Ubisoft executive behind Quartz nft gaming platform: players don’t get it
Nicolas Pouard, the vice president of Ubisoft’s Strategic Innovations Lab and one of the people behind the Quartz-nft gaming platform, says players still don’t understand that a digital secondary market for trading NFTs of digital items is beneficial for them.
In an interview with Australian financial website Finder, Pouard said in response to a question that players apparently don’t seem to see what NFTs like Quartz Digits can offer them: “I don’t think gamers understand what a digital secondary market can bring them. Currently, Due to the current situation and context of NFTs, gamers really believe that it destroys the planet first and second is just a tool for speculation. [bij Ubisoft] especially seeing is the end game. The endgame is about giving players the option to resell their items once they’re done with them 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.” Later in the interview, he says that Ubisoft had expected this misunderstanding, partly because it wouldn’t 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 highly energy efficient. Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Breakpoint became the first game in this experiment to offer NFTs called Digits. These have been offered since December 9. Soon there was a lot of criticism from players and after a few weeks it turned out that these NFTs were hardly traded.
Kotaku previously wrote that people within Ubisoft had also criticized the arrival of the NFTs internally. However, the top of Ubisoft continued to insist that NFTs in games have a future, according to the same website. Ubisoft’s CEO Yves Guillemot is said to have addressed employees and said that “nfts are just the beginning.”
Judging by the recent Finder interview, 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 going in the right direction. Therefore, Ubisoft will continue to integrate this, he says. Pouard does say 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.