Ubisoft

Well, everyone sure did not seem to be on board with Ubisoft Quartzand its blockchain-based NFTs for Ghost Recon Breakpoint, a series of limited edition cosmetics that could be claimed in the game. But at least for now, it appears that it isn’t just gamers who don’t really care about them, it’s NFT collectors as well.

As pointed out by Apex Legends Senior Character Artist Liz Edwards on Twitter, the entire market for resold Ghost Recon Breakpoint NFTs appears to be just…$400 total.

Ubisoft Quartz partnered withTezosfor this project, and its currency, Tezons, reveals that the entire volume for Ubisoft Quartz right now is ꜩ 94.49 (Tezons). With the exchange rate of ꜩ1 to $4, that’s…just under $400 in total volume, and there appear to have only been 15 total sales of Ubisoft’s Breakpoint NFTs.

While Ubisoft was not trying to make money on these NFTs initially, it was more or less a proof of concept idea because it was giving all of them away for free, the complete and utter lack of a resale market seems to show there’s little interest in Breakpoint NFTs from either gamers or NFT collectors. NFTs obtain value from a bunch of NFT people believing they have value, so they sell and re-sell and balloon their price to extremely high levels. That simply isn’t happening with Ubisoft’s NFTs, it seems.

Why not?

On the gamer side, barely anyone cared. The concept of Ubisoft Quartz was roundly rejected by most gamers, so that leftmaybea small collection of die-hard Breakpoint players interested in claiming them. But two of the three NFTs required 100 and 600 hours of playtime respectively to claim, and apparently two of them were not even fully claimed by the time the clock ran out on the limited offering. The interest simply isn’t there. This seems like a combination of a general distaste for NFTs, the high playtime requirements, and the fact that this is Ghost Recon Breakpoint, hardly the most popular game in Ubisoft’s catalogue, two years after its launch.

Ubisoft Quartz

On the NFT collector side, here’s a simple question that probably explains the lack of interest there. Why would you bother with NFTs in a video game you have probably never played nor heard of when you can find an infinite amount of speculative assets elsewhere? Why would an NFT enthusiast be interested in a Ghost Recon Breakpoint helmet that requires 600 hours of playtime to claim when you can look across a raft of sellers hawking cartoon sharks smoking blunts and such that are somehow worth tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars? Even if I’m trying not to dunk on NFTs here for once, the fact remains that there are plenty of NFT options out there that are much more accessible to collectors than these Breakpoint ones, so why would anyone on that side of the market bother with them? And it appears that no one is.

Recently, Ubisoft doubled down on the idea of NFTs, when CEO Yves Guillemot,questioned about the project, launched into a grand plans about web 3.0 and the metaverse, implying NFTs were only the beginning of Ubisoft’s push into that space. But we’ll see if the actual performance of Ubisoft Quartz alters that idea at all. Minus the actual dollar value of the Tezon market created here, Ubisoft has lost a lot of PR among gamers for this move, and appears to have gained little credit or interest from the crypto crowd at the same time. We’ll see what they do next after this…opening act.