This headline might seem a few years off, but it’s not. This news 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 the game in 2024, after most tech companies had stopped promoting unpolished Web3 features and shifted their focus to the emerging artificial intelligence boom. Despite having previously failed on multiple occasions to introduce “pay-to-earn” features, the French company launched the game in 2024. In January 2022, the vice president of the company’s Strategic Innovation Lab declared that we simply don’t understand the value of NFTs.

This did little to quell the negative backlash, however, 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 came up with a solution offering real 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 it would gradually discontinue blockchain features due to expected changes in the infrastructure supporting the game’s Web3 features. A few days later, 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 over $63,000 shortly after their release. It is unclear how many of these characters were sold or for how much. After the Web3 features were removed, all players’ supposedly non-fungible characters were reportedly converted into fungible ones, which is typical in a game.

On May 21, Ubisoft announced that players who had reached the Divine rank at least once in the past three seasons would receive free content in Might & Magic Fates, a digital TCG launched in February. This game allows players to acquire and trade cards through an external marketplace powered by Immutable technology to secure these transactions.

So far, Champions Tactics hasn’t garnered much public attention. The game previously made the news when a matchmaking glitch caused all ranked players to spend their first weekend constantly being matched against an unbeatable opponent.

Source: PCGamer, Ubisoft