Epic Games Store to shut down blockchain games with ‘bad behavior’
Epic Games Store won’t think twice about banning blockchain games if developers or publishers show any kind of “bad behavior,” a senior official has revealed. The Fortnite The manufacturer’s evolving stance on the segment could determine the future of the entire niche given how the storefront became the largest PC gaming marketplace allowing such titles after Steam adopted an almost complete ban on blockchain games at the end of 2021.
Apart from Valve, Xbox has also expressed skepticism about blockchain gaming in the past, although its views on NFTs and related technologies do not seem to be in sync with the fact that Microsoft itself recently invested in South Korean crypto game developer Wemade. Despite this, one of the biggest franchises has already made a de facto termination of blockchain games after Mojang revealed that Minecraft won’t be supporting anything like this in the summer of 2022. With Sony and Nintendo still seemingly on the fence about this new technology’s game applications, that leaves Epic as arguably the biggest public supporter among major game distributors.
Regardless, the North Carolina-based company appears to be fully aware of the bad reputation and controversy that seems to follow so many crypto ventures and will be quick to shut down “any bad behavior,” Axios reports. quoting Epic Games Store GM Steve Allison. The top official also hinted that the company remains uncertain whether its limited support for blockchain games will ever generate significant revenue, predicting that the next 12 months will paint a clearer picture of the outlook. That’s primarily because there are currently only five such titles on the Epic Games Store, but nearly 20 more are scheduled for release in early 2024, Allison said.
At least one of the upcoming blockchain games could come from Square Enix, whose outgoing CEO recently confirmed that the company intends to commercialize gaming applications of digital ledgers within a year. As for this early batch of releases, Allison said the first ever blockchain game on the Epic Games Store—Blanko’s Block Partya free-to-play social sandbox that launched in September 2022 — is doing “pretty well,” but without sharing actual download numbers.
Combined with the fact that Fortnite producer still delegates full responsibility for blockchain transactions and fraud policing to publishers, it appears that the Epic Games Store’s limited acceptance of this niche remains far from a long-term certainty. Still, Epic CEO Tim Sweeney insists that Valve’s early ban on blockchain games had nothing to do with deciding on the most consumer-friendly policy and everything to do with blocking any game that could make money by bypassing Steam’s 30% cut of all transactions, which is how decentralized systems work by design.
Source: Axios
