Nicolas Pouard, the vice president of Ubisoft's Strategic Innovations Lab and one of the people behind the Quartz nft gaming platform, says that for now, gamers do not understand that a digital secondary market for trading nfts of digital items is beneficial to them.
In an interview with Australian financial website Finder, Pouard says the following in response to a question that players apparently don't seem to see what nfts like Quartz Digits can offer them: "I think gamers don't understand what a digital secondary market can bring them. Currently, because of the current situation and context of nfts, gamers really believe that first of all it is destroying the planet and secondly it is just a tool for speculation. But what we [at Ubisoft] see most of all is the endgame. The end game is about giving players the ability to resell their items once they're done with it or when they're done playing the game itself. So it's really for them. It's really beneficial. But for now, they don't get it." Further on in the interview, he says that Ubisoft expected this lack of understanding, partly because it would not be an easy concept to understand.
Quartz was introduced by Ubisoft early last month. It is an nft platform based on the Tezos blockchain for trading unique items in aaa games. The company presented this platform as a system that would be very energy efficient. Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon Breakpoint became the first game within this experiment to offer nfts, which are called Digits. These have been offered since December 9. Soon there was some criticism from players and after a few weeks it appeared that these nfts were hardly traded.
Kotaku wrote earlier that people within Ubisoft had also criticized the arrival of the nfts internally. However, according to the same website, Ubisoft's top brass continued to insist that nfts in games have a future. Ubisoft's ceo, Yves Guillemot reportedly addressed employees and said that "nfts are just the beginning.
Judging from the recent interview in Finder, this line and the positive attitude towards nfts still seems to be leading. Pouard says he still strongly believes in Quartz and Digits and that they are heading in the right direction. Therefore, Ubisoft will continue to integrate them, he says. However, Pouard adds that players will never be forced to use Quartz and that the requirement to own Ghost Recon Breakpoint and have played for at least two hours means that the platform becomes less attractive to speculators.
