Ubisoft Devs Don’t Understand Company’s NFT Push, Either

 

 

Last week Ubisoft revealed its new NFT tech platform, called Quartz, and it didn’t go well. The announcement that Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Breakpoint would be the first game to implement cryptocurrency-backed items was downvoted on YouTube over 40,000 times. Now it turns out even many developers at the Assassin’s Creed publisher have no idea what to make of the publisher’s new NFT scheme.

 

 

According to messages reviewed by Kotaku, a post announcing Quartz on Ubisoft’s internal social media hub, MANA, quickly filled up with questions and concerns from developers across the company. Some didn’t understand which old problems the new tech actually solved, while others were worried about receiving mandates to start integrating NFTs (non-fungible tokens, aka hyperlinks to JPEGs) into their own games.

 

 

“I still don’t really understand the ‘problem’ being solved here,” wrote one employee. “Is it really worth the (extremely) negative publicity this will cause?” Another asked, “How can you look at private property, speculation, artificial scarcity, and egoism, then say ‘yes this is good, I want that, let’s put it in art?’”

 

 

“I normally try to stay positive on our announcements but this one is upsetting,” wrote a third.

 

 

Some developers raised environmental concerns. While Quartz is based on a cryptocurrency, Tezos, that derives its value from proof-of-stake technology rather than an exponentially more energy-intensive proof-of-work algorithm, there’s still a lot of debate over the strengths and weaknesses over this alternate form of crypto generation. Others simply felt like the announcement was just a vehicle for meaningless buzzwords and another unnecessary PR disaster for a company whose reputation is already in shambles following a litany of allegations of sexual misconduct and workplace mistreatment over the last year.

 

 

Read the full article on Kotaku