EVE Online’s success shows why gaming doesn’t need NFTs

Enlarge / In-game ships and structures like these have real value to EVE Online players even without NFTs.

Nearly 19 years after its launch, EVE Online still has one of gaming's most robust virtual economies, as the game's detailed monthly economic reports attest. So when developer CCP says it has "no plans to add blockchain technology into EVE Online... for the foreseeable future," it should probably cause proponents of crypto gaming to wonder why.

In a Monday blog post, CCP CEO Hilmar Petursson wrote that the company is always "exploring new technologies and new possibilities" to help fulfill its mission to have "the EVE Universe outlive us all: EVE Forever." But while he said that blockchain tech has "a lot of untapped potential," he noted that there is "a lot of work needed before [blockchain is] ready for EVE-scale games."

Petursson leaves CCP a bit of wiggle room, though, by clarifying that non-fungible tokens will be absent from Tranquility, the main server cluster that serves as the home for the game's global player base. So CCP may still experiment with blockchain technologies on the Chinese Serenity servers or mobile spinoff Eve Echoes, which have their own completely separate economies and player bases [Note: This portion initially misstated the nature of some alternative EVE Online servers. Ars regrets the error].

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