Last week Ubisoft introduced a new in-game item selling platform called Quartz and received a lot of reviews from gamers and a real shit storm – now the devs also made negative comments in internal Ubisoft messages. But before we get to that, let’s summarize the subject of NFT and what Ubisoft is doing now in this context. We reported on December 10 and before that on the details of Ubisoft’s new business idea. NFT items can be obtained through Quartz. NFT stands for “non-fungible token” – it is a type of digital watermark that makes a file unique and is in itself intended to indicate originality as well as ownership rights.
NFT items at Ubisoft are, in turn, items that are not only available once, but in limited quantities and each individually numbered. At first there are only skins, that is, optical objects. For example, Ubisoft could offer a weapon skin consisting of 2000 pieces – each skin as an NFT with its own number. You can imagine this as something like a special edition of a game or a music album, of which there are 2000 pieces worldwide, which are identical in each case, but are numbered from 1 to 2000 with a fingerprint, for example – with NFTs this is added, that you also save the owner as info. The difference with normal game skins that can be purchased as DLC is that as a player you are not only purchasing the unlock associated with the account to be used in game, but that NFT skin with a specific number really belongs to the player – this can increase the value of the item for some players who don’t have a problem with monetization.
Ubisoft’s NFT Articles Get Downvotes
Player criticism is directed at the fact that these NFT items are once again dominating micro-transactions in games in a negative sense. Basically, Ubisoft would sell normal items and charge them more money with the “NFT” addition – especially because Quartz works with cryptocurrencies. Thus, Ubisoft is also indirectly accused of helping to fuel the controversial cryptocurrency market. In addition, Ubisoft forbids many things that could be done with NFT items, and transaction security and future developments are also in the stars. In our December 10 news above, you can see that Ubisoft probably knew in advance that the review was coming – the Quartz video was flagged as “Unlisted” on YouTube early on.
Even the developers are not enthusiastic
In the meantime, the developers at Ubisoft have also come forward with their criticisms, as Kotaku reports. It’s pretty much the same concerns as gamers, at least not in one-to-one terms. For example, the developers of the studio responsible for the Assassin’s Creed series do not know what to do with Ubisoft’s NFT scheme. This became clear via internal Ubisoft messages that apparently leaked to Kotaku. The developers therefore have no idea what advantage the NFT elements should bring, and above all one wonders whether the whole thing is worth the negative public effects. It certainly also means that the developers rate the loss of revenue from gamers who are put off by this thing and therefore don’t buy a game or cut down on their playtime as higher than the revenue gain from gamers who find NFT items so good that they play a game buy or spend more time in the game and therefore also perform a micro-transaction here and there.
An employee also writes that while he generally looks for the positives in ads, he tends to be annoyed by these shots. Kotaku also illustrates another thing that annoys gamers a lot – there is an NFT helmet in Ghost Recon: Breakpoint that you can only get after 600 hours of gameplay. Gamers now fear, especially if there are other conditions of this type for items, a stream of in-game bots that will be sent into the game by users to obtain such items and then resell them. To be fair, however, it must be said that this example could also lead to such robot farmers without NFT and the idea of requiring 600 hours of play time has nothing to do with the pure principle of NFT, but could also be held with normal objects.
However, with NFT and the associated unique signature and limited number of coins, such an item becomes more valuable, which could actually result in more players or bots not playing at all, just wanting to farm. In the worst case, the games in question could, to some extent, lead to a new type of cryptomining, in which objects are not mined, but objects with the aim of collecting cryptocurrencies by selling them.