Team 17, the studio behind Worms, is cancelling their planned NFT collection, just days after announcing its existence. Although the studio tried to highlight the environmentally friendly nature of the MetaWorms collection, fans were quick to voice their disapproval of the plans online.
The NFT market has seen incredible growth over the last year, and game developers have been quick to join the trend. Unfortunately, these announcements have often received a tremendous amount of negativity from fans. For some, these are environmental complaints; the high processing power needed to sustain NFTs means that they can be very environmentally harmful. For others, the release of these ‘products’ feels like a greedy attempt to try to drain more money from consumers. In the case of STALKER 2, the announcement that NFTs would feature in the game’s release was met with such backlash that the developer dropped those plans later that same day.
Now, Team17 has suffered a similar fate. They revealed MetaWorms just a few days ago, but they have now confirmed that the collection will not be going ahead.
Team17 is today announcing an end to the MetaWorms NFT project.
We have listened to our Teamsters, development partners, and our games’ communities, and the concerns they’ve expressed, and have therefore taken the decision to step back from the NFT space.
— Team17 (@Team17) February 1, 2022
‘We have listened to our Teamsters, development partners, and our games’ communities, and the concerns they’ve expressed, and have therefore taken the decision to step back from the NFT space,’ the announcement reads.
Team17 did make a concerted effort to make MetaWorms a more appealing prospect that some other NFT offerings. To address the first major issue of the technology, MetaWorms was to be ‘environmentally friendly’; in a statement, the company claimed that minting 100,000 of them through their Etherium sidechain would require the same energy as the average annual kettle usage of roughly 11 UK households.
Further, Team17 and the Reality Gaming Group, which would have been responsible for creating and managing the NFT collection, planned to invest a portion of the proceeds from each sale in the ReFeed project. The Coin 4 Planet project aims to use real-life worm farms to convert food waste into fertiliser. By doing so, they are able to regenerate exhausted soil without the need for environmentally damaging synthetic fertilisers.
Reactions on Team17’s dedicated Discord server were almost unanimously negative
Secondly, the team addressed concerns about the collection inhibiting game enjoyment with a new paywall. They reassured fans that the NFT collection would be a separate entity from their existing game catalogue. Moreover, they had no plans to include NFTs in any future titles.
These efforts didn’t appease fans, however. Following the reveal of MetaWorms, people were quick to criticise the concept, even on the studio’s dedicated Discord server. With such a strong negative reception, Team17 likely had little choice than to drop their plans and announce the cancellation.
