If you read this site regularly, you’ve probably clocked that I’m pretty livid about what Ubisoft is doing with NFTs in its games. Right now, the company is just trying to justify adding NFTs to Ghost Recon: Breakpoint. The only caveat is that you need to be a dedicated player with 600 hours in the game. This might sound like a safe way to ensure not everyone is going to be exposed to this business practise, but 600 hours is about normal for any Ubisoft game, because they’re so damn big Ghost Recon: Breakpoint also has multiplayer, so that figure is even easier to reach. Lately though, I’ve been wondering what would happen if NFTs were added to an Assassin’s Creed game.
I’m going to take Assassin’s Creed Valhalla and Odyssey as examples since they’re the two games that just got updated with crossover stories. There’s very little to stop Ubisoft from adding in some NFT cosmetics to these games to toxify the community quite a bit. These games, like Ghost Recon: Breakpoint, have dedicated players that are more than likely to have at least 600 hours in their save files on them. This means that basically every hardcore fan will be rewarded with a terrible opportunity, one that will kill the environment that much faster because of how NFTs work.
The Assassin’s Creed community is fairly positive, much more so than those for many other games. If NFTs get thrown into the mix, you’re suddenly going to introduce a lot of not very nice people to a community that loves a game franchise. Gone will be the conversations about story, and what will replace them are conversations about buying and selling a weird sword with a specific serial number on it. I genuinely cannot think of a worse franchise to put NFTs in, yet that’s where this is heading.
Ubisoft needs to wake up and realise that it’s paddling upstream, and there’s a few dozen trees coming its way to sink it if it continues. No one wants this. In fact, the entire Ubisoft community has made if very clear that it doesn’t want it. All the executives need to do is put greed to side, they’re rich enough as it is.