The top comment on the Ubisoft YouTube video that is introducing its nonfungible tokens (NFTs) has more likes than the real video. The comment slammed the company for ‘milking’ money from its clients. Ubisoft Entertainment SA’s, the French gaming giant, new nonfungible token (NFT) project Quartz is facing major pushback from the gaming sector.
Ubisoft unleashed the Beta launch of Quartz through a short YouTube video on December 8 that has around 300,000 at the time of writing. This project is designed to integrate NFTs and blockchain technology with the existing Triple-A game titles. In the process, it announced Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Breakpoint as its inaugural game to officially integrate NFTs.
This video introduces Quartz as a platform that ensures that games can “collect the first playable and energy-efficient Ubisoft NFTs” that are referred to as “Digits.”
Recently, YouTube changed its policy to conceal the number of dislikes a video on the platform gets. But, the number can still be accessed easily using Google Chrome extensions. Upon using an extension, the video show more than 1,500 likes and 38,000 dislikes that equates to a dislike ratio of nearly 96%.
One of the main comments on the video from user “OperatorDrewski” currently has 2,800 likes with zero dislikes. This comment blasts Ubisoft’s NFT project as a quick cash grab instead of improving the general gaming experience:
To me, this is a blatant signal that you’re just milking the Ghost Recon franchise for literally every cent while putting in minimal effort into the actual game itself. Not playing a GR game in the future if there’s this level of degeneracy in the team.”
You took a solid franchise and made it a laughing stock.”
Ubisoft Gets Backlash From Everywhere
That opinion seems to be shared by a considerable number of the community members with the users on Twitter also lashing out at the company in response to its latest announcement as they threatened to uninstall the company’s games and boycott Ubisoft entirely.
Introducing Ubisoft Quartz 💎
We're bringing the first energy efficient NFTs playable in a AAA game to Ghost Recon: Breakpoint!Try it in the beta from December 9 with three free cosmetic drops and learn more here: https://t.co/ysEoYUI4HY pic.twitter.com/owSFE2ALuS
— Ubisoft (@Ubisoft) December 7, 2021
A December 8 post on the r/gaming page on Reddit indicates a concerted effort to boycott the new NFT project. This post titled “do not support “Quartz”, the new nonfungible token (NFT) Ubisoft marketplace” from “u/WolverineKuzuri93” currently has 2,700 comments and an upvote ratio of 93% at more than 14,400 upvotes.
The Redditor highlights some similar issues to the top commenter on the YouTube video, noting that:
We have to stand against this practice. […] This is just another way to nickel and dime players with cosmetics rather than focusing on making quality products with depth. We have to let companies know this is anti-consumer.”
I’m not entirely against the concept of using an NFT style system for digital games. For example, owning your digital copy rather than just a license so you can sell it to another user’s account. That’s the future of digital gaming. What I’m against is how Ubisoft is doing it with in-game items.”
Gamer Backlash To NFTs
It is not the first time a major company has been thwarted for looking at or launching into the world of NFTs. Reports emerged in November that the Discord community messaging app was compelled to walk back on its Ethereum-based NFT integration plans after the gamer community flamed CEO Jason Citron.
At first, Citron teased his company’s plans through a screenshot of a beta feature showing an Ethereum NFT wallet support. Nonetheless, he was promptly hounded with thousands of comments that called on him to abandon the plans along with the users threatening to cancel their paid Nitro subscriptions.
Unlike the case of Ubisoft where the community seems to be peeved by what they insist is a cash grab, the cryptocurrency-skeptics on Discord think that NFTs are a Ponzi scheme and damage the environment as a result of the energy needed to mine cryptos.
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