Last week Valve announced its measure to expel and ban the presence of games that contained some trace of blockchain technology, thus eliminating all those games that made use of alternative payment methods such as cryptocurrencies or NTFs, two very fashionable elements at the moment. So since Epic Games have been quick to get into the topic, making a public statement appealing to these editors.
As shared by Tim Sweeney, the CEO of Epic Games in his statements to The Verge, his company is not interested in disrupting the current rules of its store, thus ensuring that it will clarify the rules while working with developers to understand how they plan to use blockchain technology in their games.
In fact, Sweeney tweeted some additional thoughts following the publication of this story, offering his welcome to the “innovation in the areas of technology and finance“, Suggesting that blockchain doesn’t have to be inherently good or bad.
As a technology, the blockchain is just a distributed transactional database with a decentralized business model that incentivize investment in hardware to expand the database’s capacity. This has utility whether or not a particular use of it succeeds or fails.
– Tim Sweeney (@TimSweeneyEpic) October 15, 2021
Obviously this does not mean that as a rule all the developers rejected by Steam end up in the Epic Game Store, although undoubtedly some are already sharing your interest openly. In fact, not only developers, but some NFT users are already migrating after the Steam announcement.
So, when it comes to games, Epic’s desktop publishing program is currently in a closed beta version, anticipating that they will study who can join on a case-by-case basis. Although Epic has already shown itself to be quite permissive in the past, something that was used against it in the Apple lawsuit, for hosting “offensive and sexualized” games available on Itch.io.
Without a doubt allowing access to prohibited games on Steam is undoubtedly presented as another “weapon” that Epic Games could use to compete against Valve. And it is that Epic has already demonstrated its great bet, with astronomical figures, to turn its store into an essential component for players.
