Ubisoft's NFT bosses say players just "don't get it"

eurogamer.net:

In December, Ubisoft raised eyebrows when it announced Quartz, an NFT platform for big budget games which would host resellable in-game items with unique codes stamped on.

Despite saying the system would use an «energy-efficient technology… a million times less energy than a bitcoin transaction», fans still criticised Ubisoft's focus on and championing of a technology they claimed was unnecessary and speculative.

Now, two of the faces behind Ubisoft's big NFT push have been interviewed by Australian financial site Finder, and said that fans just did not «get it».

Specifically, fans were said not to understand the upsides to reselling digital items — whereas Ubisoft was simply getting in early on a «paradigm shift in gaming».

Here's an extended quote in full:

«I think gamers don't get what a digital secondary market can bring to them,» Nicolas Pouard, VP at Ubisoft's Strategic Innovations Lab said. «For now, because of the current situation and context of NFTs, gamers really believe it's first destroying the planet, and second just a tool for speculation. But what we [at Ubisoft] are seeing first is the end game. The end game is about giving players the opportunity to resell their items once they're finished with them or they're finished playing the game itself.

»So, it's really, for them. It's really beneficial. But they don't get it for now.

«Also, this is part of a paradigm shift in gaming. Moving from one economic system to another is not easy to handle. There is a lot of habits you need to go against and a lot of your ingrained mindset you have to shift. It takes time. We know that.»

Pouard said that the reaction to Quartz was something Ubisoft was «expecting» and it was «not an easy concept to grasp».

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