Ubisoft’s NFT announcement provokes heavy criticism

Last week, Ubisoft, the first major video game publisher, ventured into the NFT space. The move, however, arouses fierce criticism.

At the beginning of the year, not many believed that NFTs were much more than a temporary hype in the crypto space – similar to the ICO hype a few years ago. But far from it: The NFT division is now a billion-dollar business and has established itself in the world of art, music and sports. The gaming area is served by blockchain games such as Axie Infinity, Decantraland and The Sandbox. But what about the big publishers and studios – where to stay Rock star, Electronic Arts and Valve? The answer: you take your time.

Last week, however, we received news that the French publisher Ubisoft now dares to take the first step – and not just for a small indie game, but with a so-called AAA title, a true blockbuster. We are talking about the one that appeared in 2019 Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon: Breakpoint. Shooter players should have access to weapon, outfit and vehicle skins, which they then do not know managed on a Ubisoft server, but as an NFT on the blockchain. We reported.

As a result of the news, the XTZ price also exploded, because the Tezos Blockchain acts as the basic technology for the Ubisoft NFTs that are gradually appearing.

However, there were no storms of enthusiasm online – at least for the time being.

NFT announcement video now removed

On the contrary: The news was received extremely negatively in the gaming community. It even went so far that the video, which Ubisoft North America published on its own YouTube channel in time for the announcement, has meanwhile been “delisted” – so it is for those who know about a link can still be found, but no longer appears in search results. The reason: At the time of writing, the video had 180,000 clicks and generated a good 23,000 responses. Almost 1,000 of them were likes, the rest were dislikes – that results in a rate of only 4 percent of viewers who liked the video.

The comments below the video provide deep insights. So writes a: e user: in that this was the day “on which Ubisoft decided to just get completely angry”. A: e other: r writes: “We don’t have to boycott them anymore, they’ll do it themselves”. Positive feedback: none. On too Reddit criticism stirs. For example, one comment said sarcastically: “Who plays games to have fun when you can also gamble on a speculative market?”.

Another: r writes: “What happened to just making good video games?” and thus poses a question that the gaming community is currently concerned with apart from NFT announcements. Because pay-to-win methods, which hide the important content of games behind payment barriers, have long since degenerated into everyday life in the video game industry, to the great frustration of gamers. The new division of play-to-earn games (see for example Axie Infinity or The Sandbox), in which gamers can earn hard cash in the form of crypto tokens through successful play, solves the problem of “simply good video games” that use the Do not put fun in the game instead of profit – on the part of publishers and players alike: inside.

Pay-to-win, play-to-earn and a new silver lining

And yet there are now voices in the network who want to have discovered a silver lining between play-to-earn and pay-to-win, especially in the form of the current Ubisoft announcement – primarily in the NFT space.

Because the NFTs do not solve the basic problem of greed for profit, of course, but Ubisoft has not put forward altruistic motives either. At the same time, however, the players can participate in the success and failure of the respective games thanks to the NFTs. Rare items from popular games will be more valuable in the future than those from lesser-known games. And thanks to the DLT, the assets are no longer stored on centralized platforms, for example in the form of the Steam library, but on the players’ wallets. So writes u / wyzard135 in one Reddit Post that NFT itself is not the problem, but rather the “trend of excessive monetization of games”, which is placed above their actual quality.