Ubisoft VP says players 'don't get' NFTs, but can't explain what there is to get

pcgamer.com:

Last year Ubisoft announced its first foray into NFTs: Ubisoft Quartz was announced via a new website and an overwhelmingly disliked Youtube video, and basically amounted to selling helmets with little numbers on them in Ghost Recon Breakpoint. Nevertheless the publisher seems committed to the idea of utilising these technologies in some form, and the whole shebang is being led by Nicolas Pouard, VP of Ubisoft's Strategic Innovations Lab.

Pouard has now commented on the backlash to Quartz, telling Finder that «I think gamers don't get what a digital secondary market can bring to them. 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 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 are 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."

Even if we give Pouard the benefit of the doubt, and try to understand the Ubisoft pitch, the problem remains that there just doesn't seem to be much here to grasp.

One of Pouard's key arguments is about decentralisation, and how it could potentially change what a game is: «I'm sorry as I know it's difficult to understand right now as this kind of idea doesn't really exist yet. But we see that the ecosystem for a game can be much, much bigger than what a game is