The 20th of June Microsoft-owned Mojang announced that NFTs and blockchain technology would no longer be allowed to “integrate” with Minecraft. That was bad news for NFT Worldswho have spent months building an entire crypto-economy on top of a collection of the randomized seeds needed to make specific Minecraft Map.
Now is the team behind NFT Worlds announced it will create a new game that is “based on many of the core mechanics of “Minecraft” but which will be “completely untethered from the policy enforcement Microsoft and Mojang have endured Minecraft.” NFT Worlds promises its new Minecraft-style games will be built “from scratch” to be familiar with Minecraft players, but now with “the modernization and the active development Minecraft has been missing for years.”
Don’t worry, everything will work out fine
NFT Worlds’ games will always be free to play, the team says, and users won’t need a credit card to purchase additional content. That content will presumably instead be purchased with NFT World’s token if the value has fallen over 60 percent in a week following Mojang’s announcement.
Currently players who own an NFT World issued by NFT Worlds can still use his random seed to play in Minecraft or even host multiplayer sessions on that map, as a Microsoft spokesperson confirmed to Vice. But that’s not saying much since NFT itself never gave exclusive rights to that card any more than writing “World 1-1” on a piece of paper gives ownership rights to the iconic Super Mario Bros. level.
However, under Microsoft’s new rules, NFT World’s blockchain will no longer be able to join Minecraft‘s API. This means that players can no longer craft easily in-game crypto payments denominated in NFT Worlds’ $WRLD token, as well as benefit from other functions coded using NFT World’s API.
The NFT Worlds team says it will prioritize “backwards compatibility with existing Minecraft server development plugins and practices” in its upcoming clone. This means that creators should “continue to build NFT Worlds content” on top Minecraftsays the team, confident that it will work with the new revamped NFT Worlds game whenever it launches.
Thanks to Mojang’s new EULA, however, any further NFT Worlds-related developments in the Minecraft may not involve any “blockchain-based functionality, NFT support or game currency” at the moment. And since those were the core features that defined NFT Worlds’ value as an add-on, it’s unclear what exactly NFT Worlds developers will do until their new Minecraft alternative is available.
You can’t fire us, we quit
NFT Worlds characterizes this new division as “a web2 vs web3 battle … between two different visions of the future of the web” and “a technological battle over who will have ownership of digital assets.” The team presents itself as protectors of the “spirit of innovation through independent creators” while casting Microsoft as a profit-obsessed giant that “will always act in the interests 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 that are inconsistent with Minecraft values of creative inclusion and playing together.” The rules it has put in place that exclude NFTs are intended to “ensure that Minecraft remains a community where everyone has access to the same content,” the company wrote.