Late last year, Ubisoft announced Quartz, an NFT platform that is to be adopted across some of the firm’s most popular games. The reaction from the general public was negative, to say the least, and it doesn’t seem like the venture was all that successful commercially, either.
However, Nicolas Pouard, VP at Ubisoft’s Strategic Innovations Lab, has been speaking about the future of Quartz and feels that gamers are hating on the idea because they currently don’t understand the benefits of NFTs.
Pouard said:
I think gamers don’t get what a digital secondary market can bring to them. For now, because of the current situation and context of NFTs, gamers really believe it’s first destroying the planet, and second just a tool for speculation. But what we [at Ubisoft] are seeing first is the end game. The end game is about giving players the opportunity to resell their items once they’re finished with them or they’re finished playing the game itself. So, it’s really, for them. It’s really beneficial. But they don’t get it for now.
Also, this is part of a paradigm shift in gaming. Moving from one economic system to another is not easy to handle. There is a lot of habits you need to go against and a lot of your ingrained mindset you have to shift. It takes time. We know that.
When asked if he expected the negative reaction, Pouard said:
Well, it was a reaction we were expecting. We know it’s not an easy concept to grasp. But Quartz is really just a first step that should lead to something bigger. Something that will be more easily understood by our players. That’s the way we think about it and why we will keep experimenting. We will keep releasing features and services around this first initiative. And our belief is that, piece by piece, the puzzle will be revealed and understood by our players. We hope they will better understand the value we offer them.
Pouard adds that Ubisoft is “listening to what our fans are telling us” and that the next move is to “make sure what we’re doing will make even more sense to gamers.”
NFTs have been a hot topic over the past few months, with the likes of Konami, Sega, EA and Square Enix either experimenting with them or discussing them openly in public.
