Created in late 2021, Critterz incorporates nonfungible tokens (NFTs) and cryptocurrency into the Minecraft universe, bringing a “play to earn” model to the best-selling video game of all time. Players need to own an NFT to enter the Critterz server; once inside, they can earn an in-game cryptocurrency that can be traded for real money. They can buy plots of land in the Critterz world, also represented as NFTs, and sell the constructions they build on them, like Daniec’s medieval houses, to other players.
It was a new experiment in play-to-earn gaming, hot on the heels of Axie Infinity, the figurehead Web3 game from developer Sky Mavis that had attracted thousands of players, especially from low-income countries such as the Philippines.
Then, on July 20, 2022, in a post on the Minecraft website, developer Mojang Studios dropped a bombshell: Minecraft would not support integrations with NFTs.