NFTs quickly became a controversial topic in gaming spaces, thanks to their environmental impact and the number of scams that have popped up around them. Players are also worried – and for good reason – about developers finding new ways to squeeze money out of their player base. EVE Online developer CCP is planning to hedge its bets.
If you’re not familiar with what NFTs are, they’re a digital receipt that proves you are the original owner of something. That something could be anything from a piece of digital art – you’ve probably seen the horrible apes doing the rounds – to an item in a video game.
While the company will be experimenting with NFTs, it will keep those experiments away from the core experience.
“NFTs have stolen the limelight a little too much,” CCP Games CEO Hilmar Veigar Pétursson explains. “We have been doing some form of digital property for 20 years – people own spaceships and space stations in EVE Online. NFTs are like a way to rediscover something in a different medium that has always existed in another.
“I think it’s valuable for us to explore it because you can always learn from everything. But the main thing is, for our main server on on on TQ, as we call it, we’re not going to do any of that because there really isn’t the customer base for it.”
CCP sees these experiments as a method of future-proofing the company and EVE Online itself, just in case the mood changes on this controversial tech. While it’s hard to imagine now, you only have to look back at the Xbox One launch and its idea of a digital future – the one many of us are now living in – to see how easy it is for the winds to change.
For now, EVE fans, there’s no need to worry. According to Pétursson, these experiments are only just beginning, and they won’t be introduced to EVE Online “as it exists now”.
Check out our full account of EVE Fanfest if you want to know more about this strange and unique space game.
Written by Kirk McKeand on behalf of GLHF.
