UbiSoft becomes the first major videogame publisher to announce the addition of NFTs to its games.
Well, expect the floodgates to open from this point onwards. Major gaming publisher Ubisoft has confirmed what it had been hinting for some time: it’s bringing NFTs to its games.
NFTs, if you’ve had the fortune not to have come across them before, are non-fungible tokens. We talked about them in more detail here, but they’re effectively – for the purposes of this story – a digital collectable. One-offs, in theory, that are unique to the person who has possession of them on their screen.
Of course, this sends the BS metre off the scale for some. But in theory, it holds: the integrity of an NFT is held by something called the blockchain, which in simple terms is a digital ledger that’s shared across thousands of pieces online. It means one individual can’t defraud it, or replicate it.
The downside is that whereas writing this stuff down on a piece of paper somewhere requires, well, a pen and paper, a blockchain requires thousands of computers to share and maintain the list of what’s what. To say blockchains are not on the environmentally friendly side would be a fair accusation, given the shared processing power required to keep them going.
But also, there are questions as to just why a game needs an NFT in the first place.
Appreciating that this opens up a line of enquiry where it’s not hard to come up with a list of things that games don’t actually need, the addition of an NFT nonetheless feels like commerce ahead of anything that matters. It’s cosmetics at this stage, rather than tangibles.
Gaming isn’t shy of money-making additions though. The whole saga of loot boxes rumbles on for a start. Loot boxes are items in games which can make a visual or an actual difference to a game, and several companies have come under fire for deploying them. Parents in particular have expressed unhappiness at being expected to pay for a digital box of randomised loot, and there have been – denied – accusations that it’s all akin to gambling. That debate and assorted legalities continues.
In their (weak) defence, at least a loot box doesn’t require a blockchain to keep it going, and can make some difference to the game in question beyond cosmetics. The argument for NFTs remains less clear.
But it’s not stopping major publishers chasing this potential pot of gold. Ubisoft is the first to officially break cover and it’ll be adding what it calls ‘digits’ to the game Ghost Recon: Breakpoint first up. Those digits will be in-game digital items that people can buy or sell. They will never exist as anything tangible in the real world.
Ubisoft has also addressed environmental concerns as it plays its hand, it thinks, by revealing that it’s using a blockchain called Tezos, which is said to be more energy-efficient than some of the alternatives. Still, you can buy the ‘digits’ with cryptocurrency, and that opens up a whole other metaphorical worm can as well. Extinction Rebellion will, with some justification, not be happy.
For players, serial numbers are being deployed in the items for sale in Ghost Recon: Breakpoint, so that you can be assured nobody else will have quite the same digital helmet for your character as your good self. Ubisoft furthermore has described the launch of its first NFT as “developing a true metaverse”, and no, we’ve no idea either.
Still, stranger things have taken off in gaming before. But unless we’re missing something, the benefits here are weighted in favour of the publisher rather than the player. It’s not going to stop another gaming giant, EA, bursting through the door next, and several others will be watching with interest to see if this is all a fad, or if there’s something to it. It can’t just be us, given what we’ve seen so far, that dreads it becoming the latter.
