Ubisoft Exec Says Fans ‘Don’t Get’ NFTs, Tech Is ‘For Them’

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Principal Skinner

Image: The Simp­sons

Ubisoft’s offi­cial for­ay into the world of Non-Fun­gi­ble Tokens has not had the best start; the announce­ment was trashed by fans, and the company’s “garbage” NFTs were large­ly ignored upon release. In a new inter­view with Aus­tralian site Find­er, though, Ubisoft say the blame for this lies with us, not them.

It’s an extra­or­di­nary inter­view to behold, from top to bot­tom. It begins, for exam­ple, with:

On 7 Decem­ber 2021, Ubisoft become the first big name game devel­op­er to pub­licly enter the NFT space. The launch of the Ubisoft Dig­its, an NFT, and the Quartz plat­form did not go down well. Gamer feed­back was neg­a­tive to the point of being aggres­sive. As gamers are want to do. The big names in game press were also tepid in their analy­sis. One way or the oth­er, this was a land­mark moment in gam­ing, but the media clear­ly didn’t want to gain the ire of their readers.

OK. And by the time we’re onto “In fact, I was excit­ed by the launch of Quartz and Dig­its” you can prob­a­bly see where this is going. The whole thing is a soft­ball chance for Nico­las Pouard, VP at Ubisoft’s Strate­gic Inno­va­tions Lab and Didi­er Genevois, Ubisoft’s Blockchain Tech­ni­cal Direc­tor to clear the air and make a sales pitch for the much-derid­ed Quartz campaign.

Instead of appeal­ing to users, though, Pouard decides to tell us we’re all wrong, and that actu­al­ly, this stuff is great:

I think gamers don’t get what a dig­i­tal sec­ondary mar­ket can bring to them. For now, because of the cur­rent sit­u­a­tion and con­text of NFTs, gamers real­ly believe it’s first destroy­ing the plan­et, and sec­ond just a tool for spec­u­la­tion. But what we [at Ubisoft] are see­ing first is the end game. The end game is about giv­ing play­ers the oppor­tu­ni­ty to resell their items once they’re fin­ished with them or they’re fin­ished play­ing the game itself.

So, it’s real­ly, for them. It’s real­ly ben­e­fi­cial. But they don’t get it for now.

Also, this is part of a par­a­digm shift in gam­ing. Mov­ing from one eco­nom­ic sys­tem to anoth­er is not easy to han­dle. There is a lot of habits you need to go against and a lot of your ingrained mind­set you have to shift. It takes time. We know that.

We absolute­ly get it, Nico­las, and we want noth­ing to do with it. It’s telling that this is a sales pitch com­ing from some­one in the cryp­to space, since it has the same dan­ger­ous and soul­less hall­marks, of con­de­scend­ing huck­sters who want to turn every­thing into a mar­ket, to trans­form even your leisure time into some­thing that can and by divine right should be commoditised.

Of course he wants Ubisoft to push ahead with this, and “giv­ing play­ers the oppor­tu­ni­ty to resell their items” is the key sen­tence here. A big dri­ver of mon­ey for them in this space won’t just be sales of NFT items, but the cut they get every time an item is sold and resold again. End­less mon­ey for doing lit­er­al­ly noth­ing. Liv­ing the dream.

A lot of com­pa­nies, big video game pub­lish­ers includ­ed, have been dip­ping their toes into this mar­ket over the last 12 months for just this rea­son. As stu­pid as it is, it’s also usu­al­ly explained away by it being a fad that involves mak­ing a quick buck out of suck­ers, and real­ly, what pub­lic com­pa­ny wouldn’t want in on that action.

Ubisoft’s efforts are on a whole oth­er lev­el, though. There’s a degree of delud­ed com­mit­ment to the cause we sim­ply haven’t seen from oth­er pub­lish­ers, and when­ev­er I hear about devel­op­ers pre­dict­ing NFTs will dri­ve “a wedge right in the heart of this indus­try”, it’s places like Ubisoft, where man­age­ment and work­ers are so far apart on the issue, I think of first.

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