Big surprise, no one likes Ubisoft’s NFT plans–even people who work at Ubisoft. When the bigwigs heard their own developers lamenting the future of the Ubisoft Quartz platform, did they listen? Perhaps roll back these lofty goals of plopping non-fungible tokens in each and every one of their once-beloved titles? Did they take a few minutes to think about how their dedicated audience would feel about these changes?
No, not at all.
In fact, Ubisoft is now doubling down on this monumentally bad decision, stating that the company will continue to invest in NFTs regardless of the abysmal reaction to the Ubisoft Quartz YouTube trailer. It currently sits at a whopping 95% dislikes.
Ubisoft sat down with Decrypt for an interview regarding the future of the company, and rather than attempting to empathize with the playerbase, they took the route of patronizing them instead, saying that this is just a “major change,” and we need time to adjust. The blockchain technical director for the company, Didier Genevois, gave a very PR-friendly statement.
“We have received a lot of feedback since the announcement, and we hear both the encouragement and the concerns. We understand where the sentiment towards the technology comes from, and we need to keep taking it into consideration every step of the way. This experiment is meant to understand how the value proposition of decentralization can be received and embraced by our players. We know it is a major change that will take time, but we will stay true to our three principles,” Genevois stated.
In posts made to Ubisoft’s internal social media network just last week, developers stressed their dislike for the plans. One 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?”
The first title in the Ubisoft library to get the NFT treatment was Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon, which launched in beta earlier this month. As of yesterday, December 21, Ubisoft Quartz has sold a whopping 15 NFTs so far. Slow clap.