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Recently, Ubisoft announced Quartz, its own NFT platform with plans to sell in-game content for Ghost Recon Breakpoint as NFTs. This decision quickly sparked controversy in the gaming community, with the publisher's announcement video for Quartz being so heavily downvoted that Ubisoft unlisted the video. As it turns out, many Ubisoft developers also have questions around the company's push into the NFT market.
According to sources speaking with Kotaku, Ubisoft's internal forum, known as MANA, is filled with messages and posts from staff members across the company, expressing disappointment in this new push into the NFT market. Many developers were also caught by surprise and left confused by the decision.
One developer posted on MANA asking if this move is “really worth the (extremely negative publicity” it will cause. Another asked “how can you look at private property, speculation, artificial scarcity, and egoism, then say ‘yes this is good, I want that, let’s put it in art?”
Despite all of this, Ubisoft has charged ahead with its plans for NFTs, which the company refers to as ‘Digits' on its platform ‘Quartz'. Claiming these NFTs also requires a hefty time investment, with some early users finding that they need to have 600+ hours of playtime in Ghost Recon Breakpoint to claim an NFT. As SkillUp points out, this could lead to future issues, particularly in multiplayer games, where are good portion of the ‘player base' could be AFK bots farming hours in the game in order to obtain NFTs. Valve has a similar issue on Steam, with many using bots to rack up hours in games across their library in order to earn ‘trading cards', which can then be sold on the Steam Marketplace and converted into Steam Wallet funds.
Ubisoft has not commented publicly on the backlash to its plans for Quartz and NFT integration in future games. So far, there is no indication that the publisher will change course.
KitGuru Says: What do you all think of Ubisoft Quartz and this sudden push to implement NFTs in games across the industry?
