The Ubisoft wasn’t kidding when it said they’re starting to feel their way towards NFTs: the announcement was made, but the community didn’t like it.

The name of Ubisoft’s NFT is Quartz; if you look at its website, depending on your region, you might get geo-blocked with a statement that the NFT is not available in your area, which is understandable because some of us are not that important to Yves Guillemot. But here’s the announcement video, which was found directly on YouTube after a bit of digging (unlisted, but we’ll dissect the topic after the video embed…).

Ubisoft announced in November (and we wrote about it) that the French company would start experimenting with NFTs to follow the trends. It’s not alone, as Electronic Arts also sees the technology as the future of the games industry, but meanwhile, Phil Spencer, the Xbox head, sees them as exploitative. Discord quickly backed out due to negative feedback. And through Steam, Valve wants to keep blockchain out of the public eye. So it’s a divisive issue.

The problem with Quartz is that the uniqueness is only in the unique number of helmets and cosmetic items, and Ghost Recon: Breakpoint, the first game to embrace the NFTs, may not be the best choice, while Riders Republic, for example, could have been a more apt choice. Perhaps they are deliberately experimenting on an older game so that they can quickly sweep the results (if any) under the carpet in the event of failure.

Well, the problem is that despite it being unlisted, there were quite a few dislikes for the video. Despite YouTube’s decision to officially take this step to help smaller content creators, Ubisoft itself can’t seem to stand the fact that it has received 40,000 dislikes versus 1,500 likes. The French spokesperson claims it is only linked to the Ubisoft Quartz website, with the video never being publicly available.

The time has come for Ubisoft to be on the other side of the fence: they are on the same destructive path as Electronic Arts. Serialised cosmetic items? Do they take players into account that much?

Source: PCGamer