Epic Games CEO Reaffirms NFT Stance After Minecraft Rejection

Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney has responded to Minecraft rejecting NFTs by reaffirming his stance regarding the matter.

Minecraft Says No To NFTs, Epic Games Tim Sweeney Keeps Open View

A couple of days back, the super popular videogame Minecraft released an official statement in relation to non-fungible tokens and blockchain technology.

The company was of the opinion that NFTs don’t align with the game’s values of creative inclusion and playing together.

“NFTs are not inclusive of all our community and create a scenario of the haves and the have-nots,” said the announcement. “The speculative pricing and investment mentality around NFTs takes the focus away from playing the game and encourages profiteering, which we think is inconsistent with the long-term joy and success of our players.”

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Following this view, Mojang, the developer behind the game, has disallowed the use of non-fungible tokens and other applications of blockchain-based technology on the platform.

Last year, Valve’s Steam announced a ban of crypto and NFT-related games on the PC gaming store. As a reply, competitor Epic Games Store welcomed such videogames on their platform with open arms.

Yesterday, one Twitter user asked Tim Sweeney, the founder and CEO of Epic Games, as to whether the company will now also take a similar stance as Minecraft.

“Developers should be free to decide how to build their games, and you are free to decide whether to play them,” said Sweeney in a response. “I believe stores and operating system makers shouldn’t interfere by forcing their views onto others. We definitely won’t.”

While Minecraft rejected NFTs on its platform, the Japanese videogame company Square Enix announced its new NFT project on the same day.

State Of The Market

After facing dwindling trading volumes for many months, the NFT market finally showed some high activity during the start of May, providing some hope to investors.

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However, the surge didn’t last too long, and the subsequent plunge took volumes down by around 90%. The below chart shows the trend in the weekly non-fungible token trading volumes over the past year.

Looks like the volumes have been very low in recent weeks | Source: NonFungible

In the last couple of months, the NFT weekly volumes have stayed around $233 million, a pretty low value when compared to the normal for last year.

At the time of writing, Bitcoin’s price floats around $23.1k, up 12% in the past week.

The value of the crypto seems to have been moving sideways over the last few days | Source: BTCUSD on TradingView

Featured image from Andrey Metelev on Unsplash.com, charts from TradingView.com, nonfungible.com