No NFTs in Minecraft? This crypto group will create their own game

The 20th of June Microsoft-owned Mojang announced that NFTs and blockchain technology would no longer receive “integration” with Minecraft. That was bad news for NFT Worlds, which has spent months building an entire crypto-economy on top of a collection of randomized seeds needed to make specific Minecraft map.

Now, the team behind NFT Worlds announced that they will create a new game that is “based on many of the core mechanics of “Minecraft” but which will be “completely freed from the enforcement of the policy Microsoft and Mojang have over Minecraft.” NFT Worlds promises its new Minecraft-style game will be built “from scratch” to be familiar with Minecraft players, but now with “modernization and active development Minecraft has been missing for years.”

Don’t worry, everything will be fine

NFT Worlds’ games will always be free to play, the team says, and users won’t need a credit card to buy any additional content. This content will presumably be purchased instead with NFT World’s token, whose value has fallen over 60 percent in the week since Mojang’s announcement.

Currently, players who own an NFT World issued by NFT Worlds can still use their random seed to play in Minecraft or even host multiplayer sessions in that map, as a Microsoft spokesperson confirmed to Vice. But that’s not saying much, since the NFT itself never gave exclusive rights to that map any more than writing “World 1-1” on a piece of paper gives ownership of the iconic Super Mario Bros. level.

However, under Microsoft’s new rules, NFT World’s blockchain will no longer be able to connect Minecraftits API. This means that players can no longer easily make in-game crypto payments denominated in NFT Worlds’ $WRLD token, as well as take advantage of other features coded using the NFT Worlds API.

The NFT Worlds team says it will prioritize “backwards compatibility with existing Minecraft server development plugins and practices” in its upcoming clone. That means creators should “continue to build NFT Worlds content” on top of that Minecraftsays the team, confident that it will work with the new, revamped NFT Worlds game whenever it launches.

However, thanks to Mojang’s new EULA, any further NFT Worlds-related development in the Minecraft may not involve any “blockchain-based functionality, NFT support or game currency” for now. And since those were the core features that defined NFT Worlds’ value as an add-on, it’s unclear exactly what NFT Worlds developers will do before their new Minecraft option is available.

You can’t fire us, we quit

NFT Worlds characterizes this new split as “a web2 vs web3 battle … between two different visions of the future of the web” and “a technological battle over who will have ownership of digital assets.” The team comes across as protectors of the “spirit of innovation through independent creators”, while casting Microsoft as a profit-obsessed behemoth that “will always act in the interests of their shareholders and balance sheet, to the detriment of innovation, player experience and creators.”

On the contrary, Mojang argued last week that projects like NFT Worlds create systems of “digital ownership based on scarcity and exclusion, which are inconsistent with Minecraft values ​​of creative inclusion and playing together.” The rules it has put in place to prevent NFTs are meant “to ensure that Minecraft remains a community where everyone has access to the same content,” the company wrote.