Team17 announces Worms NFTs, developer voices opposition

pcinvasion.com:

Despite the endless protests made by both developers and the gaming community at large, major gaming companies remain eager to have a sweet piece of that NFT pie. Multiple people have already pointed out the flaws with NFTs and why they do not make for a sustainable long-term marketplace, but it appears that publishers mainly care about their short-term profitability at the moment. Team17, the publisher behind a number of successful indie games, has unfortunately fully jumped into the NFT market. Today, it announced its own collection of NFTs based on its long-running franchise Worms. Notably, this decision has already met resistance from indie studio Aggro Crab Games, which stated that it will not work with Team17 unless the publisher reverses course.

According to a press release, these new NFTs, which Team17 refers to as the “MetaWorms NFTs,” will provide “documented ownership indefinitely,” a claim that seems fallacious considering NFTs tend to come in the form of links that could become permanently lost if their servers went down. The press release also suggests that people are unable to copy these NFTs, a bold and frankly amusing statement considering I just copied the example NFT that Team17 provided onto a Word document. Additionally, the press release advertises these NFTs as environmentally sustainable, which is an issue frequently brought up with NFTs.

As for Aggro Crab Games, the studio announced its plans to cease working with Team17 on its official Twitter account. According to its statement, the team at Aggro Crab Games does not believe that NFTs could ever function as an environmentally friendly product or a useful product, for that matter. The studio proceeds to refer to NFTs as “an overall fucking