Epic Games will “definitely not” comply with Minecraft NFT ban

by · July 21, 2022

Epic Games founder and CEO Tim Sweeney says his company “definitely will not” follow Minecraft’s developers in banning non-fungible tokens (NFTs).

As previously reported, Minecraft developers Mojang Studios banned NFT integrations on July 20 as they believe the speculative aspect of NFTs, along with the scarcity and risk of exclusion and fraud allegedly associated with NFTs are against the principles of the game .

The move was seen as high controversial in the NFT community, while it has been met with praise by the group of crypto-skeptic players.

Sweeney’s company is the creators of the wildly successful battle royal game Fortnite, which is also seen as a Metaverse platform. While Epic Games isn’t necessarily pro-crypto or NFTs, the CEO said the firm doesn’t want to enforce any views on the subject on users:

“Developers should be free to decide how to build their games, and you should be free to decide whether you want to play them. I believe that stores and operating system manufacturers should not interfere by forcing their views on others. We definitely don’t want that.”

In response to the post, Twitter user @Low5ive Sweeney asked Epic Games’ policy on banning “hateful/discriminatory content” differs from this. In response, Sweeney suggested that Epic Games makes “editorial” judgments, but NFTs do not currently fall under them.

“A store can choose not to make such judgments and host something that is legal, or choose to draw the line of standard acceptable norms as we do, or only accept games that match the owner’s personal beliefs,” he said.

The NFT ban by Mojang Studios has left a particular project called “NFT Worlds” with a big problem to solve, given that it was built on one of Minecraft’s open source servers.

Related: Delphi Digital: How to get players to accept the integration of NFTs

The community-driven play-to-earn (P2E) platform has an entire crypto and NFT ecosystem built around it, with the NFTs generating 51,000 Ether (ETH), or $80.8 million in trading volume to date. However, since the news dropped, the floor price of the NFTs has fallen from 3.33 ETH to 1.01 ETH at the time of writing, while its parent token WRLD has plunged 55% in that time frame.

Following the Mojang announcement, the NFT Worlds team stated that it is now “brainstorming solutions” on how to move forward. The team mentioned that it is working to get in touch with Minecraft to see if a possible solution can be found, otherwise a pivot to a “Minecraft-like game engine” or GameFi platform is outlined as possible options.