Minecraft bans blockchain and NFTs
Microsoft wield the hammer
Minecraft’s openness as a platform has enabled various blockchain game companies to leverage its technology and IP and build out their own projects.
But that openness is now over.
Microsoft-owned Mojang has announced that “blockchain technologies are not permitted to be integrated inside our Minecraft client and server applications nor may they be utilized to create NFTs associated with any in-game content, including worlds, skins, persona items, or other mods”.
The major project to be hit by this forthcoming ban will be NFT Worlds, which runs on the Polygon blockchain, and has generated over $150 million in trading volume on its land NFTs.
Unsurprisingly the project had a massive sale spike today with the floor price dropping from 3 to 1 ETH — they peaked at around 15 ETH earlier in 2022 — as nervous bag holders attempted to offload their NFTs to brave diamond hands.
The game’s WRLD token also crashed over 60%.
Nevertheless, project CEO @ArkDev.wrld says NFT Worlds will continue even if it has to create its own platform.
“Bottom line, we’re not leaving. We have the community, we have the warchest and we know we can build.”
As an aside, I actually bought a copy of Minecraft to investigate NFT Worlds a couple of months ago but never got around to doing anything with it. Lucky escape I guess!
Other projects that have technically implemented blockchain with NFTs include Alien Worlds and Enjin, which actually started out as a Minecraft server operation before it moved to blockchain.
But — as everyone is now pointing out — this demonstrates the perils of attempting to build a web3 project on a (pretty open) web2 platform.
This Substack is sponsored by Hiro Capital, which was part of the $35 million investment into esports Team Liquid’s parent company Axiomatic.
Funding news
UK-founded but now US-incorporated crypto-based gaming payment provider Zebedee has announced a $35 million Series B round, which was led by Kingsway Capital (Animoca, The Sandbox, Klang).
Other investors included Square Enix and The Raine Group plus existing investors Lakestar and Initial Capital.
This takes Zebedee’s total funding to $46.5 million.
Based on Bitcoin’s Lightning network, Zebedee enables game developers to integrate micro-payments into their games, allowing players to earn sats (0.00000001 BTC) for general gameplay as well as tournaments etc.
The technology has particularly been adopted for mobile games, allowing casual games to beef up their retention KPIs, while sharing advertising revenue with players through Zebedee’s mobile wallet. It can, however, be used for any type of game on any platform, with any in-game action triggering a payment.
Keep On Buidling news
One of the most underrated projects imho, it’s good to see Splinterlands ploughing ahead with new content and features, both in terms of its existing game but equally importantly on its longterm Land plan, and its base layer infrastructure too.
Not investment advice — I’m already up-to-my-eyeballs — but it’s also worth noting that the year-long SPS airdrop is coming to an end in seven days time, which combined with other changes is likely to reduce daily selling pressure considerably.
Wildlife Studios’ PVP web2 game Castle Crushers is slowly moving towards web3. It’s just minted 19,000 character NFTs on the Avalanche blockchain and will enable players to attach their wallet to their in-game ID and start gaining the benefit of ownership on 15th August.
The NFTs are already live on marketplaces, however, with 113 items traded to-date and the cheapest available character being an archer for 3.1 AVAX (c.$80) for 3.6 AVAX (I just bought the 3.1 AVAX one!).
GameStop Success Shocker news
Having mentioned it was difficult to parse the day 1 trading volume of GameStop’s NFT marketplace, I guess we need to be equally cautious with the news that its week 1 sales have seen >$7 million of NFTs traded.
For some perspective, that’s more than double the all-time trading on Coinbase’s NFT market.
What GameStop seems to have gotten right is that because it’s currently using Loopring’s L2 scaling solution, the NFTs on its marketplace are only available on its marketplace. And given that the MetaBoy collection has been trading well — current floor price $240 — the entire marketplace has been trading well.
The even better news, is that the marketplace will soon also start to support the Immutable X blockchain, which contains collections from games such as Gods Unchained, Illuvium, Ember Sword and Guild of Guardians.
Of course, these collections are already live for trading on the Immutable X marketplace, but given that’s not really taken off to-date, the addition of these assets to GameStop’s marketplace might end up being a win-win.
But let’s await the first month trading volume before getting too excited.