Ubisoft is pretending it was never really that interested in NFTs
Enlarge / Galaxy brain, meet Ubisoft brain... (credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images | Ubisoft)
If you've been following Ubisoft's relationship with the NFT space in the last year, you probably remember that its nonsensical release of Quartz NFTs in Ghost Recon Breakpoint was halted in April after just a few months. At the time, though, Ubisoft said that players should "stay tuned for more updates with features to the platform and future drops coming with other games!"
In the months since, though, Ubisoft seems to have become less enthusiastic about its future NFT plans. In a recent group Q&A following a press event at Ubisoft's Paris HQ (transcribed by GameIndustry.biz), CEO Yves Guillemot tried to clarify that the company is "still in research mode, I would say, when it comes to NFTs."
"We really look at all the new technologies. We are very much on cloud, on the new generation of voxels, and we're looking at all the Web3 capabilities. We tested a few things recently that are giving us more information on how it can be used and what we should do in the universe of video games. So we are testing ground with some games, and we'll see if they really answer the players' needs.
The bit about "answering the players' needs" is especially interesting in the wake of Ubisoft's use of NFTs in Breakpoint. In the months after Ubisoft gave away thousands of game-usable NFTs, an Ars analysis found only 96 successful secondhand sales for those in-game items on Objkt and Rarible (the only two marketplaces where such sales are allowed), with prices generally measured in the equivalent of tens of dollars. These third-party transfers were sold as one of the primary use cases for NFTs in the first place, so the lack of sales shows just how little player interest there was in Breakpoint's NFT implementation.