Ubisoft's got yet another NFT project, and man do I feel bad for the artists whose great work is being wasted on this garbage

pcgamer.com:

Despite the fact that we've sort of universally agreed that NFT games aren't going to happen, the nature of game development makes it so we're bound to be seeing doomed projects fly their unwanted freak flags high on the proud ship «Sunk Cost». See, videogames take a few years to make, so whatever trend was popular a few years ago will only be surfacing now, unless you're willing to go all Early Access about it (which plenty of NFT projects have).

Ubisoft has gotten a big run up and leapt onto the bandwagon already halfway to Oregon with Champions Tactics, a Web3 (that's «NFT» in tech bro speak) PVP game which, looking at this trailer, has an art department that's utterly wasted on it.

Here are the nice things I have to say about Champions Tactics: This aesthetic, a blend of Darkest Dungeon and Heroforge-style tabletop minis, is rad as all hell. Going onto the website, you can see 3D models of these things, and they all have this lovely painterly texture to them. This might be the first NFT game I actually think looks halfway good—certainly better than the weird, lifeless pseudo-anime dolls of Square Enix's Symbiogenesis.

Here are the bad things I have to say about Champions Tactics: It's an NFT game. Despite being so thoroughly, annoyingly touted as the future of game development since it surfaced circa 2015-2017, I've yet to see a single use of the tech that isn't just replicable with what we have already.

Evangelists of the stuff will tell you that you can own your own digital corner of the information highway (Second Life came out in 2003, and most MMOs have housing), or that you can trade rare items with your fellow players (TF2 and Counter-Strike have been doing this forever). Then there's this idea that you «own the item» in question more than you would otherwise (you don't, you own a certificate that's associated with it, and the item will vanish if the infrastructure does). Then there's the whole «you could use a sword from one game in another game!»