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Ubisoft's Latest Galaxy-Brain Move Is To Gift Scammy NFTs To Employees (kotaku.com) 46

Posted by msmash from the closer-look dept.
Ubisoft's ongoing NFT odyssey continues to bewilder and demoralize not just longtime fans but also its own developers. The company recently held another workshop aimed specifically at addressing the concerns of skeptical employees, yet also started giving out special NFTs to some members of the Ghost Recon team to "celebrate" the series' 20th anniversary. From a report: One developer likened it to the staff saying "We hate this crypto stuff," and Ubisoft responding with, "OK, come get some." Last week, VP of Ubisoft's Strategic Innovations Lab, Nicolas Pouard, claimed in an interview that players' overwhelmingly negative reaction to the company's NFT rollout was because "they don't get it." His remark was roundly derided on social media, but also by some within the company, according to posts from Ubisoft's internal communications platform viewed by Kotaku. In addition to disagreeing with Pouard's position, they expressed frustration over the company's continued botched messaging around the controversial tech.

"They don't get it" was also the tone of a recent internal Q&A with the Quartz team aimed at addressing skeptical employees, sources familiar with the event told Kotaku. (Quartz is the name of Ubisoft's recently introduced proprietary crypto platform.) Instead, it bolstered some developers' concerns about security vulnerabilities in the Quartz technology and its lack of interesting design possibilities. Pouard and other blockchain proponents have pitched scenarios in which cosmetic items can follow players between games. That's not something current Quartz NFTs are set up to do, however, and according to sources, Pouard admitted internally that the "interoperability" question remains unanswered. In the meantime, the core use-case for Quartz NFTs remains in-game hats.
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Ubisoft's Latest Galaxy-Brain Move Is To Gift Scammy NFTs To Employees More

Ubisoft's Latest Galaxy-Brain Move Is To Gift Scammy NFTs To Employees

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  • There maybe tax and SEC rules that make this something that may end badly for both sides.

    • I suspect it would only hurt employees. An NFT is priceless. Now I am no expert on tax law but I believe most priceless herloms are not taxed unless something such as land.

      Producing an NCT is akin to writing something on paper. We aren't taxed for that but if this priceless work is resold, it leads to tax which in the case of an NCT will likely be capital gains.

      If anything it's a write-off for the company. Have some old hardware? eritage a smart contract and "mine NFTs", deducting it and power consumption a

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by Kisai ( 213879 )

      I think what Ubi should have done first, is replaced their executive bonuses with NFT's. If it's not good enough for the executives, it's definitely not good enough for the actual employees.

  • This reminds me of my days at Gateway. (Score:4, Insightful)

    by nightflameauto ( 6607976 ) on Thursday February 10, 2022 @03:35PM (#62256599)

    The higher ups ask for feedback via paperwork and electronic forms to help improve processes via contributions from the plebes with a promise to have meetings later to discuss the possible improvements. Those meetings, when they finally happened, were literally just management screaming at the rank and file that we were stupid, we didn't know what the fuck we were talking about, and that processes will not be altered in the ways the majority wanted, instead doubling down on the ways they had been changing processes for the worse.

    I didn't stick around long after that.

    Drop NFTs into the mix and it's clear that the management philosophy is exactly the same here. We see how well that worked out for Ted Waitt & Co.

    • "We, the higher ups, understand how brooms work much better than you gutter dwellers who do the actual work of sweeping."

  • Companies see this as a potential future revenue stream, if they can get enough hype going behind it. One where they literally need do almost nothing to rake in the money! Virtual stuff built from assets they already have. Man. Talk about a goldmine.

    • I don't yet fully understand the market. With skins, you get rare skins via boxes. The only difference here is potentially carrying skins/items/flair between games and reducing the market of the goods to something you need not manage but then again steam reduces the issue of the latter, so maybe something with telling steam to "fuck off" or support gamers not wishing to use steam. The process of minting NFTs doesn't seem more lucrative than random number generator that do loot boxes... unless you are invest

      • Re: What is there to get? (Score:5, Interesting)

        by JonnyCalcutta ( 524825 ) on Thursday February 10, 2022 @04:30PM (#62256773)

        According to my friend, who's spending thousands investing in crytpo, NFTs will allow you to swap items between games. And you'll be able to make money playing games. Crypto is like the internet in 1994 so if you get in now you're guaranteed to make a fortune.

        He's short on details though. Even though he spends almost all his time 'researching it'.

        Did I mention that previously he was a flat earther?

        • Sounds like dotcom again. Great minds have billion dollar ideas, they just need to hire some plebes to implement those ideas, and any failures are failures by the plebes and not the divinely inspired geniuses trying to sell more dogfood. Even after the dotcom crash, many of these geniuses remain convinced that it would have worked. Remember all the "new economy" stuff and the disparaging of the stalwart old school companies that were paying actual dividends.

