You've seen them. I've seen them. We've all seen those hideous NFT apes litter our social media feeds, disgusting in their smug boredom. Now, a Doom mod will let you take the fight to the monkeys, tanking their value from behind the barrel of a double-barelled camera.

Released by modder Ultra.Boi on ModDB last week, NFT Doom replaces the denizens of hell with equally horrific primates pulled from the notorious Bored Ape Yacht Club—a collection of 10,000 procedurally generated apes that have come to represent the current state of NFT collection.

Instead of taking on these beasts with shotguns and rocket launchers, the Doomguy instead uses a handheld camera to screenshot these high-value chimps. It's a fun prod at the NFT communite's growing ire against the idea of "right-clickers", people who save and screenshot their overpriced pictures to highlight the absurdity of the idea anyone could ever own a jpeg. Comically large dollar amounts are subtracted from each Ape kill, tanking their value.

So far, it's the only acceptable way I've seen to bring NFTs into games. But that hasn't stopped crypto pushers from trying to infiltrate this space. Last week, Stalker 2 faced such strong pushback to its proposed NFT integration that its developerwalked back those plans it within a day.

Ubisoft, meanwhile, is still very much full steam ahead on its own uninspired Breakpoint NFTs. But as spotted by Respawn (and former Ubisoft) artist Liz Edwards, it doesn't look like there's much demand for marginally different metal helmets.

Hostility towards NFTs has been a rare unifying factor across gamers of all stripes, with the only support for them coming from high-level management and folks already bought deep into crypto. That said, it's easy to see why NFT pushers are attracted to this space—after all, Steam effectively primed the industry to accept that in-game items could be worth thousands of dollars.

NFTs might well be inevitable. But until then, why not waste a good few hours splattering those hideous things against the halls of Mars?

20 years ago, Nat played Jet Set Radio Future for the first time—and she's not stopped thinking about games since. Joining PC Gamer in 2020, she comes from three years of freelance reporting at Rock Paper Shotgun, Waypoint, VG247 and more. Embedded in the European indie scene and having herself developed critically acclaimed small games like Can Androids Pray, Nat is always looking for a new curiosity to scream about—whether it's the next best indie darling, or simply someone modding a Scotmid into Black Mesa. She's also played for a competitive Splatoon team, and unofficially appears in Apex Legends under the pseudonym Horizon.

On Wednesday, Stalker 2developer GSC Game World announced it would be auctioning off NFTs—also known as 'expensive receipts'—that granted owners a presence in the game, which really just meant their faces would be pasted onto the heads of NPCs. Now the studio has announced it has cancelled all plans to sell NFTs.

The NFT promo material posted yesterday was full of gibberish about becoming "the first metahumans" in the "Stalker metaverse" which was going to be achieved by way of a "metaversial bridge," a term which sounds like something from a Kojima game. It's actually just face scanning.

GSC clearly expected blowback when it made the announcement, saying right away that Stalker 2 wasn't becoming a "blockchain-based game," that the NFT auction wouldn't affect gameplay (except in the sense that you'd see the faces of NFT owners while playing), and that purchasing NFTs was optional.

Today, the studio posted another message to Twitter intended to soothe irritation caused by the announcement, saying that the in-game representations of NFT owners wouldn't be disruptive to players who wanted to ignore the whole thing. GSC quickly deleted that tweet, and then about an hour later announced on Twitter that "anything NFT-related" has been canceled.