Xbox doesn't want anything to do with 'exploitative' NFTs, says Phil Spencer
Head of Xbox Phil Spencer has commented on the use of NFTs in the gaming space, and he's clearly not a fan.
Xbox head Phil Spencer has made clear his stance on non-fungible tokens (or NFTs) in the video games space – and suffice to say, he's not sold on the idea of them.
Speaking to Stephen Totilo for Axios, Spencer noted that he is wary of the increasingly fevered way the industry is approaching NFT integration, suggesting that – unlike Ubisoft, for example – Microsoft won't be chasing this gimmick any time soon.
"What I’d say today on NFT, all up, is I think there’s a lot of speculation and experimentation that’s happening, and that some of the creative that I see today feels more exploitive than about entertainment," Spencer said.
But does that mean Xbox is never going to feature some form of NFT integration? Probably not, no.
"I don’t think it necessitates that every NFT game is exploitive," Spener continued. "I just think we’re kind of in that journey of people figuring it out. And I can understand that early on you see a lot of things that probably are not things you want to have in your store."
If Xbox did feature some sort of blockchain and NFT integration at some point, then, it stands to reason that Spencer and co. would want it to look very different to how it does now. “I think anything that we looked at in our storefront that we said is exploitive would be something that we would, you know, take action on. We don’t want that kind of content,” Spencer concluded.NFTs and crypto generally are both widely derided for their environmental impact, which is part of the reason companies like Steam flat-out refuse to integrate them into their platforms.