First, Ubisoft blindly began announcing that it would be adding NFTs into Ghost Recon: Breakpoint. Regardless of the backlash and the actual issues that fans are expressing regarding this practise, the company is now plowing forward, insisting that NFTs are the same as monetisation in that there was backlash when that concept was first introduced as well. I will be extremely blunt here, these two things are not the same at all. They’re extremely different, and in many ways are polar opposites. The only similarity they share is that they cost money, meaning Ubisoft’s argument can be used to compare your car or weekly food shop to NFTs too.
Let’s break this down since Ubisoft doesn’t seem to be able to get its head around it. Monetisation is the practise of adding cosmetic items, sometimes gear and things that give you an advantage in a single player experience as well, to a game. Players are able to purchase them if they want to further fund the developer, and want to get a little bit more out of the game they love. It started as expansions to the games that seemed as though they’d been cut off before release, but that soon got caught and changed to what we know today.
NFTs serve no purpose. If you buy them, you own one version of a cosmetic item with a serial code that justifies the existence of a server running day and night to ensure that everyone knows that you own that one piece of gear with the serial number on it. This adds nothing to the gameplay experience, in fact, I’d argue that it hinders it. If you’re constantly checking the value of your NFT, you’re not playing the game you purchased it for. If no one in the game knows it’s an NFT, what’s the point of owning it? I buy art so I can enjoy it and others can see it when they come to my house. I don’t buy art to hoard it because I think it will be worth something one day. Ubisoft is wrong, and NFTs and monetisation have nothing in common outside of what ties all shops in the world together, money.