Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney has announced that Epic Games will “welcome” games that use blockchain technology on the Epic Games Store. This follows Valve’s quiet decision that took effect earlier this morning to remove games that make use of blockchain-generated cryptocurrency.
Sweeney tweeted that Epic will welcome these games “provided they follow the relevant laws, disclose their terms, and are age-rated by an appropriate group.” He added that Epic has no plans to use “crypto” in its own games, but that the company “welcomes innovation in the areas of technology and finance.”
In a follow-up tweet, he stated that “As a technology, the blockchain is just a distributed transactional database with a decentralized business model that incentivize [sic] investment in hardware to expand the database’s capacity.”
“This has utility whether or not a particular use of it succeeds or fails.”
Sweeney’s statement specifically avoids mention of currencies or NFTs (though “crypto” might be implied to read “cryptocurrency”). He previously tweeted that Epic isn’t looking to use NFTs because “the whole field is currently tangled up with an intractable mix of scams, interesting decentralized tech foundations, and other scams.”
This tweet followed a statement that Epic Games gave to The Verge saying it was “open to” working with such developers. The spokesperson added that developers won’t be able to use Epic’s services to accept cryptocurrency payments–they will need to generate their own payment systems independent of the store.
Epic’s self-publishing program will still be in closed beta “through the next year,” though Sweeney told developers in follow-up tweets that it’s looking to open up its doors to more developers every month.
So if you were disappointed by this morning’s news from Valve–it appears that once again, Epic is willing to spur some competition.