Riot Games, the creators of League of Legends and online shooter Valorant, has issued something of an apology to fans of the latter after a tweet appeared to show one of the game’s characters enjoying the works of an NFT artist.
As Polygon report, Valorant’s social media team recently posted an image of one of the game’s characters, Killjoy, visiting a local museum in Berlin, where she was taking in the work of Martin Houra, an artist whose work is sold as NFTs.
Riot’s social media is no stranger to this kind of supposedly relatable, fourth-wall-crossing work; last year the company ran an entire campaign based around Seraphine, a League of Legends character who would take to Instagram and Twitter and post about everything from her anxieties to genocide, a tactic which despite praise from some fans also came across as a bit much.
Anyway, in this case, what began as an attempt at something similar ended up a complete disaster, with so many fans firing back that the company first deleted the tweet entirely, then went and issued an explanation:
Whoopsie! We’re always trying to give you new experiences and interesting facts on our local channels, including a look into Killjoy and her hometown of Berlin.
Since Killjoy loves programming, we wanted to introduce you to computer generated art from around the world. 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.
I’m honestly not sure how you can’t be aware that Houra’s works are made specifically for NFT sales when the dude’s website opens with his claims that his works are “living on the Ethereum blockchain, forever”, and then quickly links directly to an Opensea gallery, but hey, I’m just a guy, not a social media employee for a video game studio. At least they deleted the tweet and learned a valuable lesson about their fan’s views on NFTs!