he was preparing to launch a blockchain game launch after ending the viral video app in June.

Some of gaming’s biggest names such as

Epic games

is looking to get into action as well, with the Fortnite developer planning to release Grit, an NFT-based battle royale game developed by Web3 company Gala Games, on the online store later this year.

Jörnow’s comments coincide with a collapse in NFT sales, amid rising interest rates and turbulent markets.

Figures from Chainalysis, a blockchain data firm, indicate that NFT sales fell from $ 12.6 billion in January to around $ 1 billion last month.

EQT has previously made investments in the blockchain area, with Jörnow noting that the company was looking more at the underlying infrastructure of the sector at the moment, rather than consumer-oriented technology.