Ubisoft Exec Inexplicably Blames Gamers for Dire NFT Reception. As of December, Ubisoft announced that they would be introducing the new blockchain and NFT platform for its game called Ubisoft Quartz.
This idea behind the Quartz is to sell gamers unique in-game NFTs given the name Digits limited edition batches that can further be resold when the players are done with the game in question. So far, gamers have seemed pretty hostile to the idea of games with NFTs baked in and, with that in mind, they had some uprising reaction to Ubisoft Quartz.
Ubisoft Exec Inexplicably Blames Gamers for Dire NFT Reception
Although this major pushback from gamers on the topic has been enough for them to dissuade other developers from implementing NFTs in their games (Such as STALKER 2 developer GSC Game World), Ubisoft is offering down on the concept.
As a matter of fact, the company is now offering more than just doubling down, because, in a recent interview with the Australian Website Finder, Ubisoft executives are now blaming the overwhelmingly negative reaction to Quartz on the notion that gamers just “don’t get” NFTs.
“I think gamers don’t get what a digital secondary market can bring them,” said Nicolas Pouard, who is the VP of Ubisoft Strategic Innovation Lab. “For Now, because of the current situation and context of NFTs, gamers really believe it’s first destroying the planet and second just a tool for the speculation. But first, we (at Ubisoft) are seeing first is the end game. The end game is all about offering players the chance to resell their items once they are done with them or probably finished playing the game itself.
“So, it’s really, for them” Pouard continued. “It really beneficial. But at the moment they don’t get it. also, this is a part of a paradigm shift in gaming. Moving from one economic system to another is quite not easy to handle. There are tons of habits that you are required to go against and a lot of your ingrained mindset has shifted. It actually takes time. We are aware of that.”
Ubisoft’s Announcement Trailer for Quartz
It should be noted that the “end game” scenario Pouard outlines in his comment has already been revealed by Ubisoft. The ability to resell digits in the coming future was in Ubisoft’s announcement trailer for Quartz, so we would be having a hard time believing that gamers are genuinely missing the point here. If Ubisoft’s end game is really all about just selling Players NFT items that they can resell at a much later date, then it is safe to say that it did not go over the head of gamers as Pouard claims.
But hey, you do not get to take our word for it, because we have embedded that announcement trailer up above. You get to watch it for yourself and see that it’s a pretty cut-and-dry presentation. It seems less than gamers would still be mission the point, more that they simply don’t want what Ubisoft is offering them here.
As stated earlier in an interview, Pouard states that Ubisoft was expecting a negative reaction to Quartz because “it’s not a very easy concept to grasp,” Once again suggesting that gamers get to get out of the loop on NFTs. Another Swing and another miss, we would say.
Verdict
It is actually not worth anything that gamers aren’t the only ones that are not purchasing what Ubisoft is selling. Quartz has even apparently generated a negative reaction coming from some Ubisoft employees, per this Kotaku report from December. It looks as if people who truly “get” Ubisoft’s strategy are Ubisoft executives, and that they would probably make the rest of us at least a little bit suspicious.
Even if we do not really understand what Ubisoft’s angle here is, we are not sure that talking down to your audience is not the way that you get them on board with something that is so controversial. It would remain interesting for you to see how Ubisoft tries rebounds from this one because so far, it seems like a terrible job to be selling of people on Quartz as a platform.
