NFT: Ubisoft launches the Quartz platform, freshly welcomed by Internet users – archyde

Tuesday, December 7, Ubisoft announced the launch of Quartz, a platform for acquiring NFTs (non-fungible tokens, or “non-fungible tokens” in French), called “Digits” and usable in the game Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Breakpoint, released in 2019. But from the launch of what was to be one of the most important announcements of the end of the year for the video game giant, the video saw an avalanche of negative comments on YouTube.

Available from December 9 for PC players, these NFTs offered in nine countries, including France, are digital items available in limited quantities. The first of them, a machine gun, must succeed in the coming days two other objects, a helmet and pants.

Concretely, each NFT will have its own serial number, visible to all other players, and will keep track of its current owner and all previous ones for years to come, thanks to a technology-based certificate of ownership. “Blockchain” (here, the blockchain Tezos), a tamper-proof system that also authenticates cryptocurrency transactions. These cosmetic items have no real effect in the game (an NFT rifle will not be more powerful than another, for example) but can be resold.

Even if Ubisoft has already been interested in NFTs for a few years – for example, it launched the OneShot League in March with the start-up Sorare – this announcement seems to have made many players cringe. Despite the disappearance of the button “I don’t like” (dislike) on Youtube, which would have made it possible to concretize this discontent, two American specialized media, Kotaku and Video Games Chronicle, claim that the video presenting the project received 95% negative interactions.

“Laughable”, “Something we haven’t asked for and aren’t going to like”, “The day Ubisoft thought it was going to become totally evil” … These messages appear at the top of the comments, have been “liked” by thousands of Internet users and generally reflect the general trend of what can be observed on social networks.

Between NFT and video games, a stammering relationship

Thursday December 9, at the top of the forum dedicated to Ghost recon on the Reddit platform, Internet users wondered why the YouTube video was dereferenced, which makes it impossible to find for those who do not have the direct link. No reason to see it as a way to avoid negative comments, according to Ubisoft who, contacted by The world, explains that the video was dereferenced “On YouTube from the start, in order to redirect players as a priority to the Quartz site to discover the whole experience”. However, the studio declined to comment on the influx of negative comments – a phenomenon that is not restricted to YouTube, since it can also be found on Twitter or the Ubisoft US Facebook page.

This episode in any case resurfaces many recurring criticisms about the introduction of NFT in video games.

Many Internet users seem to fear in particular a speculative effect of NFTs on games, as can already be seen in the art market. A digital yacht created in the virtual universe The Sandbox was for example sold at the end of November for 149 ether, a cryptocurrency based on blockchain Ethereum, an amount equivalent to 560,000 euros. Moreover, because the technology of blockchain requires great computing power to validate transactions, and therefore a significant amount of electricity, other users are already sorry about the announced environmental cost of these new Ubisoft NFTs, and this despite the company’s efforts to communicate on nature ” environmentally friendly “ of the device.

At last, as noted by the specialized site Ars Technica, this new project also seems to free itself, at least in part, from the open and decentralized nature of NFTs, favoring management subject to many criteria (age, nationality, possession of a Ubisoft account and a certain number of experience points in the game…) and restricting their trading to two platforms exclusively.