Valve’s Counter-Strike 2 devs have revealed the introduction of non-fungible tokens (NFTs) to the new game is unlikely to go ahead, with the team behind CS2 saying they don’t know enough about NFTs to feel comfortable adding them to the game.
Valve developers commented on the position of NFT in their games in an Oct. 28 interview for PCGamer. After commenting on how skins were ported from CS:GO to CS2, Valve claims it “doesn’t know enough” about NFTs and that it always tries to do its best for its community.
“Sometimes people talk about NFTs in the context of Counter-Strike items, but to be honest, we don’t know enough about NFTs to weigh in on that conversation,” Valve’s CS2 dev team said, adding they work to ensure they make the right decisions about things their players care about.
Valve expressly forbids games containing NFTs to be released on its platform Steam. Naturally, due to Valve’s stance, neither CS:GO nor CS2 have seen NFTs implemented in any way, shape, or form.
Valve also noted in its answer that CS2 was always meant to replace CS:GO and that it did everything to allow players to keep their progression and cultivated skin collections in their latest title.
“From the start of development, we knew that CS2 would ultimately replace CS:GO,” the team said.
“Early into the process we started to work to support all of the CS:GO weapons, stickers, agents, and music in CS2.”
Skins have been a central part of the CS:GO monetization system ever since the famed Arms Deal update way back in 2013. It revolutionized how games are financed and monetized and has perhaps heralded the age of microtransactions as we know it.
The appearance of blockchain cryptocurrencies and NFTs naturally spilled over to the gaming world after growing in popularity with the rise in cryptocurrency in the late 2010s, with many big-time personalities hopping on the trend.
NFTs are a thing of the past for now as their value has severely crashed, with even the rarest, most expensive tokens now worth pennies. Perhaps this, and Valve’s stance, will change in the future, but as of right now, the developer apparently won’t be including NFTs in their FPS.
