According to Hilmar Veigar Pétursson, head of CCP Games, there is a lot of potential in NFTs, but it is too early to use them in EVE Online, for example.

Last December, the studio announced that it would use NFTs in EVE Online’s Alliance Tournament XVII for prizes and raffles. It was emphasized that this would be strictly tournament-related, and a “profoundly minimal energy consumption” blockchain was chosen. Despite the optimistic approach, players did not take CCP Games’ position well.

The situation was not helped by the crossover between EVE Online and Doctor Who because the tone between the two IPs was completely different… and when it was revealed that an NFT-based card game, Worlds Apart, was already on the Doctor’s doorstep, many people figuratively took up pitchforks against CCP Games. It got so bad that Pétursson had to publish a message to try and calm things down!

Pétursson wrote, “Many of us at CCP have been following the new frontier developing around blockchains and cryptocurrencies for the past few years. We’ve read your feedback, and we see that blockchain tech has a lot of untapped potential and a lot of work needed before being ready for EVE-scale games. We have no plans to add blockchain technology to EVE Online’s global server Tranquillity for the foreseeable future.

For the coming years, Tranquillity’s development will focus on building exciting new opportunities on top of the robust foundation laid over the past two decades. While we remain intrigued by the technology, NFT stands for ‘Not for Tranquility’. [We] will continue to push the boundaries of digital economies and virtual worlds [within the EVE property, we will do so] outside of [Tranquillity].”

It is a fair approach: although there is interest, they don’t want to test it on the main game server out of the box, so unlike Ubisoft (Ubisoft Quartz), for example, there is no talk of trying to force it down the throats of players like the French are doing with Ghost Recon Breakpoint, whose content updates have already been stopped…

Source: PCGamer