NFT’s. None fungible tokens. A controversial topic right now to be sure. Companies and Crypto-bros keep pushing that these are the future, while it seems almost everyone else is rejecting them outright.
One company not pushing NTF’s and crypto is valve, who have recently banned Crypto and block-chain based games. There was recently some outcry for devs of one of said blockchain based games, “age of rust” spoke out about their disappointment in this decisions, who claimed that steams point of view was that steam didnt want “items that had real world value” on the service… which is a bit strange and personally I am going to call fowl on the devs here because valve themselves have games which have items with real world values.
In a recent interview with Rock Paper Shotgun, valve co-founder gabe newel clarified that he has no issue with owning something digitally or taking part in a shared universe, however the negatives associated with NFT’s far outweighed any positives.
At one point steam actually accepted bitcoin as a payment method for games, but this functionality was cut due to the volatility of the market. Quote:
“Like, why did I spend $497 one day to buy a game, and the next day I spent 47 cents, what’s going on here? Volatility is a bad thing in a medium of exchange. That was one problem, that sort of volatility was creating more pain for our customers than the value of having the option of using cryptocurrencies.”
With NFT’s, the problem is much more over people using them to engage in fraudulent behavior. Quote:
“With the actors that are currently in this NFT space, they’re just not people you really are wanting to be doing business with. That doesn’t say anything about the underlying technology, it’s just a reflection of the people right now who are viewing it as an opportunity to rip customers off, or engage in money laundering, or other things like that.”
Newel asserts that his issue is not with blockchain technology in general,but with the people using them in ways that impact players negatively. Steam banned NFT games back in october of last year, and they are not alone. Recently Square Enix confirmed that NFT’s would never be part of its popular MMO Final Fantasy 14 while unveiling the games 10 year roadmap.
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