Ubisoft execs: “Gamers are always right”—yet they somehow “misunderstand” NFTs

In the weeks since Ubisoft rolled out non-fungible tokens in one of its video games, critics—particularly those here at Ars Technica—have shot back with questions about their purpose. While Ars is still waiting for a formal response to our December questions, the closest we're likely to get comes from a Thursday interview with Ubisoft executives that included a bold assertion that players' "resistance" to NFTs is "based on misunderstanding." (We hope Ubisoft isn't saying that to anyone who has read Ars' lengthy guide to NFTs.)

In the interview, conducted by Australian tech site Finder, two Ubisoft executives (Didier Genevois, head of Ubi's blockchain team, and Nicolas Pouard, lead on Ubi's "Quartz" and "Digits" NFT systems) fail to clarify how an online game's NFT implementation differs on a gameplay basis from existing digital rights management (DRM) solutions, particularly those baked into storefronts like Steam and Ubisoft Connect.

When pressed directly on what benefit a player might expect from engaging with Ubisoft Digits, Pouard first said that "gamers don't get what a digital secondary market can bring to them." Eventually, Pouard answered with one potential benefit: "the opportunity to resell their items once they're finished with them or they're finished playing the game itself."

Finder's reporter then asked whether Ubisoft game license purchases might one day be treated like NFTs so that consumers can freely sell and trade the games they've purchased instead of having them locked in their Ubisoft Connect accounts. Pouard implied that such a thing could happen one day. "That's part of the use case we can explore, but it's not the focus today,"  he said.

A domain of wild contrasts

Pouard also indicated that the greater goal of NFT sales is connecting them to other marketplaces. He responded to a query about whether "play-to-earn" schemes could appear in Ubisoft games, with NFT acquisition as an endpoint, by saying, "Adding a real-world value reward might be the next addition on top of all the value a game already offers." (Pouard in no way explained how such NFTs or rewards would be doled out, nor what kind of regulatory hot water his team could land in for promoting such a scheme.)

In one head-spinning quote, Pouard all but screamed Ubisoft's intent for making money from a connected metaverse of some sort:

The interest in decentralization for a centralized company like Ubisoft is to open the gates of our games and to make them bigger by sharing [a stake] with our players. To build new experiences that are on top of what is in each game to date. It's a new way to see what a game could be. I don't want to go into numbers, but owning a percentage of a huge ecosystem might be even more interesting than just owning a game today. I'm sorry, as I know it's difficult to understand right now, as this kind of idea doesn't really exist yet [in gaming]. But we see that the ecosystem for a game can be much, much bigger than what a game is today in terms of value creation for everyone.

The interview is a domain of wild contrasts. On the one hand, Pouard said Ubisoft customers would have seen through any attempt to hide the NFT-based nature of its Digits system. "We need to be transparent on what we are doing," he said.

Yet when asked about customers' negative reaction to Ubisoft Digits, Pouard pivoted to condescension and obfuscation. After saying NFTs are "not an easy concept to grasp," he boldly asserted that "piece by piece, the puzzle will be revealed and understood by our players."

Worse, when describing the item-resale potential of Ubisoft Digits, Pouard got pretty blunt. "So, it's really for [paying Ubisoft customers]. It's really beneficial. But they don't get it for now," he said.

A few questions later, Pouard went back to heaping praise on players, telling Finder, "Players are always right. Because they are our players, and we love them. And so they're always right."

Hyper Scape as a glaring example

Pouard attempted to distance Ubisoft's Quartz and Digits systems from a recent decision by GSC Game World, the developer of upcoming first-person shooter S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2, to reverse course on selling NFTs. "It's saddening to see there's still some resistance based on misunderstanding," Pouard said. "But I'm not sure we can really compare what S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 was trying to do with what we are trying to achieve with Quartz."

Yet everything Pouard said in Finder's interview about the Ubisoft Digits system sounds identical to GSC Game World's original NFT plan. Both revolve largely around cosmetic add-ons for the game as staked and confirmed by a decentralized protocol (and these items are exclusive to their respective NFT systems, not otherwise available through normal gameplay or direct DLC purchases), while each system offers the potential to stake higher-level content in a game's universe. (In S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2's case, NFTs would have been auctioned off to permit their owners to digitally appear in the game.)

Ubisoft's pair of execs did not directly respond to criticism from a French trade union that includes Ubisoft staffers among its ranks. The union called out the "useless, costly, ecologically mortifying technology" involved in the company's NFT implementation. Though the interview includes multiple claims that Quartz's reliance on the Tezos blockchain means it will use less energy than other blockchain protocols, the executives did not address the inherent security concerns that affect Tezos—especially as applied to the hacker-filled ecosystem of online video games in general.

Ultimately, the metric that may determine the future of NFTs for Ubisoft and other game publishers is actual user interest, and Pouard confirmed the news is not good so far. "The hurdles we put in place for the eligibility criteria worked," he told Finder. That is certainly one way to spin low user uptake on a new feature.

To reduce speculative acquisition, Ubisoft Quartz, as implemented in Ghost Recon Breakpoint, requires players to reach a certain level of XP before being eligible to claim an in-game NFT. Though if the game already has a system in place to track metrics like playtime and in-game XP—and thus determine eligibility—what is the point of adding an NFT to the whole thing? And how come Digits are touted as being decentralized, even though Ars' Kyle Orland explained at length how they're inextricably chained to a number of centralized Ubisoft confirmations?

And what happens to affected NFTs when an online Ubisoft game evaporates—like Hyper Scape, the company's two-year-old free-to-play battle royale game, which had its impending shutdown announced the same day this Finder interview went live?

While we'd love to anticipate clearer official answers from Ubisoft on those questions, we expect the company to continue its "piece-by-piece," puzzle-like approach until further notice—and for other companies to offer equal measures of NFT excitement and reluctance going forward.