Minecraft de-platforms NFTWorlds Metaverse — a ban on in-game NFT’s!
Web2.0 deplatforming risk of centralization as real as it gets.
Minecraft is one of the biggest sandbox and survival video game developed by Mojang Studios. As Minecraft became a highly successful, the best-selling game of all time, eventually a majority stake was acquired by Microsoft through Xbox Game Studios (then known as Microsoft Studios) in November 2014. It has 141 million active player count worldwide, which speaks of it’s popularity.
What did NFTWorlds do with Minecraft?
NFT Worlds is a play to earn gaming platform where world owners can create their own limitless metaverse games or experiences for players or exclusive communities within their worlds. Instead of building their own game, they innovated the metaverse & NFT gaming top of Minecraft which is an open-source ecosystem. They launched a collection of 10,000 unique worlds that make up a decentralized, play-to-earn ecosystem within the much broader Minecraft ecosystem. And they saw some quick traction:
What happened with Minecraft & NFTWorlds?
All was going well, and then there is a sudden bombshell by Mojang Studios where they suddenly announce that they will not support NFT’s on the game. This is a part of what they said on their website:
“To ensure that Minecraft players have a safe and inclusive experience, 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.”
So where does it leave NFTWorlds?
Really in the middle of nowhere! It’s not just about stopping a game feature, for them it’s about their token holders, their players who have built their worlds. A few hours after Minecraft’s announcement, NFTWorld’s native token dropped more than 58%, causing uncertainty among players who now do not know what the future will hold for them in that game.Here is what they announced on Twitter & Discord:
Why did this happen?
One word : CENTRALIZATION- leading to deplatforming of NFTWorlds
Even though Minecraft is open sourced, it’s still owned & governed by Microsoft, who have their interest before anything else. No one knows what prompted them to do this, but clearly what NFTWorlds was doing was becoming big enough for them to intervene and stop it since they were not gaining anything from it.
Whether it’s NFTWorlds or any other Metaverse project, the one thing that is a big red flag is to be sure to stay away from centralization which can be in two forms:
1 — Like the NFTworlds situation, the metaverse is built on top of an existing game which is centralized
2 — The game may be decentralized per se, but the game assets, id’s etc could be stored on a centralized server like AWS.
What’s the solution? No third party for frontend, backend and storage! Everything 100% on chain
There is only one solution to this problem, i.e. be 100% decentralized to avoid policy changes that could lead to deplatforming or other major setbacks. The only protocol where this is possible is The Internet Computer, where the entire metaverse & gaming assets are decentralized and on-chain. There is no third party cloud or service provider that can de-platform or change policies as the governance is decentralized as well. Above all, there is no gas fees, and the game can be infinitely scalable.
Enter Cubetopia! Built 100% on chain on the Internet Computer
A good example of what is being built on the Internet Computer is Cubetopia Metaverse. It’s a a Multiplayer RPG Sandbox game, where players can own a unique island on the blockchain, create whatever they desire, play with friends, flex & sell NFTs. In all terms it’s a Web3 game that brings the world of Minecraft to World of Warcraft on the blockchain — and it allows players to build, chat, and adventure with friends all in your browser.
With metaverse worlds like Cubetopia which are Web3.0 native with tokenomics, governance, NFT Minting & trading & interoperability in-built, it’s time for gaming platforms like NFTWorlds to rebuild their Metaverse here instead of being at the mercy of Web2.0 centralization!
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