70% of developers do not want NFTs implemented in their video games, according to GDC’s annual State of the Video Game Industry Report

Every year the Game Developers Conference presents a State of the Video Game Industry Report, where it surveys more than 2,700 game developers about their work, and this time it featured questions about NFTs and cryptocurrencies. According to the report, 70% of developers are not interested in implementing non-fungible tokens or cryptocurrencies in any way, while a few are already doing so.

One of the questions presented by the GDC in its survey read, “What is your studio’s interest in non-fungible tokens (NFTs)?:  70% of the respondents answered not interested, while 21% said somewhat interested, and 7% said very interested. Only 1% responded that they were already developing NFTs. Presumably, that 1% could be Ubisoft (since their Quartz programme is already available), but that is purely speculative.

The other related question in the GDC survey asked “What is your studio’s interest in cryptocurrencies as a payment method?”, with very similar responses: 72% of developers were not interested, 21% were somewhat interested, 6% were very interested, and 1% were already using it.

According to the GDC, some developers went so far as to call NFTs and cryptocurrencies the future of gaming, although “the vast majority of respondents spoke out against both practices, highlighting their potential for scams, general monetisation concerns and environmental impact“.

Examples of responses at GDC included some developers saying, “This is going to be a massive shift in the way we think about digital goods and ownership/monetisation“, while another said, “How this hasn’t been identified as a pyramid scheme is beyond me“. One anonymous developer responded on the topic and said:

“What benefit does it have putting these systems into our games? Who is using these things? It feels like a very small audience. And also, these technologies are still not using sustainable energy and are a target for money laundering. As a developer, I feel deeply uncomfortable that there is a push for these. It feels entirely fuelled by greed for more money because we read stories about crypto millionaires when in reality all of it is extremely unstable and unethical.”

Some of the companies that are already using NFTs in their video or game-based games include Ubisoft and Konami, although the response from the general public has been quite negative.

Source: egames