Epic Games CEO confirms NFT stance after Minecraft rejection
Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney has responded to Minecraft rejecting NFTs by confirming his stance on the matter.
Minecraft Says No to NFTs, Epic Games Tim Sweeney Holds Open View
A couple of days ago, the super popular video game Minecraft released an official statement regarding non-fungible tokens and blockchain technology.
The company felt that NFTs were inconsistent with the game’s values of creative inclusion and playing together.
“NFTs do not include our entire society and create a scenario of haves and have-nots,” the announcement said. “The speculative pricing and investment mentality around NFTs takes the focus away from playing the game and encourages profit, which we believe is inconsistent with the long-term enjoyment and success of our players.”
Related Reading | Quant Suggests Tesla’s Bitcoin Dump Behind Recent Red Coinbase Premium
Following this view, Mojang, the developer behind the game, has denied the use of non-fungible tokens and other applications of blockchain-based technology on the platform.
Last year, Valve’s Steam announced a ban on crypto- and NFT-related games on its PC gaming store. In response, competitor Epic Games Store welcomed such video games onto their platform with open arms.
Yesterday a Twitter user asked Tim Sweeney, founder and CEO of Epic Games, on whether the company will now also take a similar stance to Minecraft.
“Developers should be free to decide how to build their games, and you should be free to decide whether you want to play them,” Sweeney said in a response. “I believe that stores and operating system manufacturers should not interfere by forcing their views on others. We definitely don’t want that.”
While Minecraft rejected NFTs on its platform, Japanese video game company Square Enix announced its new NFT project on the same day.
The state of the market
After facing declining trading volume for many months, the NFT market finally showed high activity in early May, giving investors hope.
Related Reading | Bitcoin Is ‘Here To Stay’ Ex-BlackRock Investment Advisor Says – Better Than Gold?
However, the increase did not last long and the subsequent plunge took the volume down by around 90%. The chart below shows the trend in the weekly non-fungible token trading volumes over the past year.
Looks like the volumes have been very low in recent weeks | Source: NonFungible
For the past couple of months, NFT’s weekly volumes have remained around $233 million, a fairly low value compared to last year’s normal.
At the time of writing, Bitcoin’s price is hovering around $23.1k, up 12% in the last week.
The value of the crypto seems to have been moving sideways over the last few days | Source: BTCUSD on TradingView
Featured image from Andrey Metelev on Unsplash.com, charts from TradingView.com, nonfungible.com
