Fortnite Creator Launches NFT Game

Fortnite creator Epic Games has launched its first NFT-powered game, Blankos Block Party, on its store. 

Epic Games Gets Its First NFT Game

The popular web3 game Blankos Block Party will be the first NFT-based game to be available on the Epic Games marketplace. The game, which was launched by Mythical Games back in 2020, has over a million players to date. It is an NFT-powered, online creation game previously available in its beta version in its own studio’s marketplace, the Mythical Platform. 

The Epic Games platform has been ready to onboard several web3-based games lately. For a hot minute, it seemed that the first NFT-powered game on the platform that introduced Fortnite to millions would be the Western-themed shooter game, Grit by Gala Games. However, the Blankos Block Party game has beaten it to rush. 

Toy-Inspired Platform

The game features a bright and colorful world, where users can collaborate with unique personalized and interactive elements like avatar characters, accessories, weapons, and virtual land that they can buy on the game’s marketplace. The game aesthetic draws inspiration from designer or vinyl toy culture and has caught the attention of many brand and artist partners like Burberry, Atari, and Deadmau5 for limited-edition NFTs. However, the one unique proposition of the game is that players do not need to buy or hold NFTs in order to play the game. 

The game is still in its early access phase and is virtually identical to the one playable on the Mythical Games platform. Further features and content will be released across both platforms on September 28. 

Valve Bans NFT Games From Steam

The Epic Games Store has held a very pro-NFT approach towards Web3 gaming, which lies in stark contrast to the strictly no-NFT approach adopted by its rival gaming company Valve. The latter has banned all games that require cryptocurrencies, NFTs, or any other blockchain or web3-associated elements from its Steam platform, reasoning that such assets could be exchanged for money, which puts the players at risk. However, Epic Games has gone the opposite route.

 In fact, addressing the matter, Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney had even tweeted, 

“Epic Games Store will welcome games that make use of blockchain tech provided they follow the relevant laws, disclose their terms and are age-rated by an appropriate group. Though Epic’s not using crypto in our games, we welcome innovation in the areas of technology and finance…As a technology, the blockchain is just a distributed transactional database with a decentralized business model that incentivizes investment in hardware to expand the database’s capacity. This has utility whether or not a particular use of it succeeds or fails.”

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