Animoca Brands co-founder Yat Siu called the latest Minecraft NFT ban “hypocritical” and underlined that nonfungible tokens (NFT) may be inclusive despite arguments to the contrary. Siu is also the co-founder of the massive crypto/NFT venture fund.
As was noted previously, on July 20, NFT integrations in the game were outlawed by Mojang Studios, the makers of Minecraft. The company said that NFTs went against its core principles since they encourage price speculation, scarcity, exclusion, and the possibility of rug pulls.
Siu expressed his anger at Mojang Studios in an interview with Cointelegraph, citing the circumstances surrounding the integration of NFTs with Minecraft prior to the ban.
Projects like NFT Worlds were using open source Minecraft servers to run a metaverse platform with ecosystems for NFT and cryptocurrency developed around it. Given that it produced more than $80 million in NFT trading volume and claimed to have about 100,000 players, the initiative seems to be rather well-liked.
Given that the firm has said that it prioritises “inclusion” and that NFT integrations in games are thought to encourage exclusion, the co-founder of Animoca Brands remarked that he considered it disingenuous that Minecraft would restrict a small fraction of its user base.
“The general perspective is that this is hypocritical, NFTs have not hurt anyone at Minecraft, it’s very clearly a minority. This was not a decision of actual evidence of harm, this was a preference decision, purely based on an opinion.”
“They did not cite evidence, they didn’t even correctly point out what NFTs are, nor did they talk to NFT Worlds,” he added.
Siu agrees that many in the conventional gaming community are opposed to NFTs, typically out of concern that they would make games “even less fair” and overly lucrative. Users in this case had the option of playing on NFT-affiliated servers or not, and NFT integrations weren’t imposed on normal Minecraft players.
“What NFTs do is redistribute the economics of the players who add value to the game which then also has the same effect of decentralizing and redistributing the power dynamics inside games. [Therefore] allowing for more freedoms and power to the community instead of just a community.”
