Fact Checked by 
“The Machines Arena,” an Ethereum-based (ETH) blockchain-enabled top-down shooter game, makes its way to the PC game store Steam and Sony’s Playstation 5 — but without its crypto features.
“The Machines Arena” is available with its crypto features on the Epic Games Store, on Android devices or as a direct download from the publisher’s website. The game in question regularly runs “play-to-airdrop” events which see players be rewarded with TMA tokens that allow access to exclusive content through the game’s website.
The in-game skins are also tradable as non-fungible tokens (NFTs) on the Ethereum gaming-focused sidechain Ronin. All those features were excluded from the Steam and PS5 releases of the game to comply with their restrictive crypto policies.
The details
Steam announced back in mid-October 2021 that the store prohibited in-game NFT implementations. Later that week, Epic set its store apart and announced that it would accept games with crypto features.
According to the announcement, the game will make it to Steam on Jan. 14. No specific date was included for launch on the Playstation Store. The announcement reads:
“The rumors are TRUE! TMA is currently in development for PlayStation 5, a huge milestone for web3 aiming to be the first [Ronin] game to be available on PS5.”
Talking to industry news outlet Decrypt, Directive Games design manager David Gracia explained that “to comply with platform policies, crypto-related elements will not be present in the Steam version.” Still, he had higher hopes for the PlayStation 5 version:
“For the PlayStation 5 version, we are in continuing discussions with Sony to explore the scope of the experience we can provide with The Machines Arena while still adhering to their platform guidelines.”
While Gracia hinted at crypto features possibly making it to Sony’s gaming consoles, others before him failed to do so. One example is the combat arena game Moonray, which admitted that it would be forced to remove all crypto elements in the PlayStation release.
