SNEAK PEEK
- Ubisoft has slowed its momentum on its NFT gaming project Quartz.
- In a recent interview, the company said it was in research mode.
- The CEO, Yves Guillemot, said that the company is currently looking to discover whether NFTs are beneficial for gamers or not.
French gaming giant, Ubisoft seems to go back on its enthusiastic NFT gaming project, Quartz. In a recent interview with gamesindustry.biz, the CEO, Yves Guillemot, said that the project was merely in its “research mode”.
The CEO said,
We are very much on cloud, on the new generation of voxels, and we’re looking at all the Web3 capabilities. We tested a few things recently that are giving us more information on how it can be used and what we should do in the universe of video games,
The company’s chief financial officer Frédérick Duguet October 2021 wholeheartedly noted that the NFTs in gaming will enable users to create and own content. At that time, the company was looking to become one of the key players in NFT gaming and Web 3.0 integrations.
In December, the company launched the beta version of the Quartz NFT games. It offered gamers payable NFTs that they can use in games like Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Breakpoint.
However, in the recent Saturday interview, the company appears to go back on its last year’s comments. The CEO at this stage noted that the company is currently emphasizing how NFTs can be integrated into the games. They are also looking to discover the importance and utility of NFTs to gamers.
Yves Guillemot also added,
So we are testing ground with some games, and we’ll see if they really answer the players’ needs. But we are still in research mode, I would say.
Ubisoft Quartz met strong criticism from the NFT-hating gamer community. they accused the company to milk out every cent possible by introducing NFTs into the mix.
Nicolas Pouard, the vice president at Ubisoft’s Strategic Innovations Lab, defending the company said,
I think gamers don’t get what a digital secondary market can bring to them.
The CEO feels that the company didn’t properly communicate its vision behind the NFT rollout and was misunderstood. He said that they must have said that they were working on it and will bring it to the public if it gives real benefit.
The Ubisoft CEO also showed his concern about the environmental impacts of the blockchain. Gamers often confuse high energy-consuming PoW consensus mechanism as the basis of all gaming projects.
Guillemot said that he is very cautious about the environmental impacts of blockchain technology. Talking further on this point he said,
Like so many things, at the beginning, it’s not as good as it could be, but like other new technologies they will find the right way.
