Last week, Ubisoft made the terrible decision of releasing a new trailer for Ubisoft Quartz. Called “the first platform for playable and energy-efficient NFTs in AAA games,” the announcement video racked up record dislikes and restarted the uncomfortable conversation regarding the inclusion of non-fungible tokens in future video game releases across the board. Blaming Ubisoft as a whole isn’t correct, however, as a number of developers at the company are also against the NFT push. In a new report from Kotaku, messages posted to Ubisoft’s internal social media network MANA were leaked, showing plenty of irritation and confusion relating to this horrible new platform.
The first Ubisoft game to get the NFT treatment is Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Breakpoint–that is if the company doesn’t cancel Quartz outright over this bad PR. One employee wrote, simply, “I still don’t really understand the ‘problem’ being solved here. Is it really worth the (extremely) negative publicity this will cause?” Currently, the new NFT platform trailer has over 40,000 dislikes on YouTube.
Another reasonable post reads “How can you look at private property, speculation, artificial scarcity, and egoism, then say ‘yes, this is good, I want that, let’s put it in art’?” When glancing through these statements, it’s worthwhile to remind those critical of this new announcement to be kind to developers personally, as it seems most of them are utterly against this tasteless cashgrab. That means no Twitter mobs, please.
Ubisoft Quartz launched in beta last week with the PC version of Ghost Recon Breakpoint. This addition lets players acquire ‘Digits,’ which translates to in-game collectibles. These digits have their own serial numbers and certificates of ownership and can be sold on third-party platforms. Most players are deeming these just another type of microtransaction that will largely hurt the playerbase as a whole.
Let’s hope the game company fixes all of this bad press before 2025 when the first Ubisoft Entertainment Center is scheduled to open in France.
