CEO of Epic Games, Tim Sweeney has commented that his company, best known for its hugely successful battle royale game Fortnite, has no plans of allowing NFT games in its current policy.
In a Twitter post, Sweeney went on to reiterate his company’s previous stance as he tweeted, “Developers should be free to decide how to build their games, and you are free to decide whether to play them. I believe stores and operating system makers shouldn’t interfere by forcing their views onto others. We definitely won’t.”
Developers should be free to decide how to build their games, and you are free to decide whether to play them. I believe stores and operating system makers shouldn’t interfere by forcing their views onto others. We definitely won’t.
— Tim Sweeney (@TimSweeneyEpic) July 21, 2022
When questioned about how the policy differed from the other guidelines of his company such as not prohibiting hateful or discriminatory content, the CEO said that Epic’s stance was drawing the line at “mainstream acceptable norm.”
He added, “These are all editorial and brand judgments. A store could choose to make no such judgments and host anything legal or choose to draw the line at mainstream acceptable norms as we do, or accept only games that conform to the owner’s personal beliefs.
However, while the CEO has strongly advocated for an open market approach to the Epic Games Store, it’s starting to look very unlikely that the Fortnite developers will ever allow NFTs in their titles.
NFT – Not For Tim
In September 2021, Sweeney wrote, “We aren’t touching NFTs as the whole field is currently tangled up with an intractable mix of scams, interesting decentralised tech foundations, and scams.”
Epic’s policy slightly diggers to that of Steam, the popular PC marketplace that banned NFT games from its store in late 2021.
In a conversation with Eurogamer earlier this year, Gabe Newell, President of Valve said, “The things that were being done were super sketchy. And there was some illegal shit that was going on behind the scenes, and you’re just like, yeah, this is bad. Blockchains as a technology are a great technology, that the ways in which has been utilised are currently are all pretty sketchy. And you sort of want to stay away from that.”
And earlier this week, Mojang, the studio behind Minecraft also drew a line in the sand and announced that it would not be integrating NFTs or allow others to use Minecraft to sell them.
With high profile naysayers like this it looks as though NFT’s battle to conquer the mainstream has some way to travel.
However, not every video game studio is backing away from NFTs. Square Enix recently celebrated the 25th anniversary of Final Fantasy 7 with a range of NFT merchandise.
Isa Muhammad is a writer and video game journalist covering many aspects of entertainment media including the film industry. He's steadily writing his way to the sharp end of journalism and enjoys staying informed. If he's not reading, playing video games or catching up on his favourite TV series, then he's probably writing about them.
