Dude.
Guillemot isn’t wrong. It’s a new way to squeeze the whales, and the rest of us are not going boycott Ubisoft over this. Or at least not in numbers big enough to make a difference.
“I’m here to make games and promote fun and entertainment,” one current developer told Kotaku . “And I don’t see how this is going in that direction, it’s just another way to milk money.”
Who wants to be the one to tell him?
Hey, look! Yves took my title to heart.
According to them, the Ubisoft co-founder said the backlash to the Quartz announcement was expected, and likened it to initial public outcry over previous new developments in the games industry like DLC, microtransactions, and loot boxes. The implication seemed to be that NFTs would become similarly accepted over time.
I love Anno and Asscreed, but the moment they introduce NFT’s to them I’m done. I won’t buy the games period anymore. Yves can go f*ck himself.
Loot boxes are supposedly a huge problem in gaming, but I have never seen one in anything I play. So my rationale is the same here. I figure the NFTs will catch on with the Fortnite type games and I will never be bothered by them. That is probably naive though.
I wish NFTs and Crypto would die out, but that just isn’t going to happen, so I have to learn to live with them.
I’m surprised this hasn’t been mentioned (or I missed it)
Was discussed here:
It will be painful for him, but Yves will persevere, and in time will be able to go on without us.
You have rosier picture of the future of the planet than I /s, sort of
That’s the future I see for the planet. For the lucky few who’ll be able to afford living.
So you’ve heard of my new Adele cover band: “Squeeze the Whales”? Look for our upcoming debut release NFTs.
Is that a joke?
In other news even the developers at Ubisoft hate NFT’s and the direction their company is taking.
It does seem dumb to make it a requirement that you have to have played the game extensively to purchase NFTs for it. I thought the whole idea of NFTs was to attract people who want to launder money?
That may partially be due to various countries making moves to ban them. The industry seemed to retreat from them after that. As least that’s how it appeared to me.
It’s presumably how they’re creating artificial scarcity, but it is particularly dumb if you think that NFTs are supposed to represent something other than a means of speculation. “Hey, I have this cool thing that shows I achieved “x” in this game. Or, you know, that I paid money to someone who did. Or someone who paid that someone.” You’re literally buying an achievement. It’s devaluing the in-game reward to monetise it.
Apparently we will not, in fact, buy in-game NFTs.
The initial three releases are free, so as Ginger_Yellow implies the time requirement is how you make the initial allocation of the NFTs feel fair. If the initial allocation was just first come, first served, the limited number of initial releases would just all go to bots.
Here’s the thing, though: rare cosmetic items in any game with a large enough player base are already monetized, through after-market reseller sites a la gold sellers.
It’s been this way for a decade. (Just google “Counterstrike skins market.”) At this point those sites are firmly entrenched, nicely profitable, and thriving under the status quo. So the developers/publishers face a choice:
- Ignore the after-market, which allows the reselling to continue without any of that money involved going to the devs.
- Ban anyone who participates in the after-market, which will alienate a vast chunk of the player community who doesn’t feel the punishment fits the crime. (And may be impossible to do accurately anyway.)
- Make transfer of cosmetics impossible, which alienates a smaller chunk of the community, but still involves pissing off a large group of people who are just innocently trying to share their good fortune with their friends, guildies, or alts.
- Officially allow the resale of cosmetics for cash (or something like cash) and become the broker yourself. This wipes out the after-market middlemen and gives you a cut of the resale value.
For Ubisort, it’s not a hard choice.
There are bunch of ways to do that, though, which raises the question: why NFTs in particular? But I’ve rambled on long enough, that’s a subject for another time.