This was a good article, including some of the other “why is this an NFT” parts
Ubisoft leans into this “feature” in its Quartz FAQ, writing that “a blockchain is a database that is shared across a network of computers. In other words, it is decentralized and has no ‘master.’”
It’s an interesting concept, but when you dig into the way Quartz works, it’s plainly not true in practice. Quartz, as currently constructed, has a very clear “master”—Ubisoft.
For a supposedly decentralized and “open” technology, Ubisoft places a lot of restrictions on who can own and use Digits. Quartz users have to be 18 years old, reside in one of a handful of countries (“USA, Canada, Spain, France, Germany, Italy, Belgium, Australia, or Brazil” for now), and use two-factor authentication on their Ubisoft Connect accounts.
Quartz owners also have to reach “XP Level 5” in Ghost Recon Breakpoint before they can collect or use the NFTs, a system seemingly designed to discourage pure speculators and to ensure “the Ubisoft Quartz platform is made for players, and for players only,” the company says. That XP level status is confirmed by linking Quartz to your Ubisoft account, which is, of course, centrally controlled and subject to its own terms of use above and beyond the detailed Quartz terms of use.
And if you later get banned from the game, your Ubisoft account, or the Ubisoft Quartz platform itself, you can no longer own Digits, according to those terms of use. Players who don’t meet any of Ubisoft’s requirements “will not be able to acquire Digits whether on the Ubisoft Quartz platform or an authorized third-party marketplace, nor have another player transfer their Digits to you… If you are not eligible, the transaction will fail.” So much for “decentralization.”
There’s a lot of other “lol so not really an NFT” things in there.
Yeah, it’s pretty clear that this is an attempt to attract outsized blockchain-bucks from bros excited to use their fake money for something. They could have just as easily created a non-blockchain-based market for in-game items.
There’s good reason for that, too. It’s really not easy to just hop 100% from the tech stacks that have surrounded the internet for the past 30 years to something fundamentally different. There are a lot of unsolved problems regarding how decentralization could work in practice. There’s also a fundamental lack of middleware to perform tasks that we consider routine in traditional tech stacks.
For example: blockchains are too large, in general, to scan in real time. A lot of services have their own smart contracts and write their own indexing servers (example) to create snapshots of blockchain transactions. Those have to be verified against the chain once new blocks are written, they introduce security holes, sites crash when they crash, etc.
The entire blockchain tech space is very new and will evolve dramatically over the next 10 years. Whatever people are doing now is going to look like a 1980s BBS in a decade.
Don’t worry buddy, it’s all speculative growth fake money, money laundering or sellers selling to themselves to pump shit up. I do not believe anybody is actually spending 650,000 real world dollars to buy the equivalent in crypto specifically to buy this shit. Laundering or leveraging media hype to bolster pump and dump strategies all the way down.
Extremely possible. I would put the likelihood the buyer was the seller, or they least know each other and co-ordinated the sale as a laundering effort or means to pump WETH at 90%.
My real takeaway from that article is that, even though YouTube has taken away the public display of the number of Dislikes precisely to keep the dirty laundry of companies like Ubisoft hidden, all it takes is a Chrome plugin to see the Dislike number so … why bother?
Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot held a video Q&A this week to try and reassure developers about the company’s controversial new push behind NFTs, according to multiple sources who were in attendance. But they said his answers were vague and leaned on buzzwords like “metaverse” and “web 3.0,” leaving some as disheartened by the company’s latest PR disaster as before.
