Champions Tactics: Grimoria Chronicle makes good on Ubisoft’s threat to coil out hot steaming NFT garbage straight into my innocent eyes

rockpapershotgun.com:

"Worthless,’ they'd declared. Most NFTs were ‘worthless.’ The greatest artistic movement since The Big BSoD, the greatest proof of the power of the blockchain, the very future of the whole funging Infobahn, and the hedgie soybean-counters say it's all ‘worthless’," once wrote the greatest living prophet of our era.

Now, in an entirely predictable case of "I am once again asking our tech overlords to watch the whole movie", those plucky chancers at Ubisoft have lifted AliceO’s ideas wholesale, ignored her timely and cogent commentary, and released a roiling puke reservoir of NFT upchuck masquerading as a game. Thank you Ian Games for the spot. You are the Neal Stephenson to AliceO’s William Gibson, but for worthless crap. (The IGN piece has some very good context and is worth reading).

Champions Tactics: Grimoria Chronicles, which I won’t link because I respect the colour green too much, is “the ultimate Web3 competitive Turn-Based RPG”. You can only play the game via its own website, which I won’t link to because I respect the colour green too much. There’s also a trailer floating around. Not going to link to that either. Got a lot of respect for ‘things in motion’, I have, and this represents a terrible use of them.

As IGN point out, Ubisoft first announced it’d be sticking its head in the NFToilet bowl and daintily sampling the yellowing side-cruft about three years back in an earnings call. Words like ‘revolution’ were used. The phrase ‘pay-to-earn’ was latched on to with glee. "[Blockchain] will imply more play-to-earn that will enable more players to actually earn content, own content, and we think it's going to grow the industry quite a lot," chirpy cockney urchin Yves Guillemot said at the time.

Contrast this to statements made by Ubisoft’s Philippe Tremblay to GI.biz earlier this year, where the director of subscriptions said that a consumer shift "needs to happen" re: "Gamers are used to owning their games". Sure, blockchain and subscription-based access