Head of Valve Gabe Newell calls NFTs “super sketchy”

gamepur.com:

Public reception for the unveiling of Ubisoft’s Quartz, an NFT platform for Tom Clancy Ghost Recon, cataclysmically bombed in December of last year. That never stopped the French publisher from doubling down on naysaying people for their supposed ignorance regarding blockchain technology—we “don’t get it,” they said. Square Enix chose to its teeth, grin and publish a sunny, bombastic, and not-at-all forced endorsement for its own NFT-related plan. EA too joined the choir, calling blockchain the “future of our industry,” though CEO Andrew Wilson would later walk back that statement somewhat. Valve on the other hand steered clear of the herd; it banned all blockchain, crypto, and NFT-related media from their own platform, Steam.

“The things that were being done were super sketchy and there was some illegal shit that was going on behind the scenes, and you’re just like, yeah, this is bad. Blockchains as a technology are a great technology, that the ways in which has been utilized are currently are all pretty sketchy. And you sort of want to stay away from that,” Valve president Gabe Newell told Eurogamer when asked for clarification on the decision.

Back in 2018, Steam shut down BitSkins, a third-party Counter-Strike: Global Offensive blockchain-based shopfront that was being used to launder money off of stolen credit cards by purchasing skins and reselling them for cash. Any game that has a skin economy is heavily monitored specifically to ensure people can’t turn their ‘fun bucks’ back into real currency—essentially creating a marketplace for gambling.

A non-fungible token (NFT) is a purely fictitious product reliant on blockchain encryption; a massive amount of energy is used to ensure only a finite number of this