Far Cry 6 Publisher’s NFTs Don’t Make Sense To Devs Or Players

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A Watch Dogs Legion character wearing a pig mask holds up a crystal skull while surrounded by red smoke.

Image: Ubisoft

Last week Ubisoft revealed its new NFT tech plat­form, called Quartz, and it didn’t go well. The announce­ment that Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Break­point would be the first game to imple­ment cryp­tocur­ren­cy-backed items was down­vot­ed on YouTube over 40,000 times. Now it turns out even many devel­op­ers at the Assassin’s Creed pub­lish­er have no idea what to make of the publisher’s new NFT scheme.

Accord­ing to mes­sages reviewed by Kotaku, a post announc­ing Quartz on Ubisoft’s inter­nal social media hub, MANA, quick­ly filled up with ques­tions and con­cerns from devel­op­ers across the com­pa­ny. Some didn’t under­stand which old prob­lems the new tech actu­al­ly solved, while oth­ers were wor­ried about receiv­ing man­dates to start inte­grat­ing NFTs (non-fun­gi­ble tokens, aka hyper­links to JPEGs) into their own games.

“I still don’t real­ly under­stand the ‘prob­lem’ being solved here,” wrote one employ­ee. “Is it real­ly worth the (extreme­ly) neg­a­tive pub­lic­i­ty this will cause?” Anoth­er asked, “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?’”

“I nor­mal­ly try to stay pos­i­tive on our announce­ments but this one is upset­ting,” wrote a third.

Read More: Cryp­to Art Belongs In The Trash 

Some devel­op­ers raised envi­ron­men­tal con­cerns. While Quartz is based on a cryp­tocur­ren­cy, Tezos, that derives its val­ue from proof-of-stake tech­nol­o­gy rather than an expo­nen­tial­ly more ener­gy-inten­sive proof-of-work algo­rithm, there’s still a lot of debate over the strengths and weak­ness­es over this alter­nate form of cryp­to gen­er­a­tion. Oth­ers sim­ply felt like the announce­ment was just a vehi­cle for mean­ing­less buzz­words and anoth­er unnec­es­sary PR dis­as­ter for a com­pa­ny whose rep­u­ta­tion is already in sham­bles fol­low­ing a litany of alle­ga­tions of sex­u­al mis­con­duct and work­place mis­treat­ment over the last year.

Ubisoft explains the benefits of NFTs as a Ghost Recon Breakpoint operator equips one of them.

Screen­shot: Ubisoft

Despite Quartz being in the works for four years, NFTs are still in the ear­ly stages of imple­men­ta­tion at Ubisoft. The cur­rent one on offer through Ghost Recon Break­point, which was round­ly derid­ed by crit­ics and fans at launch and nev­er recov­ered, is a hel­met for those who have spent over 600 hours in the open-world tac­ti­cal shooter.

“600 hours to earn an NFT!” tweet­ed YouTube game crit­ic SkillUp. “Now cryp­to bros will just afk bot to farm hours so they can col­lect their shit­ty hel­met. Ubi wins because they can book these met­rics as ‘increased MAUs’ [month­ly active users], even though [it’s] all pumped up by this garbage.”

The hel­met and Break­point’s oth­er NFTs aren’t cur­rent­ly being sold for mon­ey. While they can be worn like oth­er cos­met­ics, they don’t affect how the game is played either. Instead, they’re tro­phies for ear­ly adopters and the most hard­core Break­point play­ers defined first and fore­most by the fact that only a few thou­sand peo­ple will ever own them. Play­ers will be able to resell them, how­ev­er, which is where the new cryp­to-gam­ing slo­gan “play to earn” comes from.

“We are far from fun,” wrote the French union rep­re­sent­ing Ubisoft Paris, Sol­idaires Infor­ma­tique, in a blog post today blast­ing the new ini­tia­tive. Accord­ing to the union, Ubisoft lead­er­ship ref­er­enced the fact that Quentin Taran­ti­no had recent­ly hopped on the NFT band­wag­on to bol­ster its case. Tarantino’s NFTs, which are based on his 1994 movie Pulp Fic­tion, are cur­rent­ly mired in a legal dis­pute with the film’s orig­i­nal dis­trib­u­tor, Miramax.

“Yes, blockchain is a game chang­er, but only if used the right way and with play­ers at its core will we col­lec­tive­ly har­ness the true poten­tial of this inno­va­tion,” Nico­las Pouard, VP of Ubisoft’s Strate­gic Inno­va­tion Lab, wrote in an op-ed for Ven­ture­Beat ear­li­er this month. So far, many of his col­leagues don’t seem to be buy­ing it. 



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