Slime Rancher 2’s game director says he won’t branch into NFTs

In a recent interview with For The Win, Slime Rancher 2’s game director Nick Popovich said that he wouldn’t be moving into NFTs. Popovich says that he’s made his stance very clear on the matter and thinks the NFT industry, in general, is “pretty tragic.”

Popovich explained that any emerging technology has its doubters, and those behind it have to persevere to succeed. With NFTs, though, he says, “you can see there is nothing but money motivating it.” He says that the industry is purely built on making money for someone else and is akin to a pyramid scheme, causing more harm than good by existing.

He added that it’s clear when something new like this is worthwhile because people are willing to do it for nothing or at a significant personal cost. NFTs are easy to mint and are priced extremely high when they go on sale. Furthermore, they’re extremely harmful to the environment. The platform that stores the receipts for NFTs, the Ethereum cryptocurrency platform, uses 48.14 kWh of energy per transaction, while the average US household uses 28.9 kWh per day. This is clearly at odds with the focus of Slime Rancher 2, which is to help the world instead of harming it.

Last week, prominent voice actor Troy Baker, who played Joel in The Last of Us and The Last of Us Part 2, announced that he’d partnered with an NFT company to turn his voice into an NFT. The fan backlash was incredibly harsh, showing just how many people didn’t want games sullied by NFTs, even if it’s a voice actor getting involved.