In news that came as a blow to several trading communities, the creators of Minecraft announced Wednesday morning that it would rewrite the game’s user guidelines to effectively ban fan-created integrations of non-fungible tokens (NFTs) with the game.
Under Minecrafttheir current user guidelines, administrators are allowed to charge users for access to their personal host Minecraft servers, although several additional rules apply. This includes requiring paid users to have genuine, paid versions of the game and that access fees remain exactly the same for each user.
Mojang, the Swedish development studio and Microsoft subsidiary behind it Minecraftintends to revise these guidelines to also prohibit the implementation and exchange of NFTs in the game.
In a post on the official Minecraft blog attributed only to “Staff”, Mojang announced that “blockchain technologies are not permitted to be integrated into our client and server applications, nor can Minecraft in-game content such as worlds, skins, persona elements or other mods are used by blockchain technology to create a scarce digital resource.”
The stated reasoning behind the change does not mention any specific names, but notes that third-party companies have launched minecraft-integrated NFT implementations that have created play-to-earn versions of the game, where activities performed in or outside the game allowed players to gradually acquire minecraft-thematic NFTs.
“Each of these uses of NFTs and other blockchain technologies creates digital ownership based on scarcity and exclusion,” the post says, “which is inconsistent with Minecraft values of creative inclusion and playing together. NFTs do not include the whole of our society and create a scenario of the haves and the have-nots.”
Other cited concerns include the unreliability of third-party NFTs; the technology’s general reliance on asset managers that can suddenly disappear, taking a user’s NFTs with them; and NFT’s general tendency to get involved in what are essentially pump-and-dump schemes.
Mojang further stated that they have no plans to implement their own official blockchain technology in the Minecraft “right now”, but will keep an eye on how the technology continues to develop. There is currently no word on how the rule change will affect last year’s official Minecraft NFTs, released as a collaboration with Enjin.
One company affected by Mojang’s rule change is NFT Worlds, which bills itself as a metaverse platform. It had previously hosted a custom Minecraft server, where users could purchase virtual plots of land as NFTs for use in the game, among many other metaverse projects.
Its official reaction to Minecraft NFT ban, as shared on the Discord server, is exploring options that could include moving the technology over to another, similar crafting game, or marketing the implementation style as a service to other game developers. The company has no intention of leaving the space, and is “dedicated to a solution.”
To be fair, this was most likely inevitable. There is a peculiar resistance in the NFT/crypto-sphere to understanding that an NFT theme surrounding the intellectual property rights of others will still be legally treated as infringement of intellectual property rights, since it is essentially unlicensed securities trading. This was also seen earlier this year Magic the Gathering-theme mtgDAO project.
If Web3 is really the future, the future will still have lawyers.
