On NFTs, Valve says it's only interested in 'things our players care about'

pcgamer.com:

Counter-Strike 2, the first direct sequel to one of the most important games in PC history, released on September 27 after roughly six months in a limited test period. PC Gamer recently had the chance to ask the Counter-Strike 2 development team at Valve a wide-ranging bunch of questions about the game, its history, and its future: and one of those was about a weird crossover with one of the most despised technologies on the fringes of gaming. 

The people have spoken and, generally speaking, players want NFTs as far away from their games as possible. The whole web3 and crypto space is rightly viewed with scepticism as a world of scams, grifters, and frankly technology that games just don't seem to need. But at the heart of the NFT push into gaming is one big claim: this is how developers could, in theory, create items that can transfer from one game to another, and retain any in-game value while doing so.

Now you can easily pick holes in this theory, the most obvious being that different games simply are not compatible in this way. But if we accept it at face value for a moment, then Counter-Strike has just become the first series to actually do it: When the big CS2 announcement arrived, an important aspect of it was that players' inventories and in particular their gun skins (the basis of an entire thirdparty economy) would transfer from CS:GO to CS2.

And they did, flawlessly and seamlessly. I asked the CS2 dev team how they felt about, accidentally or no, validating this core concept of allowing players to retain inventories across different games.

«From the start of development we knew that CS2 would ultimately replace CS:GO,» says the CS2 dev team, «and we wanted to ensure that players could keep as many of their