        • NFTs will allow you to swap items between games

          The problem is there is a non-zero amount of work to allow an item to be used in a new game, so unless there is some kind of on-going revenue stream to include the item it's not going to happen. Only way I can see this happening going forward is as part of a subscription based service, but if you are already tied to an account NFT's aren't required to keep track of entitlements.

          • NFTs aren't needed because these things won't work outside of Ubisoft's products anyhow. All they need is what they already have - a closed ecosystem where all users are logged into the same servers. What benefit does jamming a blockchain into that provide? Sounds like an awful lot of work for something entirely redundant.

          • Yes, it makes no sense at all. The scary things is people are pushing it but they can't even answer the most basic questions. Like 'how?' and 'why?'. My friend is a crazy so his buying into it is NOT a good sign for its validity.

      • I'm not exactly an expert, I've only taken a cursory look at NFTs, but the "market" comes from the idea that an NFT is digitally assigned a key which is owned by you and signifies it's not a copy but is the original file.

        For example if you get a BFG-9000 through months of grinding in Game A, you can take it with you and use it should Game B also support that weapon. But because it's tied to a key, which you own, it's also basically your "property" meaning you can sell it to someone else. If you stop playi

        • Meh, you can do this already. Especially if 1000 players all have exactly the same BFG-9000. The game's databases records who owns what, like an MMO. Sell your BFG to someone else in game and done. Sure, it's not real cash, and I think game execs are wetting themselves over the ideas of idiots spending real cash on real junk.

          Now are players going to pay for a special BFG-9000 that has a unique smudgey icon on the stock? Maybe a couple, maybe some gullible crypto bro hoping to resell it later. Overhype

    • I'm reminded of a book, KW Jeter's Noir. He described an idea called a "Turd on a Wire", as the next step past a "turd in a can". A turd in a can is a product that costs you almost nothing to make, so it's almost pure profit. The only problem is that you still have to put it in a can. A turd on a wire gets around that by being nothing at all, but people give you money anyway.

      In the book this was to be achieved by programmatically stimulating dopamine receptors to get people addicted to a bit of code

  • Wait, you mean there's another kind?

  • "Galaxy Brain" ? Is this 'News For 8 Year Olds' ? (Score:3, Funny)

    by greytree ( 7124971 ) on Thursday February 10, 2022 @03:47PM (#62256657)
    FFS, hire some grownups.

    And 'Editors' who can EDIT.

  • NFTs Are Hot. So Is Their Effect on the Earth’s Climate
    The sale of a piece of crypto art consumed as much energy as the studio uses in two years. Now the artist is campaigning to reduce the medium’s carbon emissions.
    https://www.wired.com/story/nf... [wired.com]

  • I got you a macaroni art thing.

    Ha! You think it's worthless?

    That's because you aren't marketing it - it'll be worth something if you can SELL the idea of it - which is now your job.

    Which I'm not paying you for.

    Well, not any more than a crappy, er, REVOLUTIONARY macaroni art.

    Except in the case of the story, you're not even getting a macaroni art piece, you're getting a receipt for one.

    And anyone can copy the actual macaroni art.

    But that receipt, that receipt is sure unique. As unique as picking a star in t

    • Macaroni is an apt item here. It used to refer to a sort of foppish fashion style of some 18th century aristocrats. From whence comes the line "and called it macaroni" in Yankee Doodle Dandy. In that sense, an NFT might be considered a modern variant of macaroni...

  • That kids story called The Emperor's New Clothes?

  • try to cram these down our throats. Ignoring Squaresoft (or was it Ubisoft's?) CEO just flat out saying "this is inevitable, we'll make gamers accept this" there was the absolutely cringe Jimmy Fallon bit with some celebrity or another where they were talking about how great it was to spend thousands on NFTs because they were so personal.

    It was stupidly obvious they were there to sell the damn things, and I wonder who put them up to it. They were way, way too awkward to have thought of doing it themselv

    • here was the absolutely cringe Jimmy Fallon bit with some celebrity or another where they were talking about how great it was to spend thousands on NFTs because they were so personal.

      If you know who it is, then you can figure out who is paying them. For example,

      Matt Damon is getting paid by Crypto.com, and Tom Brady is getting paid by FTX.

  • Cosmetic items following a player through Ubisoft games isn't new. There could be as many of those items as Ubisoft wants to add to every game. The mechanism to support it already exists via the backend of the Ubisoft launcher and they already have cross-game items. Hell, I think EA pioneered that with things like armor that you'd get in Mass Effect 2 if you bought it for Dragon Age Origins.

    So why bother with NFTs when you already have a unified cloud backend for your games? Microsoft isn't going to le

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