On June 20, Microsoft-owned Mojang announced that NFTs and blockchain technology would no longer be allowed to “integrate” with Minecraft. That was bad news for NFT Worlds, which has spent months building an entire crypto-economy on top of a collection of the randomized seeds needed to make specific Minecraft maps.
Now, the team behind NFT Worlds announced it will create a new game that's “based on many of the core mechanics of Minecraft” but which will be “completely untethered from the policy enforcement Microsoft and Mojang have over Minecraft.” NFT Worlds promises its new Minecraft-style game will be built “from the ground up” to be familiar to Minecraft players, but now with “the modernization and active development Minecraft has been missing for years.”
NFT Worlds’ game will always be free to play, the team says, and users won’t need a credit card to purchase any additional content. That content will presumably be purchased instead with the NFT Worlds token, whose value has plummeted over 60 percent in a week following Mojang’s announcement.
For the time being, players that own an NFT world issued by NFT Worlds can still use its 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 provided exclusive rights to that map any more than writing “World 1-1” on a piece of paper provides ownership rights to the iconic Super Mario Bros. level.
Under Microsoft’s new rules, though, NFT Worlds blockchain will no longer be able to hook into Minecraft’s API. That 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 that it will prioritize “backwards compatibility with existing Minecraft server development plugins and practices” in its upcoming clone. That means creators should “continue building NFT Worlds content” on top of Minecraft, the team says, confident that it will work with the new, rebranded NFT Worlds game whenever it launches.
Thanks to Mojang’s new EULA, though, any further NFT Worlds-related development in Minecraft can’t involve any “blockchain-based functionality, NFT support, or game currency” for the time being. And since those were the central features that defined NFT Worlds’ value as an add-on, it’s unclear what, exactly, NFT Worlds developers will be doing until their new Minecraft alternative is available.
NFT Worlds is characterizing this new split as “a web2 vs web3 battle … between two different visions of the future of the web” and “a technological struggle over who will have ownership of digital assets.” The team casts itself as the protectors of “the spirit of innovation through independent creators” while casting Microsoft as a profit-obsessed behemoth that “will always act in the interest 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 does not align with Minecraft values of creative inclusion and playing together.” The rules it has put in place barring NFTs are intended “to ensure that Minecraft remains a community where everyone has access to the same content,” the company wrote.
But while NFT Worlds talks a big game about “innovation,” “open, free, and evolved” gameplay, and a “player owned and operated economy,” the devil is in the details. With Minecraft, for example, anyone can access any map just by typing in its specific 32-bit integer seed, even if someone else claims to “own” that lot of land as an NFT Worlds token (although, discovering the specific seeds for specific NFT World tokens can be difficult).
At the moment, it’s unclear whether NFT Worlds’ upcoming clone will work the same way, or whether players will instead have to pay the NFT owner for the privilege of accessing prime virtual real estate owned by someone else. Such a system would be great for early adopters who might want to extract more value out of valuable and “rare” world seeds, of course. But it might not be so attractive to later players who are used to Minecraft’s more open access and crowdsourced lists of interesting seeds.
NFT Worlds has also suggested in the past how it plans to let players create and sell their own unique in-game skins, avatars, and characters, theoretically creating a monetary incentive for this kind of in-game creativity and sharing. But Minecraft already has a thriving ecosystem of player-made skins that can be downloaded for free as plain old PNG files, no crypto (or monetary exchange) required.
Reading through NFT Worlds’ statement, though, it’s hard not to feel that there’s a large dose of “sour grapes” thinking involved with the forced split. For nearly a year, NFT Worlds was content to try to build a crypto empire on top of a mega-popular game that had over 141 million active players as of late 2021. Only now that said game is forcing it out is it confident it can build its own title with “game mechanics, graphics, performance optimizations and overall improvements that will usher in a more accessible, ownable, and enjoyable playing experience.”
We have to wonder why NFT Worlds didn’t simply build that “open, free, and evolved” version of Minecraft from the start, if it was such a necessary and simple task. We also have to wonder whether the 100,000 registered users NFT Worlds claims today—roughly 0.07 percent of Minecraft’s active user base—is big enough to prove there's a lot of latent demand for its vision of “Minecraft, but with NFTs.”
All we know is that NFT Worlds is far from the first game that thought it could outdo Minecraft. And with very rare exceptions, all of those attempts have failed. Maybe the addition of NFTs will make this attempt one of the outliers, but let's say we're skeptical.
This story originally appeared on Ars Technica.
