23 ms·

Ubisoft’s first NFT plans make no sense

88 points by AlexandrB 5y ago

einrealist 5y ago
I don't get how Blockchain technology is in a publishers/studios interest. Why do they ever want to give up control over revenue streams? And there are simply not enough games with large-enough eco system and longevity (like WoW). I really want to see pitches that don't contain any hype BS bingo lines to share holders (like me).
- meheleventyone 5y ago
  They aren’t giving up control, they’re hoping for a fat payday by taking a percentage of all secondary sales in a hype driven NFT market. In the case of Quartz they’re also trying to do an end run around consumer protection laws by refusing refunds and grant users a very strict licence about use. You can’t even display them on video for example.
- acdha 5y ago
  > I don't get how Blockchain technology is in a publishers/studios interest. It's not, and they're not going to give up the control needed to deliver the hyperbolic claims being made by blockchain PR people. The question the studio executives are asking is not “how could we make this more useful to our customers?” but rather “How can we get those speculators to give us more money for the same feature?” or “How can I have my own cool project to brag about over cocktails?”.
- rideontime 5y ago
  As the article explains, they don't give up control in this case. The blockchain they're using is locked down to the point of negating all the supposed benefits of blockchains.
  - einrealist 5y ago
    Exactly.
twirlock 5y ago
ITT we all pat ourselves on the back for pretending we don't know what NFTs are for when any idiot could figure out what NFTs are for if he thought about it for five seconds instead just repeating shit he overheard some other pseudo-intellectual say.
gjulianm 5y ago
Article summary: > And despite all the bold talk of "decentralization," the Quartz system is still so deeply controlled by Ubisoft that we wonder whether a simple internal database managed directly by the company would be a better fit. It's also NFTs for just a single game.
- oh_sigh 5y ago
  I know NFTs are popularized on decentralized blockchains, but is there anything inherent to NFTs that they need to be on a decentralized blockchain?
  - vmception 5y ago
    No, it is just a set of standardized functions. A class. Can be in any language, any platform.
  - YXNjaGVyZWdlbgo 5y ago
    No.
  - meheleventyone 5y ago
    Only the risk of a centralised service going away, which also exists for decentralised technology but is considered less likely.
  - indigochill 5y ago
    > is there anything inherent to NFTs that they need to be on a decentralized blockchain? Technically you absolutely can run a centralized blockchain and mint NFTs on it (EVE Online did this recently in their latest Alliance Tournament, where IIRC the corpses of player characters who were killed during the event became immortalized as NFTs on an isolated branch of Tezos that was created for the event). But at that point congratulations, you've just made a worse database. The only point of blockchain tech is decentralization (if you care about features and not just branding your product with the latest hype).
  - gjulianm 5y ago
    If you consider "NFT" to be a unique asset represented digitally, no they don't. A lot of games and software deals with the equivalent of NFTs, in the end it's just tracking ownership of something with an unique ID. However, for all the NFT features (mainly being able to reliably transfer ownership without relying on any specific company) you do need a blockchain.
1cvmask 5y ago
We can have url rot on both centralized and decentralized systems. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Link_rot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Link_rot
sva_ 5y ago
> NFT plans > make no sense That's a lot of redundancy for such a short title.
- errcorrectcode 5y ago
  Brought to you but the redundancy department of redundant redundancy for redundant titling. For some reason, I think the uber rich of the world have waay too much money and are willing to throw it around in spectacularly-risky trends without caring about value investing.
- vmception 5y ago
  an NFT plan can make sense for the issuer and the consumer this one only makes sense for the issuer consumers want one that makes sense for consumers obviously there is an audience that doesn’t want any NFT plan to exist at all, that audience matters the least
webkike 5y ago
Valve has already done this stuff in a way that makes far more sense. A lot of people lament CSGO’s skins (and yes they have some issues) but here are some points about them: - Skins are purely cosmetic and tied to a competitive game that many people tie their life to. Cosmetics of differing expense make sense, the better players show off their personality in the expense and style of their cosmetics. - Skins are tradeable on the steam market which itself is a ledger, no reason for it to be distributed. - The best thing about skins is that after you buy them and you don’t want them anymore, you can resell them and recoup a portion of the money you spent, or in some cases even make profit. - Additionally, because the ledger isn’t distributed, valve can actively change skins and fix mistakes to them. This allows for user submitted skins to even work, as they can respond to DMCA take downs
- Hokusai 5y ago
  > no reason for it to be distributed Many decisions are taken to increase market value. It makes sense a distributed ledger based on blockchain if that increases the shares value, but I guess that you mean that it does not improve the product at all. And I can't agree more that if anything it makes it worse.
