Ubisoft takes a step back with NFT

The future of Quartz, Ubioft’s platform that sells the first environmentally responsible and playable NFTs in AAA games powered by the Tezos blockchain, is unclear.

Yves Guillemot, CEO of French publisher Ubisoft, announces that he wants to take his time with NFT after the failures of Quartz and its Digits. The goal now is to study the fintech market as a whole to identify the main trends:

We’re exploring all the new technologies and we’re very focused on the cloud, next generation voxels, and we’re also looking at all the possibilities that come with Web 3.0. We recently tested some elements that give us more information about how they can be used and what we should do in the video game universe. So we’re on the proving ground with a couple of games that… let’s see if they really meet the needs of gamers and then they hit the market. But we’re still in exploration mode, I would say.

Ubisoft’s foray into blockchain is an unfortunate mistake by Yves Guillemot

Yves Guillemot understands the bad reviews following Quartz’s announcement of the sale of Ghost Recon Breakpoint weapons and skins as NFTs called Digits:

We probably didn’t know we were doing research. We had to say that we are working on it, and that when we have something that will really benefit you, we will present it to you. Our company experimented with VR very early on, we were one of the first on the Nintendo Wii, we are always trying something new. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t, but we always want to give the player a new experience that is innovative and interesting. Our goal is to create the best possible experience, and new technologies are a very interesting vector due to less competition and appeal to the most inquisitive players of technological novelties.

Environment and NFT is no problem for Ubisoft

One of the main points of contention for this new technology is, of course, its impact on the environment, which goes against Ubisoft’s efforts to encourage sustainability. The company has held events to raise awareness of the climate crisis at Riders Republic (including a protest march against digital climate change), executive bonuses are tied to reducing the publisher’s carbon footprint, and a speech by Guillemot in Paris mentions that 95% of the electricity supplied to I3D — a server company acquired by Ubisoft in 2018 — uses renewable sources (and the heat produced by its server farms is directed to heating neighboring buildings).

Exploring doesn’t mean quitting. This industry is changing rapidly and you have to be very careful about what impact this will have. Like many things, it’s not as good as it could be at first, but like other new technologies, it will find its way.

The Ubisoft spokesperson adds that decentralized technology is no exception to the company’s commitment to protecting the environment, noting that the Strategic Innovation Lab, which conducts its blockchain research, collaborates with the corporate social responsibility team in everything it does. The latter added that high power consumption is mainly a problem for first-generation proof-of-work blockchains, while Ubisoft is focusing on working with proof-of-stake blockchains, consuming less power.

Ubisoft Quartz, our first large-scale experiment with this technology, is based on Tezos’ proof-of-stake blockchain, which consumes less power per transaction than sending emails. A standard email is equivalent to 4g CO², while a Tezos transaction is equivalent to 2.5g CO².