Not entirely surprising. Minecraft gets to maintain full control and custody, including extracting rent from any marketplace and assets selling on its platform, and at the same time look like the hero to the game community that so fervently hates NFTs.
Eh, not that I'm in love with crypto or Web3, but as I've been getting into server stuff and mods for my kids, it's really hard for me to see Microsoft's dealings with Minecraft as a hugely missed opportunity, perhaps even an all out failure. The "metaverse" people keep touting could have (relatively easily, I think) been nearly the sole perview of Minecraft if Microsoft didn't Microsoft Minecraft so hard.<p>Even e.g. Roblox does a much better job of trying to integrate the creator/modder experience.
Whatever you feel about NFTs or cryptocurrency, it's quite obvious that they are 100% lying about the reason they are doing this.<p>The real reason is that cryptocurrency makes it relatively easy for people to transact without Microsoft taking a cut. That's it.<p>Minetest had no such restrictions by the way.