Nintendo, Sony and other gaming giants will think twice after witnessing a PR disaster unfold for Team17.
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Editor's Note: NFTs in Video Games — Game Over?
As you'll see in our news roundup below, Team17 has been forced to make an embarrassing climbdown over plans to launch NFTs inspired by the Worms video game.
Several indies who develop its games had threatened to stop working with the company unless the plans were ditched. Reports suggest staff at Team17 were unhappy, too.
You may remember that Ubisoft also experienced a pushback when it unveiled its NFT ambitions too — but so far, it's sticking to its guns.
The Team17 debacle will send shockwaves through the gaming industry — and will make other companies think twice before deciding to release NFTs. Worse still, the firestorm suggests that even using an environmentally friendly blockchain isn't enough to quell criticism from the community.
Would Nintendo and Sony really want to risk whipping up controversy by creating their own NFT collections, after seeing how a smaller firm collapsed under public pressure in just 24 hours?
We talked yesterday about how visceral hatred for NFTs could hamper mainstream adoption. The fact that big brands risk suffering a PR disaster for getting involved won't help either.
Facebook 'wasted time' on Diem 👀
Jack Dorsey says Facebook "wasted a lot of time and effort" by attempting to launch the Diem digital currency. He said the social network should have spent the past three years "making Bitcoin accessible for more people around the world." The ex-Twitter CEO argued this would have also benefited the tech giant's Messenger service, as well as Instagram and WhatsApp. Diem has now sold its intellectual property to Silvergate for a reported $200 million.
NFT platform accused of stealing music 😱
Artists have accused an NFT platform of stealing their music. Hitpiece advertises itself as a marketplace that allows users to collect non-fungible tokens of their favorite songs. But bands allege that their music has been listed without permission. Some have threatened to take legal action against Hitpiece, and the company has already received cease and desist orders. The embattled project's website has been replaced with a statement saying: "We started the conversation and we're listening."
Team17 makes embarrassing U-turn 🕹
Team17 has abandoned plans to launch an NFT collection inspired by the Worms video game franchise — 24 hours after it was announced. The news had gone down badly with Team17's community, with several game developers declaring they would refuse to work with the company again unless the plans were ditched. One of them said: "We don't support NFTs. We think they carry too great an environmental and social cost."
MicroStrategy buys dip as loss revealed 📉
MicroStrategy has announced that it has snapped up another 660 BTC for approximately $25 million — a price per Bitcoin of about $37,878. The company now holds a total of 125,051 BTC. Although MicroStrategy is still in profit from its investment so far, its balance sheet has been hurt by BTC's fall since November. It suffered an eye-watering impairment loss of $146.6 million in Q4 of 2021 — taking the total charges over the past year and a half to $901 million.
