The new Non-Fungbile-Token (NFT) project Quartz of the French gaming giant Ubisoft Entertainment SA is facing strong resistance from the gaming community.
Ubisoft revealed the Quartz beta launch on December 8th in a short YouTube video that had 214,721 views at the time of writing. The project goals to combine NFTs and blockchain technology with existing Triple-A game titles, and announced Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Breakpoint as the first game to officially integrate NFTs.
The video introduces Quartz as a platform that enables gamers to “collect the first playable and energy-efficient Ubisoft NFTs” known as “Digits”.
YouTube recently changed its policy of hiding the number of Dislikes a video receives on the platform, however the number can still be obtained through Google Chrome Extensions. When using an extension, the video currently shows 1,400 likes and 37,000 dislikes, which translates into a dislike rate of around 96%.
One of the top comments on the video from user “OperatorDrewski” currently has 2,600 likes with no aversions and criticizes Ubisoft’s NFT project as a quick cash win rather than improving the overall gaming experience:
“To me, this is an obvious signal that you are milking the Ghost Recon franchise for literally every penny while putting minimal effort into the actual game itself. Don’t play a GR game in the future if the team is so degenerate. “
“They took a solid franchise and made it absolutely ridiculous,” they added.
That opinion appears to be shared by a significant number of the community, with users on Twitter also slapping the company in response to the latest announcement when they threatened to uninstall the company’s games and completely boycott Ubisoft.
Based on my personal opinion about NFTs, and not just the environment, I will now be uninstalling everything related to you and stopping further purchases of your games.
That’s all. For people who don’t like Current Ubi marketing, just stop buying.
– Skyeeeely – Lazy VStreamer Cat (@Sukaaaily) December 7, 2021
A December 8 post on the r / gaming page on Reddit shows a concerted effort to boycott the new NFT project. The article with the title “Supports” Quartz “, the new NFT Ubisoft marketplace” by “u / WolverineKuzuri93” does not have 2,500 comments and an upvote rate of 93% for more than 13,400 upvotes.
Highlighting similar issues as the top commenter on YouTube, the Redditor notes:
“We have to oppose this practice. […] This is just another way to beautify players with cosmetics instead of focusing on making quality products with depth. We have to let the companies know that this is anti-consumer. “
“I’m not entirely against the concept of using an NFT-style system for digital games. For example, that you actually own your digital copy, not just a license so that you can sell it to someone else’s account. This is actually the future of digital gaming. I’m against how Ubisoft does it with in-game items, ”they added.
Gamer backlash to NFTs
This is not the first time a large company has been fired for looking at or entering the world of NFTs. Cointelegraph reported last month that the community messaging app Discord had been forced to make its Ethereum-based one NFT integration plansafter the gamer community bombed CEO Jason Citron.
Citron initially teased his company’s plans with a screenshot of a beta feature that was shown Support of Ethereum NFT wallets, however, he was immediately showered with thousands of comments urging him to abandon the plans and threatening users to cancel their paid Nitro subscriptions.
Reddit: OpenSea is returning to the IPO plan following the backlash from the community
Unlike in the case of Ubisoft, where the community seems upset by what it claims to be money robbery, the crypto-skeptics on Discord believe that NFTs are a Ponzi scheme and are damaging the environment due to the energy used for mining of cryptocurrencies is required.
Cointelegraph has reached out to Ubisoft representatives for a comment and will update the story if they respond.
