Vice-president of the strategic innovation laboratory of Ubisoft, Nicolas Pouard spoke at the microphone of the Australian site Finder and defended the project carried by the French publisher. “Well, we expected this reaction. We know this is not an easy concept to grasp. But Quartz is really only the first step towards something bigger. Something that will be easier for our players to understand“, he explains to start.
From the point of view of Nicolas Pouard, an in-house blockchain specialist whose background is not that of a game designer but of a professor of philosophy, for context, most players do not realize the benefits that the market NFT could offer them and are too focused on the bad reputation of this still young technology.
“I think gamers don’t understand what a digital secondary market can do for them. For now, due to the current NFT situation and context, players truly believe that it is primarily about destroying the planet and just a tool for speculation. But what we see is the finality of the thing. The purpose is to give players the opportunity to resell their items once they are done with them or when they have finished playing the game itself. So it’s really for them. It’s really beneficial. But they haven’t figured it out yet“, he adds.
For the time being, the first test carried out by Ubisoft with the NFTs was carried out very cautiously on a game that no longer unleashes a lot of passion, Ghost Recon Breakpoint. At Konami, an auction of 14 NFTs was held this month on the theme of Castlevania. If it was entitled to its share of sighs, this practice is nonetheless completely outside the game itself. Square Enix and SEGA have also shown interest in NFTs and blockchain without announcing any concrete plans that would give the public concrete reasons to revolt. Shortly before Christmas, the CEO of SEGA even warned his shareholders that NFT plans could be abandoned if the public condemns this technology as just a way to make money.
The GSC Game World studio, for its part, burned its wings by wanting to introduce NFTs without warning in Stalker 2 in the form of in-game characters. The concept was to auction character models and model the winners’ faces on it to immortalize them in-game as NPCs. Nothing that affects the nature of the game itself, but the mere mention of the terms NFT and blockchain sparked such reactions that the studio quickly gave up and swept away anything that directly or indirectly relates to these notions.
The determination displayed by Nicolas Pouard seems to contrast with the feeling present within Ubisoft itself. According to employee messages posted on the company’s internal social network and revealed by Kotaku last month, many Ubisoft employees expressed disappointment or uncertainty about the progress of NFTs in games. Continuing this sentiment, a recent GDC survey of 2,700 developers showed that 70% of professionals surveyed see no point in introducing NFTs into their games.
Far from the forcing carried out by some, others seem to have deemed it preferable to dissociate themselves from NFTs as much as possible so as not to attract the wrath of the community. The result is a scene as lunar as that offered by the German Valorant Twitter account, forced to publish a communicated to explain that, no, Killjoy’s character is not an NFT worshiper at all. A terrible misunderstanding stemmed from a photo showing this computer enthusiast at the museum admiring the digital work of an artist from her country, Martin Houra, without suspecting that the latter is marketing his work on the Ethereum blockchain. “We never intended to include NFTs among Killjoy’s works or passions.“, clarifies Riot Games. Come on, it will be fine this time, come on.
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