Ubisoft: "JK, we were kidding about the whole NFT stuff!"

 Telling lies?

The rise of NFTs has ushered on of the most distinct splits between gamers and developer desires that I might have ever seen in my years playing games. Because through everything that the games industry has churned up in order to slap a few extra bucks out of players, there's always been that plausible deniability so that the truly delusional could twist their mind into thinking everything down here was totally pro consumer. Excessive microtransactions? Well they're adding new content to the game, right? (Never mind that content was unceremoniously exorcized from the core package in the first place.) Season Passes? Well that's every DLC at a cheaper overall price! (Often sold before that DLC has been made so you can never know if it's good.) But NFTs? They were nothing. Less than nothing, for all they cost people. And the world thoroughly told that to those stupid enough to partake. But if you're stupid enough to front NFTs, you're probably too stupid to listen to free advice given by the people who give you money; so it's no surprise Ubisoft went ahead anyway.

Of all the companies that really need a kick up their arse recently, Ubisoft is one that has deftly dodged the righteous boot for an inordinate amount of time. With their workplace misconduct allegations, creatively drained team, squeezed dry franchises and all around scumminess, it's wonder they're still considered 'mid tier' by most gaming fans out there. My problem with them is more existential; they just lack that guttural drive to use their resources to create the uncreated; to innovate. They've trailed others and themselves for so very long now I don't think they higherups could tell you the Oxford Dictionary definition of 'originality.' It's a plague that has afflicted their games, staff and overall company structure and will always hold them back until the fundamental Ubisoft culture can learn to push itself forward to take risks. Oh wait- unless that risk is being the only company dumb enough to embrace NFTs; that would be a mistake!

Ubisoft Quartz was Ubisoft's absolutely full throttle jump into the scam-ridden, wash-traded, rug pulled world of Non Fungible Tokens; and don't let Yves' lies fool you; this was Ubisoft's grand vision for the future. Not only did Yves himself dripple on about how this was the future of the industry whilst his dusty grey matter started shrivelling up and dissolving between his over-cooked ears; but they even rolled out an actual Neanderthal, transported 50,000 years into the future, to tell us all how we were the dumb ones for not salivating like dogs over the prospect of trading worthless digital goods for moronic paymasters. Nicholas Pouard, Vice President of 'Ubisoft's Strategic Innovations Lab' and former Philosophy Teacher (My heart goes out to the generation of Parisian Philosophy majors this numbskull ruined) famously spouted out his utter nonsense during an interview about how NFTs aren't an "Easy concept to grasp" and that "Quartz is a first step that should lead to something bigger." These are direct quotes and I want you to keep them all in mind.

"I think gamers don't get what a digital secondary market can bring them." The man said, once again magically equating the concept of the block chain and secondary markets as interchangeable; without justifying the connection. (Especially given how secondary markets have existed in the past for games.) "Gamers believe it's first destroying the planet, and second just a tool for speculations. But what we are seeing is the end game... about giving players to opportunity to resell their items once they're finished with them." Another curious little snippet I wanted to highlight there. Wherein he identified just two of the major concerns with NFTs in gaming, there are a lot more, and then proceeded to address neither of them. The ecological impact of servers that run these various blockchains, is real. And the speculative market that NFTs consist in, is literally the core basis of NFTs. that's what the thing is; you can't just throw that away as the fringe concerns of someone who 'doesn't get it' when the very end goal you're shooting for is a world resplendent with video game item day trading!

These are words that a project lead at Ubisoft was saying, further pressing on assertions made by the CEO that NFTs were "Just the beginning". And of course, we mustn't forget the fact that Ubisoft tried to pay their employees bonuses in NFTs which is just... my god, that should be grounds for a civil case. Oh, and the NFTs which spawned all of these words of encouragement and solidarity? They were generic military armour pieces for a Live Service game that would cease active development due to lack-of-interest less than a year later. And in that time it's widely believed that Ubisoft sold so few of these NFTs that they likely didn't make back the money to took to mint them on the Blockchain in the first place. So that's the very first in Ubisoft's entire history that it took the initiative, and it turned into a total disaster so beautiful all of us 'haters' couldn't have dreamt it up in our most fitful nightmares. (Who said the String of Fate doesn't have a sense of irony?)

So how could Ubisoft possibly reveal to everyone that their get-rich-quick scheme totally dissolved into nothingness around them without losing the tightly wound community respect that they absolutely don't have? By lying of course! Yves 'le rat' Guillemot recently attempted to gaslight the entire Internet collectively by announcing the company's lack of progress with WEB3 initiatives by declaring that  Quartz was 'just part of their ongoing research'. Yeah, he hasn't walked back his stance entirely, but he's absolute trying to Astroturf over the companies' painfully obvious attempt to change the industry with a bold leap off a cliff. He wants the threat of future NFT propositions hanging over us at all times, without the looming sense of something vile happening at Ubisoft headquarters potentially souring their desperate attempt to reinvigorate their core franchise with an organised reboot strike. Seriously, Ubisoft is in major 'public relations' mode right now with reboot remakes of Prince of Persia, Splinter Cell and now Assassin's Creed, to an extent, all juggling around in various states of embarrassing disrepair.

In some ways this is actually a very damning indictment to the extent to which Yves and his like will bend reality to try and cover for their pathetic Crypto scheme. As much as many are pointing and laughing at this sad attempt to backtrack, I'm looking at a cover up aimed directly at investors. He's telling the money men that his sad profitless screw up shouldn't be held over his head because it was actually a data dry run which just ensure that the next time he swings around with NFTs, it'll actually make money. Unfortunately this is considered 'spin' in the legal sense and not defrauding his investors, but it's still utterly unethical from a moral sense to mislead those financially entwined to your company about the success of your operations so I'm going use this as yet another reason why Yves Guillemot deserves to be pushed out of his own company and left penniless. Yes, I really do hate the man.

Everything that Ubisoft has ever said about digital assets and what it is they want to do with them has been idle mush-mouth gibberish from people who really should know better. Transferrable assets is a nonsensical concept from a deeply base level, unless all the world was to adopt some sort of ultimate one-fits-all game engine overnight. (Which is a laughable prospect.) Selling on in-game items that you're done with to new players seems pointless when any game with basic balance is going to allow new players to attain that same item without spending any additional time whatsoever; Ubisoft might as well just keep selling their insipid 'time savers' packs if that's the angle they want to run with. And the whole 'ownership' angle seems deeply questionable when all of these assets are going to carry a Ubisoft trademark on them, and every sale made with them will kick back to Ubisoft. Seems gamers do understand NFTs quite a bit, eh? At least enough to know a dirty scam when we see it.