  - webkike 5y ago
    It hinders the product. By controlling the ledger and being able to make changes, user submitted products are possible. Otherwise they wouldn’t be able to respond to DMCA in the case of accidentally accepting copyrighted material
    - detaro 5y ago
      They could always block stuff they don't want from actually doing anything in the games and not host it, which would resolve that problem. (similar to how with IPFS public gateways often have blocklists of content they won't deliver, even if it is available in the IPFS network)
      - 5y ago
sneak 5y ago
Most things people try to use blockchains to solve are better served by a single centralized database. I'm an advocate of blockchain tech in general, but this criticism is a) valid, and b) as old as blockchains.
hpoe 5y ago
You could probably remove the frist 2 words and the article would be just as good. It feels to me like NFTs are one of those things that sounds really good in concept and seems so sensical and appealing from people in the "business" but looking at it form the outside it seems like just complete nonsenese. The closest thing to compare it to is MS BizTalk, XSLT, or half a dozen of those other "enterprise" services and technologies that always promised to change the world but seem to never really pan out, and everyone who hears about the project responds with a "WTF why are you doing it that way?" it seems like it is trying to solve a metaproblem that not many people have. But I'll admit maybe I don't understand the whole thing and am just not enlightened enough to see the brilliance. I know plenty of architects who are fluent in powerpoint that would tell me the same thing about Enterprise Integrations.
- ghaff 5y ago
  >It feels to me like NFTs are one of those things that sounds really good in concept and seems so sensical and appealing from people in the "business" but looking at it form the outside it seems like just complete nonsenese. I would have almost said the opposite (for certain use cases). From a totally rationalist point of view (which many tech people like to think they have), artificial scarcity of digital artifacts--especially those related to fashion--seems like nonsense. However, if you concede that there is a such a thing as fashion, collectibles, etc., why wouldn't it extend to an online environment? IMO, it breaks down once you aren't owning a digital thing and it just becomes effectively an online receipt for something you don't actually own. But in a game/online world environment it makes as much sense as a lot of unique collectibles. What is also true though is to the degree those collectibles exist within one company's playground, there's no need for decentralized ledgers.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
  > it seems like it is trying to solve a metaproblem that not many people have A particular disease of people deeply engrossed in a field is the tendency to come up with interesting solutions and reverse engineer the problems they solve after the fact. Right now that's about 80% of 'interesting' things happening in computing.
- 5y ago
delusional 5y ago
The legacy of NFTs is going to be the license they granted corporations like Ubisoft to finally launch this kind of store. They don't need the technology, but they very much do need the marketing wank to make it go down smoothly.
TigeriusKirk 5y ago
Boy, someone was clearly paid by the word. As an NFT proponent, the biggest problem I see here is that even on 3rd party sites buyers are limited to "eligible" participants. I assume that's built into the contract and the marketplaces will have special code to verify it. Ugh. Very much against what I'd like to see, but perhaps inevitable.
neom 5y ago
Internet today did a good job of covering this this-morning: https://youtu.be/KZx9OwkBA14?t=1969 https://youtu.be/KZx9OwkBA14?t=1969 My fav barb was when they discussed zooming in on the authenticity barcode to confirm it's "authentic".
cardosof 5y ago
Are there NFT plans that make sense? I'm sorry if I'm being too cynical for the general quality of this forum, but all I see regarding NFTs look like get rich quick schemes, so I'm not putting a cent in that. Am I losing the opportunity of a lifetime?
- speedgoose 5y ago
  > Am I losing the opportunity of a lifetime? If you feel like participating in a large scam, perhaps. Personally I would feel bad and I rather not touch this.
  - throw_nbvc1234 5y ago
    If you don't want to participate in the scam aspect, just don't resell. Or make sure someone you're selling to is comfortable with the value going to 0 (and wants artist to make any smart contract royalties). You can still use it as a way to invest in artists.
