Gabe Newell’s Problem Isn’t With NFTs Or Metaverse, But The ‘Bad Actors’ Behind Them

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Valve co-founder and pres­i­dent Gabe Newell has giv­en his two cents on the gam­ing world’s inter­est in NFTs and the metaverse.

Gaben’s been mak­ing the media rounds in sup­port of Valve’s new Steam Deck hard­ware. This has grant­ed him mul­ti­ple oppor­tu­ni­ties to drop his hot takes on the state of the indus­try. His com­ments come after the ban­ning of NFTs and all blockchain games from the Steam plat­form. The move was well-received by the com­mu­ni­ty but crit­i­cised by devel­op­ers cre­at­ing blockchain games. This bled into the broad­er con­ver­sa­tion that devel­op­ers and pub­lish­ers are hav­ing around the con­cept of the ‘meta­verse’.

In an inter­view with Eurogamer, Newell explained that Valve reached its deci­sion after it found the NFT and blockchain activ­i­ty in some of these games to be ‘super sketchy’. While he says that blockchains as a form of tech­nol­o­gy are great, the ways in which they’re cur­rent­ly being used are not.

He fur­ther elab­o­rates that the same prob­lem has been raised with the use of cryp­tocur­ren­cies. Newell points out that ’50 per cent of the cryp­tocur­ren­cy paid for trans­ac­tions were fraud­u­lent,” and the volatil­i­ty of the cur­ren­cy meant that peo­ple were unaware of just how much they were pay­ing for things on Steam. “Today, you paid 99 cents for it,” Newell explains, “Tomor­row, you’re going to pay $498 for it, and that makes peo­ple super cranky. So it just wasn’t a good method. The peo­ple who are cur­rent­ly active in that space are not usu­al­ly good actors.”

In anoth­er inter­view, this time with PC Gamer, Newell talks about his feel­ings on the ‘meta­verse’. He remarked that there’s a whole lot of ‘get rich quick schemes’ around the top­ic. He says what we’ve basi­cal­ly all been think­ing: that what a lot of peo­ple are doing with the meta­verse is noth­ing new. “They’ve appar­ent­ly nev­er played an MMO. They’re like, ‘Oh, you’ll have this cus­tomiz­able avatar.’ And it’s like, well… go into La Noscea in Final Fan­ta­sy XIV and tell me that this isn’t a solved prob­lem from a decade ago, not some fab­u­lous thing that you’re, you know, inventing.”

So basi­cal­ly, Gaben is echo­ing what the gam­ing com­mu­ni­ty has been scream­ing for the past while. Sure, it’s noth­ing new, but it’s com­fort­ing to know that even some of the biggest names in the indus­try think that the cur­rent approach­es to this tech­nol­o­gy are most­ly finan­cial­ly preda­to­ry malarkey.

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