I wish I was joking… I really do… but Ubisoft have proudly announced that they are now selling NFT’s on one of their current live service games, Tom Clancy’s Breakpoint.
It’s called ‘Ubisoft Quartz’ and is essentially unique identifier cosmetics in the game via individual serial numbers that have been plastered on various pieces of armor such as helmets and shoulder pads. These items will have an item number that is unique to your purchase and allows you to sell these items to others in order to grant them access to it. All of this is very clearly a vanity project and Ubisoft is just trying to catch onto the latest fad of NFTs which is scary to say the least as this means other game companies many follow in their footsteps.
For those who don’t know why NFTs are bad they are basically a pyramid scheme that is trying to convince people that they own a piece of digital media because they spent money on it when in actuality it is no more theirs than the people who run the servers. Of course this leads to massive numbers of scams, investments not paying off and alongside all of this the data that is transferred for each of the unique identifiers requires a lot more energy than most other online services which leads to massive climate decline over a period of time. Seeing this in games makes me sad as it screams to me that games at the highest level don’t care about being games anymore, they are business ventures, and you can’t get more obvious about that than by selling NFT’s. The service hasn’t been released yet but you can expect an incredible amount of backlash when it eventually hits the live servers.
That’s all for now, and as always. It’s not just a game, It’s a Life.