'Gamers don't understand what a digital secondary market can bring to them,' by Nicolas Pouard.
In December, Ubisoft announced a new blockchain and NFT platform for its games called Ubisoft Quartz. The idea behind Quartz is to sell gamers unique in-game NFTs called Digits in limited edition batches, that can then be resold when players are done with the game in question. Gamers so far have seemed pretty hostile to the idea of games with NFTs baked in and, with that in mind, they had an unsurprising reaction to Ubisoft Quartz.
"Digits are collectable in-game vehicles, weapons, and pieces of equipment that offer players unprecedented ways to connect with and enjoy more value from the games they love," Ubisoft said at the time.
Not everyone was a fan, in part because it takes a lot of work to earn these in-game NFTs, IGN explains. Others were concerned about the environmental impact of mining crypto. Or they just think NFTs are scams in general.
“I think gamers don’t get what a digital secondary market can bring to them,” said Nicolas Pouard, who is the VP of Ubisoft Strategic Innovations 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 speculation. But what we [at Ubisoft] are seeing first is the end game. The end game is about allowing players to resell their items once they’re finished with them or they’re finished playing the game itself.”
The amount of work required to earn these NFTs inside Ghost Recon, meanwhile, was by design and intended as a barrier of entry against NFT speculators.
"A very big majority of the 2,500 tokens ordered [in the first 2 weeks] were from Ghost Recon: Breakpoint players [who] were playing the game for a very long time beforehand," Didier Genevois, Ubisoft's Blockchain Technical Director, added in the same interview. "It was good to see that, because to us, [speculators were] the biggest risk."
While Ubisoft may have addressed some concerns about NFTs in its games, getting players to understand the benefits of NFTs in games is a different matter. Pouard believes the value is simple, as the NFTs provide players with “the opportunity to resell their items once they're finished with them or they're finished playing the game itself,” adding that “it's really beneficial. But they don't get it for now.”
Pouard says the team will learn from community feedback “to make sure what we're doing will make even more sense to gamers.” However, Ubisoft will likely have to address concerns over the value of NFTs when a game reaches end-of-life, thereby shutting players out from accessing the virtual items they own.
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