This headline might seem a few years late, but it isn’t. This news really is from 2026, as unbelievable as that may sound.
Champions Tactics: Grimoria Chronicles, Ubisoft’s NFT-based tactical game, will shut down in October. Ubisoft launched Champions Tactics in 2024, long after most industries connected to the technology sector had stopped pushing half-baked Web3 features and shifted their attention to the emerging artificial intelligence boom. The game arrived in 2024 even though the French company had already failed on several occasions to introduce “pay-to-earn” features, prompting the vice president of its Strategic Innovation Lab to declare in January 2022 that we simply did not understand the value of NFTs.
Surprisingly, that did little to quell the negative backlash, prompting Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot to assure us in September 2022 that the publisher was merely exploring the further integration of Web3 and would only implement it if it found a solution that offered genuine benefits to players. Well, now we can see how it all turned out.
“Today, we’re sharing an important update regarding the future of Champions Tactics. After careful consideration, we have made the decision to sunset the game. The Champions Tactics servers will officially shut down on October 30. Until then, the game will remain fully playable, and our goal is to ensure that players can continue to enjoy the experience during these final months,” Ubisoft said in its announcement of the upcoming closure.
Earlier this year, Champions Tactics phased out its NFT features. In May, the company announced that it would gradually discontinue its blockchain functionality because of expected changes to the infrastructure supporting the game’s Web3 features. In the following days, Ubisoft removed the ability to mint and sell NFT characters in the game. Some of these characters had been listed on the Champions Tactics marketplace for more than $63,000 shortly after launch. It is unclear how many of these characters were ever sold or for how much, and after the Web3 features were removed, every player’s supposedly non-fungible characters were reportedly converted into fully fungible ones, meaning something more typical of an ordinary video game.
On May 21, Ubisoft announced that players who had reached the Divine rank at least once during the previous three seasons would be eligible for free content in Might & Magic Fates. It is a digital TCG launched in February that allows players to acquire and trade cards through an external marketplace powered by Immutable technology, which secures those transactions.
So far, Champions Tactics has not attracted much public attention. It previously made the news only when a matchmaking glitch forced every ranked player to spend the game’s first weekend being repeatedly matched against the same unbeatable opponent…
