As a number of you will have noted, both Epic Games (makers of the Unreal Engine) and Valve (the Steam game deployment platform) have stated on Twitter their concerns at the current state of the NFT (non-fungible token) gaming market.
This information came to light for most people in a blog post by the Verge that you can see here: https://www.theverge.com/2021/10/15/22729050/epic-game-store-open-to-blockchain-cryptocurrency-nft-games?utm_campaign=theverge&utm_content=chorus&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter
So, the summary of the situation, is that Valve had recently stated they will not (at least for now) be listing any NFT-based games on their Steam platform. Following this, a Tweet reply from Tim Sweeney of Epic appeared to follow a similar path:
So, why do we mention it now? Because we believe in full transparency to our community, and to answer some of the concerns this may be raising in people’s minds right now. So what is the situation with Mektropolis?
Well, firstly we fully agree with the sentiment, that like any area of life where money is concerned scammers will appear. This has typically seen non-existent games or meaningless memes ‘pumped and dumped’ leaving many buyers high and dry. This is regrettable and we look forward to seeing increased steps by the NFT sales platforms to control such activity, and protect consumers.
At Mektropolis we believe in the right of gamers to keep what they earn, and not to lose it when the platform wants to change the rules, or find ways to force you to buy more. Our belief is that you should be free have a real and exciting game platform that will work with or without NFT’s, however we really believe in the concept of players owning the artefacts they acquire in-game and to carry those items across to any new parts of our Mekaverse, or just hold forever on your blockchain wallet as you like. We believe NFT is the best way to do this, and RVN is the best platform as it does not rely on tokens and has a real world monetary value that you can keep. It is very much a cryptocurrency that is gamer friendly, being designed to mine (be created) optimally using most modern video cards. This means, you can mine your own RVN when not gaming, and move it in and out of the game metaverse as and when you like, it is always yours. This is we believe empowering to you.
Regardless, as Epic have already made clear, for projects like Mektropolis our compliance with laws and ratings means that we will be able to list, although not at this time use their payment gateway. However, we never needed to use their gateway, that is all conducted directly on the RVN blockchain.
Epic says that the games would have to comply with financial laws, make it clear how the blockchain is used, and have appropriate age ratings. It also says that developers won’t be able to use Epic’s payment service to accept crypto; they would have to use their own payment systems instead. – the Verge
So, in short, the recent announcements make no impact on Mektropolis, as we never intended to list on these platforms, and even if we later chose to, we are compliant. It is our view, that all games will eventually be NFT-based, and that delays in that happening for some providers will only be transient, as the market learns to better control scammers, and the providers learn how to generate income for themselves using blockchain technology – which may well be one of the main reasons such platforms have not embraced the idea yet, simply put they are not yet ready to meetise if themselves.
