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The tech-savvy Killjoy, a character in Riot Games’ tactical shooter Valorant, was recently shown in a tweet enjoying a piece of NFT art, which raised some eyebrows among more than a few fans. Riot quickly deleted the tweet and has since issued an apology of sorts.
The tweet was made by the official German Valorant Twitter account as a way to highlight Killjoy’s hometown of Berlin and spotlight computer-generated art. According to Riot’s apology, the team didn’t realize that the artwork featured in the tweet, by artist Martin Houra, was an NFT.
“Since Killjoy loves programming, we wanted to introduce you to computer generated art from around the world,” a statement tweeted out by the German Valorant Twitter account reads. “However, we were not aware that the selected work was an NFT. In no way did we intend to include NFTs as part of Killjoy’s work and hobbies.”
Fans in the responses to the clarification tweet seemed to be relieved that one of the game’s fan-favorite characters was not into NFTs, but it’s currently unclear what Riot’s overall stance on the technology is.
NFTs, or non-fungible tokens, are essentially receipts for data stored on a blockchain, and can be anything ranging from an image, a tweet, to video game cosmetics. It’s become a bit of a craze recently, with multiple video games companies like Take-Two and EA looking to cash in and implement NFTs into their products in some form. Ubisoft is already experimenting in the space with Ubisoft Quartz, which allows players to acquire NFT-items in Ghost Recon Breakpoint that can then be sold to other players for a price (of which Ubisoft would get a cut).
Much of the criticism around NFTs revolves around the environmental impact. Because the transactions take place on the blockchain, NFTs can have a large carbon footprint due to the amount of electricity they require to be “minted,” which harms the environment and contributes to climate change.
