Yesterday, Ubisoft announced their intention to bring the first NFTs to their games in the form of three cosmetic items for Ghost Recon Breakpoint. As part of the announcement they produced a 79 second trailer describing how the system, dubbed “Ubisoft Quartz”, would work.
After around 24 hours, the video has 200k views, 1300+ likes and 35,000+ dislikes.
Here’s the video:
While YouTube recently removed the ability to see how many dislikes a video has, the dislike button still exists, and there are Chrome plugins that let you bring the counter back. At the time of writing, 96% of people who gave the video a thumb one way or the other disliked the video.
This is cheering to me personally for the many reasons I outlined in the post yesterday (and in the comments afterwards). NFTs are dumb, whether that’s because they’re bad for the environment or simply bad for games. In this instance, they’re being used to deliver three generic cosmetic items, each “unique” only in the sense that it has an “engraved ID”.
While every publisher’s CEO is talking up NFTs and cryptocurrency and “play-to-earn”, and while investors are clearly horny for the technology, there’s never been any evidence people who play games want it. Here instead is some evidence that they do not.
The Ghost Recon community on Reddit has likewise been united in their criticism of Quartz. Ghost Recon players have long been frustrated by Ubisoft’s management of the series, including this year’s announcement (and near-immediate delay) of Ghost Recon Frontline.
Correction: This story originally stated that the video had been delisted after the negative response. This is incorrect; it was always delisted. Apologies for the error.