I've just been in this time before.
Ah, it has been a while since I've had a taste of some of that succulent 'low hanging fruit', now hasn't it? That taste, a delicate yet seductive blend of predictability and prejudice, swirled into a vat of 'easy content'- oh, it just tickles the core of my senses to even picture! But then, it hasn't been so long... what could Ubisoft have possibly done this time to cement their ever flagging legacy as one of the most consistently out-of-touch developers on this fair planet? Oh wait, what a stupid question to ask, of course they've come out and reaffirmed their dedication to a grift so pathetic it's already done the late night talk show circuit and come back bruised and battered, NFTs. No, this isn't a re-run; and if you think you're caught in a time loop then we're all along for the ride as well. Ubisoft seriously can't read the neon painted writing slathered all over the wall.
To really hammer home the sort of world that the NFT trend inhabits these days; note the abundance of post-mortem articles documenting the passing of the fad as just desserts for a life badly lived. NFTs were synonymous with systemic wash trading, endemic overvaluation and horrific oversupply in the face of an extreme lack of demand. NFT pushers might as well be selling radioactive sandwiches on the street corner for how little they piqued the interest of literally anyone at all. It is somewhat warming to see how easily everyone saw through the grift of a 'trading ownership movement' that was dependent on a product that paid a constant commission to the publisher everytime it was traded. Yeah, they really forget to mention that bit whenever rambling about 'taking back your control' and 'owning your entertainment'. Which is to say nothing for the ecological impact, the impending economic implications of an NFT fuelled entertainment industry and the absolutely delusional break of society that so many defenders had as they tried to warp the foundations of reality in their mind to justify their dead-end subject.
And this was the state of the NFT world in March. There hasn't been some huge turn around, people haven't brushed off the ash and pined for the nostalgic days of NFT old- we've all moved onto the next tech boogie man, one with a lot more potential to change the face of the world, the abundance of AI generation algorithms. You'd have to be a real slack-jawed backwards hillbilly Neanderthal to be jumping abroad the NFT train now- and an even more primitive glob of primordial sludge to circle back around to NFTs at this point after experiencing the biting consequences of going down that path before. Which pretty much sums up how I saw the form of Ubisoft in the modern age because lo-and-behold: after smothering the ailing 'Ghost Recon: Breakpoint' to death with their first go at 'Ubisoft Quartz', those crazy Ubisoftians are back on their old bull again pushing the next dead end grift destined to ruin their meagre reputation even further.
Now that Tom Clancy is good and turning over in his grave, and Ubisoft already managed to kill their Watch_Dogs franchise with the quality of the games alone- they didn't even have to get out the NFT shaped gun- Ubisoft can finally move onto it's most profitable rotting horse: Assassin's Creed. Because as if planning to release 8 games for the series over the space of three years isn't asinine enough, Ubisoft have now taken it upon themselves to plan out a series of collectible digital assets mixed with real-world 3D printed models that look somewhat cool but probably aren't worth the hassle or investment to actually acquire. Okay, so maybe Ubisoft themselves aren't actually mounting this but rather just licensing out the property, but guess who's going to be getting the backlash anyway? That's right, the purse-string holders!
Picture this, Ubisoft are taking advantage of the semi-sci-fi world of Assassin's Creed to sell the likenesses of their characters in the form of 3D printable models which are tied to the purchase of NFTs which are described as the 'digital soul' of these heroes. So if you want to print out a cool model of Ezio doing a pose, you need to purchase his 'digital soul' off the blockchain for those schematics. That is the actual terminology they use and if I was working at the marketing firm who came up with this I would have taken the time to slap every single person who okay-ed this in the mouth for several reasons. Chief of which being that these desperate attempts to monetise off gaming franchises, even though this one isn't tied to an ingame asset and so I'm less personally offended by it, are all played out and trashy at this point.
But it goes a little deeper than this. Bear in mind that Ubisoft's Quartz project was such a tremendous disaster that Ubisoft had to cancel it and then pretend they were only really pretending to be zealous cultists about the 'NFT future' for laughs. So they're on the back foot right now, the laughing stock for all their business related decisions. As such, they knew this new NFT announcement was going to draw some ire right off the bat and needed to ensure it was nailed down to the floor- with no potential gaff to ruin the reveal. And then it comes out that the name of the NFTS in questions are 'digital souls'. Now divorce for a moment the fact that literally sounds like your ripping the heart and essence out of these characters in a significantly symbolic sense; where have we heard the term 'digital soul' used before in popular media? Heck, in popular gaming media?
Oh, that's right: that is literally the mcguffin device in the anti-corporate hate letter game: Cyberpunk 2077. Re-cap: Cyberpunk 2077 proposes the concept of a digitisation of a person's mind into a data chip in the vain pursuit of some form of 'immortality'. Of course, this is used as an enslaving tool to keep the 'engram' of undesirables for the nefarious ends of the financially monolithic and abstractly avaricious Arasaka corporation. These engrams are the 'digital souls' of the victims, ripped from the fleshy body and trapped in a server farm prison forever more. To quote the Cyberpunk in-universe 'Rezodrone' song 'Resist and Disorder':
"Behind the veil is the machine
It steals your soul, devouring all your dreams"
In essence, the conceptualisation of the word 'Digital Soul', as established by the Cyberpunk 2077 narrative, is a neoliberal-esque eradication of the person into their least human aspects, raw emotionless data, for the exploitation of shadowy capitalistic gods. If that isn't the be-all end-all of NFT smack downs, then I should just retire from writing altogether because it ain't getting colder than that.
So in one fell swoop Ubisoft have announced their newest foray into lunacy and roasted themselves in the same half-breath; mask-off describing the cynical and anti-consumerist nature of their latest grift. But then what else should we really expect from them? Ubisoft is desperate, they're losing respect in the industry, employees and fellow companies look on them as a joke, they're on the verge of oversaturating their last inexplicable money cow with a dozen Assassin's Creed projects at once, they have three games stuck in various states of development hell with a rumoured fourth eeking in that direction for good measure- (Beyond Good and Evil 2, Prince of Persia Remake, Skull and Bones and Splinter Cell Remake; respectively) they need to scrape the bottom of the barrel to remind themselves what it's like to feel money in their hands again. And as I did once love Ubisoft games and don't want to see them collapse any further, I should probably swallow my pride and at least wish them- nah, I can't do it... I hope they fail yet again. Screw NFTs.
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