“Worthless,’ they’d declared. Most NFTs were ‘worthless.’ The greatest artistic movement since The Big BSoD, the greatest proof of the power of the blockchain, the very future of the whole funging Infobahn, and the hedgie soybean-counters say it’s all ‘worthless’,” once wrote the greatest living prophet of our era.
Now, in an entirely predictable case of “I am once again asking our tech overlords to watch the whole movie”, those plucky chancers at Ubisoft have lifted AliceO’s ideas wholesale, ignored her timely and cogent commentary, and released a roiling puke reservoir of NFT upchuck masquerading as a game. Thank you Ian Games for the spot. You are the Neal Stephenson to AliceO’s William Gibson, but for worthless crap. (The IGN piece has some very good context and is worth reading).
Champions Tactics: Grimoria Chronicles, which I won’t link because I respect the colour green too much, is “the ultimate Web3 competitive Turn-Based RPG”. You can only play the game via its own website, which I won’t link to because I respect the colour green too much. There’s also a trailer floating around. Not going to link to that either. Got a lot of respect for ‘things in motion’, I have, and this represents a terrible use of them.
As IGN point out, Ubisoft first announced it’d be sticking its head in the NFToilet bowl and daintily sampling the yellowing side-cruft about three years back in an earnings call. Words like ‘revolution’ were used. The phrase ‘pay-to-earn’ was latched on to with glee. “[Blockchain] will imply more play-to-earn that will enable more players to actually earn content, own content, and we think it’s going to grow the industry quite a lot,” chirpy cockney urchin Yves Guillemot said at the time.
Contrast this to statements made by Ubisoft’s Philippe Tremblay to GI.biz earlier this year, where the director of subscriptions said that a consumer shift “needs to happen” re: “Gamers are used to owning their games”. Sure, blockchain and subscription-based access are different kettles of fish, but this does feel inconsistent. It’s almost like they’ll just say anything! Why even use words anymore! Why not just chortle and snort! You know you want to!
If you slept through or somehow mercifully forgot about the crypto craze of the last few years, you might be wondering why a game that lets you buy items as NFTs is a problem. First up, there’s the obvious pay-to-win element attendant on letting people cough up to forge more powerful characters – something that irks me less because of the holy sanctity of competitive game balance (although that’s enough to put me off playing), and more because these things are designed to play off the same vulnerabilities as gambling.
IGN report that the highest priced figurines – the characters you use to battle – are up on the marketplace at $63k. That doesn’t mean people are necessarily paying this much, mind, and those are outliers – most bits are a mere $300. Either way, it seems antithetical to anything actually interesting or valuable about game design. Why inspire organic investment when you can just invite players to join in a ghoulish sunk-cost spiral?
Secondly, the web3 industry have thus far failed to make a convincing case that this stuff isn’t a complete emissions disaster. According to one study, Bitcoin alone uses the same amount of electricity each year as Argentina. For balance, I should point out that blockchain advocates argue that the technology can aid sustainability via “more accurate load monitoring, generation, and distribution in the grid through efficient use of data,” via Forbes.
It’s also hard to see the release of Champions Tactics right now as anything but an act of desperation from a Ubisoft evidently feeling financial pressure, or at least trying to get those numbers up before a potential buyout.
I leave you with more words of wisdom from RPS’s dearly departed scryer of crud:
“A crack revealing strata of vape pens, LaserDiscs, and bags for life. All of it, trash. The melted bumper of the weed-green Tesla Model X once owned by… she couldn’t even say his name. Everything, trash. Two empty bottles of Irn-Bru Kombucha rising like the legs of Ozymandias. 5arah snorted. Look on my apes, ye Mighty, and despair!“
