NFT game developers take on Minecraft after blockchain ban

Follows Minecraft outright banning of NFTs in the game, some blockchain-based projects have been forced to find new homes. Case in point: NFT Worlds, a beleaguered metaverse game project that once allowed users to create, buy, and trade various Minecraft-compatible 3D worlds. With Minecraft’s ban in place, NFT Worlds’ proprietary $WRLD token immediately plummeted in value, compounding the effects of an industry-wide downturn.

NFT Worlds saw this potentially disastrous news as a gathering. Like many others in this bear market, the company has no choice but to keep building. In a lengthy public statement, the NFT Worlds team announced that they are now creating their own version of Minecraft, complete with “the modernization and active development Minecraft has been missing for years.”

But this raises the question: Can NFT developers take on a project as large in scope as Minecraft?

When cons can

According to the NFT Worlds team, they have already begun gathering “the best visionary developers within the Minecraft development ecosystem” to work on the project. In addition, the team cites the support of a thriving community and “a stack of funds to sustain us through the process.” Given these resources, the question is not if they may develop a viable Minecraft competitor to host the public’s hand-built metaverse experiences in the future, but when.

Despite its qualities as a simple, kid-friendly survival game, the infrastructure that has allowed Minecraft to balloon into its current state won’t happen in a few months. In fact, even an experienced team of developers can take years to create and roll out such a complex architecture. While the core game has been recreated with an estimated 500 lines of code in Python, other features key to the Minecraft experience will present any would-be developer with a unique set of challenges – such as procedurally generated assets, infinitely looping worlds, and a flexible set of creator tools .

Creating a Web3-enabled game similar in spirit to Minecraft is going to be a huge effort just to pull off, but it’s important that the NFT Worlds team take their time. Exactly how long is anyone’s guess, but for context, The sandbox – also a voxel-based game centered around player creativity – spent four years in development before launching its alpha version.

In general, rushing the development process of any kind of game, Web3 or otherwise, does not bode well for the quality of the final product. Just look at the mainstream gaming industry for some notable examples of games released in unfinished, unpolished states to hordes of angry gamers: 2021 had Battlefield 20422020 had Cyberpunk 20772018 had Fallout 76 – the list goes on.

A long wait begins

Even with the latest policy changes, worlds players have created will live on Minecraft. They are still allowed to operate and can be played, according to NFT Worlds’ press release. But it will no longer integrate blockchain-based functionality. Additionally, the launch and game pages for NFT Worlds will continue to be maintained and developed to introduce new features that attract non-crypto players while the upcoming gaming platform is under development. still, NFT Worlds will have little more to cling to than the idealism of its player base until the alpha of its Minecraft competitor finally launches.

“Make no mistake, this is a web2 vs web3 match,” reads the press release from NFT Worlds. “It’s a battle between two different visions of the future of the web: one that prioritizes shareholder value and profit margins above all else, and one that prioritizes the spirit of innovation through independent creators. It is both a philosophical conflict about what the Internet represents, and a technological battle about who should have ownership of digital assets.”

While it’s a stirring mission, one wonders how much NFT Worlds’ original model actually embodied the “spirit of innovation.” There’s no doubt that NFT Worlds reported 100,000 users used a great deal of creativity in building out new game modes and worlds using Minecraft as their canvas, but we can’t quite say the same for the project managers who precariously rested all their hopes on what is, at the end of the day, someone else’s game.

In NFT World’s official documentation, this concern was addressed directly. Why Minecraft? Claiming over a decade of experience modding and building on Minecraft as an open source platform, the NFT Worlds team stated, “When we started NFT Worlds, we knew that in order to compete in the fast-growing NFT metaverse gaming category we need to bootstrap our vision using an existing open source gaming ecosystem to create the thriving community-driven world development, community spaces, community-created games and connected worlds that we envisioned.”

“We didn’t want to have to ‘reinvent the wheel’ by creating our own unproven game from scratch while innovating on the NFT integration and decentralized metaverse side of the platform we envisioned. This would take far too long time to deliver.”

Here’s hoping the upcoming game lives up to NFT Worlds’ vision of what Minecraft should have been all this time. There are many disappointments in the wake of the original game owners’ decision, but one bright side remains: NFT Worlds will have more than enough time to realize its vision of the Minecraft experience on its own terms.