Minecraft Rule Change Collapses NFT Community

Minecraft, one of the most popular and longest-lasting games out there, made an interesting rule change earlier this year: no integrations with NFTs would be allowed anymore. To many (or even most) players of Minecraft, this would likely be no big deal. But to a few who parlayed their servers into a play-to-earn model, the results would be disastrous.

That is how I came across this fascinating story by Neirin Gray Desai at Rest of World. Desai recounts the story of how one savvy player established his own server, used NFTs to create an in-world currency, and make money doing the whole thing.

For a while, it worked. Some Critterz players told Rest of World that, at one point, they were earning more than $100 a day playing the game. At its peak, it had around 2,000 daily players, some of whom enlisted other players to help build their in-game empires for a cut of the crypto they earned. 

Rest of World

The setup on this Critterz server was the requirement to buy an NFT simply to gain entry. Then using the goods farmed on the server, buying and selling could take place. The digital currency could be exchanged back into real-world cash.

The people playing on this server were serious investors with serious cash. The "entry" NFT to simply get access to the server didn't come cheap.

Within weeks, they went from being worth almost nothing to thousands of dollars; by January 10, 2022, they were being sold for more than $7,000 each on a secondhand market

Then Microsoft / Mojang changed the rules of the game. Desai's telling of this group looking to turn Minecraft into something wholly different than its original idea is fascinating. People were truly creative and worked to build an entire economy in a world that intentionally looks like something out of an Atari 2600. I recommend definitely checking it out.