Team17, the company known for the Worms franchise, has become the latest company to jump aboard the NFT train. It's teaming up with Reality Gaming Group to create "high quality, low energy consuming, Worms NFT collectibles."
Plenty has been said about NFTs and the gaming community's opinion on them. They're prone to scams, many of them are environmentally unfriendly, the possibility of using NFTs to transfer content between games is highly unfeasible. Despite this, Team17 sent out a press release announcing that it's creating a line of 'MetaWorms' NFT collectibles. So far, there isn't too much about the collectibles themselves other than the usual bit about being one-of-a-kind collectibles. Anyone going to their site right now will the picture below, featuring a rotating 3D Terminator worm holding a Holy Hand Grenade and covered in ridiculous amounts of rainbow-colored glitter.
Given that the environmental impact of NFTs is a major concern for many, Team17 spent a few paragraphs detailing how they hope to be different. The MetaWorms NFTs, which are hosted by Reality Gaming Group using its Digital Asset Platform (DAT,) which creates NFTs and marketplaces connected to the company's "side-chain" of the "Etherium mainnet." Team17 claims that their collectibles are environmentally friendly, and 100,000 sold NFTs would use "the average annual kettle usage of just 11 households." In addition, there's a partnership to donate a portion of all proceeds from primary and secondary sales to the sustainability firm Coin 4 Planet and its Refeed Farms idea. This idea funds vertical worm beds designed to process food waste and reportedly creates "one of the richest natural fertilizers replacing synthetic products."
According to Eurogamer, several teams within Team17 had "no knowledge" of the company's plans to launch NFTs this morning. Others knew about the collaboration after it was signed and voiced their criticisms about it, but the company's plans went forward anyway. As for NFTs in any of the games Team17 publishes, the company said they have "no plans to introduce NFTs or play-to-earn NFT mechanics into any of its indie games label titles."
