During this weekend numerous rumors and reports have been emerging that claimed that Activision Blizzard was assessing player interest in cryptocurrencies and NFT products through a YouGov survey, with the aim of entering this world of non-fungible tokens that are increasingly present in the gaming market. However, it seems that the company finally seems not to be interested.
And it is that the refusal has come from nothing less than a direct message from Mike Ybarra himselfcurrent president of the company, has closed all the debates with a simple but direct answer: «No one (at Activision Blizzard) is doing NFT«.
No one is doing NFTs.
— Mike Ybarra (@Qwik) April 17, 2022
All this controversy has come about as a result of a single question within one of the surveys published by the company last January, in which the attempt was made to find out “What is your studio’s interest in non-fungible tokens (NFTs)?” among the player base. However, some workers within the company have already shown their rejection of this type of content, such as Jorge Murillo, one of Blizzard’s senior designers who tweeted in january: «As a developer on the @PlayOverwatch team, I am totally against NFTs and I will fight to make sure they are not integrated into our game«.
And it is that the vast majority of developers seem to be positioning themselves against these practices, as shown in the Annual Report on the State of the Games Industry published by the Game Developers Conference, which showed how 70% of respondents were “not interested” in entering the NFT market, compared to 21% said they were “somewhat interested” and just 7% were “very interested”. In fact, of the total surveyed, only 1% admitted to currently working with these digital tokens.
In fact, although we have already seen how some companies such as Konami or Ubisoft have decided to embark on this market, Activision Blizzard is not the first to position itself against this market, with many other developers such as GSC Game World or Team17, who ended up retracting because the great and negative pressure from the players.
