Minecraft is one of the most successful video games right now, and fans of Minecraft will be happy to learn that a blockchain layer is now available on this game.
Microsoft and Minecraft
Minecraft is a sandbox-style video game, and since its launch in 2011, it has grown to become one of the most successful video games worldwide with an avid and committed fan base. Minecraft is a product of Mojang Studios, and three years after launching Minecraft, Microsoft went all in as part of their gaming strategy by spending a mind-boggling $2.5 billion to acquire Mojang studios in 2014.
One of the most exciting things about this project is that its developers are unaffiliated with Microsoft. Such a development is possible because a considerable amount of Minecraft’s software is open source, so anyone or team with sufficient technical ability can build upon the software.
Microsoft is committed to its gaming strategy, and when you consider the moves they’ve made over the last decade, we can see that this is a company that’s fully committed to its gaming strategy. Microsoft recently acquired Activision Blizzard in January 2022 for $68.7 billion, intending to create “building blocks for the metaverse.”
NFT Worlds
NFT Worlds is a project built on third-party servers with a Polygon-based layer. With the NFT World’s blockchain overlay on Minecraft, players will access Web3 functionalities like an online shop where they can purchase items for their in-game experience with the $WRLD ERC-20 token.
With NFT Worlds, you’ll get a Metaverse experience within one of the most played games worldwide, and it seems to be an experience that both Minecraft enthusiasts and NFT collectors can get behind.
While playing NFT Worlds, the NFTs represent pieces of virtual land, and the team is offering 10,000 different worlds with a myriad of variations from forest islands to desert landscapes to snowy tundras. The price of land pieces in the game is a bit restrictive for most people, as the lowest price you can buy land without bidding is 14.5 Ethereum which is equivalent to $42,805.60 on March 2nd, 2022.
Since the project was announced, the NFT worlds project has had a reasonable interest, and players successfully logged north of 26,000 playing hours on a test server over three days in February. As outrageous as the land price might seem in NFT worlds, it’s considerably cheaper than lands in other Metaverse games where plots have sold for up to $450,000 on The Sandbox.
How will Microsoft React to NFT Worlds?
When deciding on the game to build on, the team behind the NFT Worlds project chose Minecraft because they feel that Microsoft is less strict and more developer-friendly than competitors like Roblox. Still, there’s no denying that building a Web3 world on a centralized game owned by one of the most valuable companies in history has its fair share of problems and risks, and there’s always the likelihood that as Minecraft works toward standardizing its in-game purchases system, Microsoft might push to end the project through legal means.
