Early sale numbers seemingly suggest that Ubisoft's adventure into the blockchain madness is not going as well as the company probably expected.
Earlier this month, Ubisoft officially announced their first NFTs under the Ubisoft Quartz title, which is the publisher's NFT initiative allowing players to buy artificially scarce digital items using cryptocurrency”.
As expected, the backlash from the gaming community was strong and unanimous since many players see NFTs as just another way to introduce exploitative tactics, as some publishers have been doing with microtransactions in the past.
Some developers at Ubisoft were allegedly told that NFTs are just the beginning and that players will accept them over time just like they've accepted microtransactions. But did they really?
Anyway, since Ubisoft launched Quartz, players noticed that the sales of the NFTs are not quite impressive on third-party NFT marketplaces.
Ghost Recon: Breakpoint NFTs which include an M4A1 skin, headgear and fancy pants, have a total of 15 sales.
If accurate, this is abysmally low and probably way below Ubisoft's expectations but it's safe to say that the publisher could see this coming, especially after the negative reception from players.
Though, it does seem like Ubisoft are looking at the future with NFTs and feel that these will become the industry standard for monetisation in a couple of years.
Of course, we are hopeful that the future of in-game monetisation will be free from blockchain and cryptocurrency as well as Ubisoft's time savers.
