Ubisoft and its love hate relationship with NFTs

It looks like NFTs are everywhere. Throw a stone in the air and it’s going to come down and hit a news regarding NFTs. 

There’s too much of it. And, now Ubisoft is getting into all the fun.

But do gaming pundits really want that? Is NFT integration any good when paired with games? Ubisoft seems to be juggling with that question. 

Summary: Quite recently, Ubisoft’s long-serving CEO, Yves Guillemot, spoke about the company’s future ambitions to integrate blockchain technology into its games, the company’s experience with blockchain technology, and the company’s past communication failures on the subject.

Guillemot made various statements in an interview with GamesIndustry.biz that suggested the company’s fondness for NFTs had cooled. Guillemot stated that Ubisoft is “researching all Web3 capabilities” to determine whether they “really match player demands” before proceeding. According to Guillemot, all of this indicates that Ubisoft is currently in “research mode” for in-game NFTs, a far cry from the company’s earlier optimism about blockchain integration in video games. 

Back in 2021, the corporation ignored the unfavorable reaction from the public and its employees and persisted with its ambitions to build a “play to earn money” game based on blockchain technology. Ubisoft’s Quartz platform, which allows you to select NFT-ized small hats for your Ghost Recon characters before Ubisoft shutters the store in April, is one of these efforts that has delivered some results.

However, it appears that the corporation is now recognizing that there isn’t a quiet majority of people who are excited by fake scarcity. Less than a year after Ubisoft Vice President Nicolas Pouard stated that players “do not grasp”. With the variety of benefits that NFTs may provide, Guillemot concedes that the company’s message may have been a little incorrect.

Ubisoft faces unending censure and mockery for discussing it on NFTs. Between the dubious benefits the technology provides to players and the environmental cost of running a “proof-of-work” blockchain system, the company’s fearless advocacy for the technology is at times surreal.

Nonetheless, the news appears to have broken through, at least momentarily. Let’s hope Ubisoft keeps its “research mode” for a little longer. Ubisoft, the publisher of the Assassin’s Creed and Far Cry franchises, has introduced Ubisoft Quartz, a platform that allows players to earn and purchase in-game products that are tokenized as non-fungible tokens (NFTs) on the Tezos network. 

Quartz will initially be available on the PC version of Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Breakpoint, with unique cosmetic items available as NFTs, or Digits as Ubisoft like to call them. These digital items – guns, in-game cars, and other visual gear – have unique serial numbers that other players may see. This adds to the show factor of them and also advertises the NFT items for others to tantalize their eyes with. 

The French video game publisher said it chose Tezos for Quartz because of its reputation as a blockchain that uses a Proof-of-Stake consensus process. Tezos was previously chosen by British racing superpower McLaren for an NFT cooperation for the same reason.

Not just that but Tezos optimizes itself quite nicely with an internet that makes full use of its accessibility and transaction power to provide speedy customer-service interactions. Equip yourself with a service such as WOW! Internet that utilizes a wide selection of deals and discounts to bring blockchain services into the fray with minimal hiccups.

Only four months after it began, Ubisoft’s first experiment with non-fungible tokens (dubbed “Quartz Digits”) in Ghost Recon Breakpoint is ending. The brief tale is a perfect example of the complications that might develop when a corporation just incorporates “the blockchain” into its strategy without considering why.

Ubisoft revealed on Twitter on Tuesday that it has published “our final piece of content” for Ghost Recon Breakpoint after 11 upgrades since the game’s debut in 2019. While Ubisoft claims it will “continue to maintain our servers” for Breakpoint and 2017’s Ghost Recon Wildlands for the time being, due to Breakpoint’s very small player population, online multiplayer support is unlikely to persist much longer.

Following a massive, splashy launch of Quartz Digits in December, Ubisoft has released four more NFT “drops” for Breakpoint in the last three months. Each was available in limited numbers and was initially free to gamers who satisfied certain in-game level criteria.

Players that were able to obtain a free Digits NFT may then resell the “unique” in-game item on two different partner NFT marketplaces: Objkt and Rarible. However, the secondary market for the in-game products was not very substantial; in the roughly 120 days after Ubisoft originally released Digits, an Ars study found just 96 successful transactions out of the thousands of Digits issued by Ubisoft.

Many proponents of NFTs and metaverses have also sought to market the concept that blockchain-based in-game purchases will allow owners to effortlessly transfer their things from universe to world. However, considering the labyrinth of rights and compatibility difficulties that would need to be handled merely to offer advantages to a few thousand Digit owners, the idea that other publishers might credit Breakpoint NFT purchases in their own games is exceedingly doubtful.

Quartz is introduced in the video as a platform that allows gamers to “gather the first playable and energy-efficient Ubisoft NFTs,” called “Digits.” YouTube has updated its policy to hide the number of dislikes a video receives on its site; however, Google Chrome extensions may still obtain the number. Using an extension, the video presently has 1,400 likes and 37,000 dislikes, resulting in a hate ratio of around 96%.

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