Ubisoft’s official foray into the world of non-fungible tokens did not get off to the best of starts; The announcement was trashed by fansand the company’s “junk” NFTs were largely ignored upon publication. In a new interview with the Australian site finderHowever, Ubisoft says the blame for this is ours, not theirs.
It’s an extraordinary interview to watch, top down. For example, it starts with:
On December 7, 2021, Ubisoft will be the first well-known game developer to publicly enter the NFT space. The start of the Ubisoft Digits, an NFT and the Quartz platform were not well received. Player feedback ranged from negative to the point of aggression. How gamers want it. Even the big names in gaming press were lukewarm in their analysis. In one way or another, this was a milestone in gaming, but the media clearly didn’t want to incur the wrath of their readers.
OK. And if we’re at “actually I was excited about the launch of Quartz and Digits,” you can probably see where this is going. The whole thing is a softball opportunity for Nicolas Pouard, VP at Ubisoft’s Strategic Innovations Lab, and Didier Genevois, Ubisoft’s blockchain technical director, to clear the air and make a selling point for the much-mocked Quartz campaign.
Instead of targeting the users, however, Pouard decides to tell us that we’re all wrong and that this stuff is actually awesome:
I think gamers don’t understand what a digital secondary market can do for them. Right now, due to the current situation and context of NFTs, players really believe that firstly it destroys the planet and secondly it is just a tool for speculation. But what we [at Ubisoft] see the endgame first. The endgame is about giving players the ability to resell their items when they’re done with them or when they’ve finished the game themselves.
So, it really is for her. It’s really beneficial. But they don’t get it at first.
Also, this is part of a paradigm shift in gaming. Changing from one economic system to another is not easy to handle. There are many habits that you need to break and many of your ingrained mindsets that you need to change. It takes time. We know that.
We absolutely understand, Nicolas, and we want to nothing to do with it. It is significant that this is a selling point from someone in the crypto space as it shares the same dangerous and soulless hallmarks of condescending peddlers who want to turn everything into a market, even want to turn their free time into something that can and is of divine right should be commercialized.
Of course, he wants Ubisoft to push this
Many companies, including major video game publishers, have dived into this market over the past 12 months for this very reason. Stupid as it is, it’s also usually explained by the fact that it’s a fad about making a quick buck out of jerks, and really what a public company wouldn’t want in this promotion.
However, Ubisoft’s efforts are on a whole different level. There’s a level of deluded commitment to the cause that we just haven’t seen from other publishers, and Whenever I hear from developers predicting that NFTs are “driving a wedge in the middle of this industry”there are places like Ubisoft where Management and workers are so far apart on this issueI think at first.
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