Head of Battlestate Games Nikita Buyanov has reassured fans that there will be no NFT content in the studio’s hardcore PC FPS, Escape from Tarkov. NFTs (or non-fungible tokens) are pieces of tradable data that can be used to monetize games.
While 2017’s Cryptokitties successfully employed NFTs, and the market for NFTs has grown considerably during the last few years, every mainstream game publisher who’s talked about implementing them has been subject to strong backlash. Team 17, Ubisoft, Square Enix, Sega — it hasn’t gone well for any of them so far. Valve has even gone so far as to ban them from Steam.
Related: Best Keybinds for Escape from Tarkov
Buyanov’s announcement on Twitter has been well-received so far, with over 150 retweets and over 2.5k likes in only an hour (much higher numbers than most of his recent tweets). Most commenters made jokes making fun of the idea of using NFT’s in games, but one reply did boldly declare that there’s “Nothing wrong with NFT’s” and that “NFT’s in games is awesome.” The comment came from Triolith Games CEO Magnus Söderberg, whose studio specializes in games with blockchain monetization.
Söderberg acknowledged that Escape from Tarkov would not be a good fit for the model, and that point is at the heart of the controversy surrounding NFTs. Nobody hated Cryptokitties because it was explicitly built around NFTs. What gamers don’t want to see is their favorite franchises being “corrupted” by blockchain monetization.
