By
Chimamanda U. Martha
April 17th, 2024
The prime reason to refuse Ubisoft’s NFT project is that the gaming community sees the venture as a money-minting technique implemented by the company.
French video game company Ubisoft Entertainment SA is facing massive backlash for its recent announcement trailer posted on the company’s official North American Youtube channel. Ubisoft revealed the Beta Launch of ‘Quartz’, its latest Non-Fungible Token (NFT) project via a small Youtube video on December 8th. Ubisoft’s NFT project video has gained almost 24k views in which only around 1k of the viewers have liked the video.
The project plans to integrate NFTs and Blockchain Technology with the present Triple-A game title. The announcement also disclosed that the first game to officially inaugurate the NFTs would be Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Breakpoint. The video begins with an explanation of Quartz as a platform that allows users to gather and store the first playable and energy-efficient Ubisoft NFTs called the “Digits”.
Recently on November 10th, Youtube modified its guideline that allowed the channel to hide the number of dislikes on a video. Nevertheless, the number can still be viewed using the Chrome Extensions and amounts to over 96% of dislike ratio. Many Youtube viewers have commented on the video complaining about the easy money techniques implemented by the company without actually trying to improve the overall gaming experience. Many top comments on the video, like the one by a user named “OperatorDrewski”, have dissed Ubisoft’s money-minting initiative. Many users on Twitter have threatened to completely boycott the company and uninstall the firm’s games altogether.
That’s not all. Gamers on Reddit have started posting on threads named “do not support Quartz”. The Redditors are emphasizing the same issue while saying no to the misleading practice of charging gamers for trivial services while ignoring the idea of developing a better gaming experience for them. The Redditors go on to call the companies “anti-consumer”.
While the gamers’ resistance to NFTs is significant, it is not the first time that a major company has suffered reluctance towards their adoption of the NFT space. In the last month, Digital Distribution platform Discord was compelled to drop the Ethereum and NFT integration plans, after CEO Jason Citron was bombarded with thousands of comments by the gamer community. While after the massive resistance, Jason claimed that the NFT feature was in “pre-release” mode, he was instantly badgered by the hundreds of comments asking him to drop the plans.
However, the case of Ubisoft is a bit different from the Discord’s one. The prime reason to refuse Ubisoft’s NFT project is that the gaming community sees the venture as a money-minting technique implemented by the company, which allows the company to put in minimal efforts and maximize profits. However, the Discord initiative faced backlash because the crypto-skeptics believed it to be a Ponzi scheme that was harmful to the environment because of its energy requirements for mining cryptocurrencies.