Gabe Newell: NFT actors “not people you want to be doing business with”

rockpapershotgun.com:

From Ubisoft to Konami to the Epic Games Store, games companies are doubling down on NFTs as fast as others are backtracking on them. Valve, on the other hand, aren’t likely to get involved any time soon, owing to “a lot of criminal activity and a lot of sketchy behaviours”. That’s according to co-founder Gabe Newell, who recently spoke to us about his concerns around crypto.

While indie game store Itch.io declared NFTs a scam, Newell is more open to the “underlying technology of distributed ledgers” – but says there are just too many bad actors using that technology for nefarious endeavours, namely fraud and money laundering. Steam banned games with NFTs and cryptocurrency last year.

“You have to separate the underlying technology versus which actors are utilising that technology,” Newell explained. “It's like, if you're a chemist, and you're looking at nitrocellulose, you're like, ‘Oh, yeah, we can do some really interesting stuff with that.’ And then if everybody's buying guns and shooting people with them, you're sort of like, ‘Hey, this whole chemistry thing is great, but there are some outcomes that can be negative.’ Not to equate NFTs with shooting people, but the underlying technology of distributed ledgers, and the notion of digital ownership, and shared universes, are all pretty reasonable.”

“The people in the space, though, tend to be involved in a lot of criminal activity and a lot of sketchy behaviours. So it's much more about the actors than it is about the underlying technology, or the rationale for what we're doing.”

Newell also elaborated on why Steam stopped accepting cryptocurrencies as a payment method, noting the drastic price changes that came with the digital money’s rapidly shifting values