Ubisoft Entertainment (OTC:UBSFF, EPA:UBI) SA has provoked serious uproar from the gaming community following its announcement of its new non-fungible token (NFT) project Quartz.
The French video game publisher announced the Beta launch of Quartz via a YouTube video on Wednesday with the aim to combine NFTs and blockchain technology with current Triple-A game titles.
Although you can no longer see the number of likes and dislikes on YouTube, Google Chrome extensions allow you to see this and highlighted that after approximately 215,000 views, 96% of the 38,400 people who voted disliked the video, according to Cointelegraph.
Ubisoft informed its followers that Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Breakpoint would be its first Triple-A game to integrate NFTs.
Triple-A games are those produced by large publishers with big development and marketing budgets.
The launch video said Quartz is a platform that allows gamers to “collect the first playable and energy-efficient Ubisoft NFTs”.
One of the top comments on the video that slammed the announcement had more likes (2,600) than the video itself (1,400) and read as follows:
“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 absolutely made it a laughing stock.”
Meanwhile, a Reddit threat that intends to boycott Ubisoft’s new project, named ‘do not support Quartz, the new NFT Ubisoft marketplace,’ has an upvote ratio of roughly 93% from over 13,000 votes, according to a report from Cointelegraph.
“I'm not entirely against the concept of using an NFT style system for digital games, [but] what I'm against is how Ubisoft are doing it with in-game items,” it said on Reddit.
This isn’t the first major gaming firm to be criticised for its intentions to use NFT style systems for new games.
Last month, Discord, the community messaging app, was made to backtrack on its Ethereum-based NFT integration plans following chief executive Jason Citron’s bombardment from the gaming community.
NFT marketplace OpenSea also denied it was planning an initial public offering (IPO) yesterday, amidst a backlash from the cryptocurrency community.