    - speedgoose 5y ago
      When you say "invest in artists", do you mean you want to support artists or you want to exploit artists in the hope of making profits ?
      - kobasa 5y ago
        Why is absolute braindead comments like this still tolerated on here. I mean you'd hope that at some point the people who missed out on one of the biggest investment and technological opportunities of our time would just suck it up and either admit they were wrong or quietly move on with their lives but this place is just filled with angry cope comments like this that seek to vilify participants in a new space without even having a moderate understanding of what they're talking about. Maybe just maybe past all the evil scams and get rich quick schemes out there (which is present in any nascent industry), there are some things and people who are interested in this space and aspects of it that don't amount to eXpLoItaTioN. And just to actually touch on this specific aspect of artists and being exploited, it's a laughable suggestion to mention this in this context when NFTs are one of the first times in recent history when artists can actually take back control from being exploited and unable to provide for themselves without succumbing to essentially giving up their soul - to unlocking their creative freedom and earning potential like we've never seen before.
woah 5y ago
The crux of the article is that the NFTs are on a blockchain, but that Ubisoft has published some legalese: > For a supposedly decentralized and "open" technology, Ubisoft places a lot of restrictions on who can own and use Digits. Quartz users have to be 18 years old, reside in one of a handful of countries ("USA, Canada, Spain, France, Germany, Italy, Belgium, Australia, or Brazil" for now), and use two-factor authentication on their Ubisoft Connect accounts. > Quartz owners also have to reach "XP Level 5" in Ghost Recon Breakpoint before they can collect or use the NFTs, a system seemingly designed to discourage pure speculators and to ensure "the Ubisoft Quartz platform is made for players, and for players only," the company says. That XP level status is confirmed by linking Quartz to your Ubisoft account, which is, of course, centrally controlled and subject to its own terms of use above and beyond the detailed Quartz terms of use. To me, that's kind of a minor point. Just because some lawyers made them put a bunch of tiny font writing in their EULA doesn't really mean much at all. If it's possible for a player to control their private keys (which it is if there's any ability to transfer NFTs to a wallet outside of the game), then these restrictions are meaningless. If this is the case, players will be able to transfer their owned items to other games (which support them), even games not produced by Ubisoft. That's what would be really interesting to look into, not just some 15 minute dunk piece from some writer skimming a EULA.
- gjulianm 5y ago
  > If it's possible for a player to control their private keys (which it is if there's any ability to transfer NFTs to a wallet outside of the game) I don't think it is possible. Apparently they can only trade on two third-party marketplaces, approved by Ubisoft. I guess that the private keys and blockchain nodes must be tied to Ubisoft accounts. Also, > Players who don't meet any of Ubisoft's requirements "will not be able to acquire Digits whether on the Ubisoft Quartz platform or an authorized third-party marketplace, nor have another player transfer their Digits to you... If you are not eligible, the transaction will fail." It doesn't seem to be just an EULA.
- rideontime 5y ago
  > players will be able to transfer their owned items to other games (which support them), even games not produced by Ubisoft. No such game exists, and it's unlikely that it ever will, as the article explains. > which it is if there's any ability to transfer NFTs to a wallet outside of the game In your own skimming of the article, you seem to have missed the point that the blockchain they're using is very tightly controlled by them. It's even mentioned in one of your own quotes.
onion2k 5y ago
What I don't quite understand about Ubisoft's NFT offering is that, assuming it actually works and people get onboard with it and NFT items do actually start becoming valuable, wouldn't that mean you'd want to move your valuable NFT assets to a cold wallet? If they're in a cold wallet, you then wouldn't be able to prove you own them to use them in a game. If you keep them in a hot wallet then the game could verify they're still yours, but then you risk someone stealing them if someone finds an exploit in the Quartz code. Everything about the 'useful' side of NFTs where people actually use them for something promotes bad cryptocurrency opsec. One day someone will steal all the in-game skins and guns and hats or whatever, and there's nothing Ubisoft will be able to do about it. They won't be able to refund people, or replace items, of offer any sort of fix. That will be the end of the whole idea, and if Ubisoft have built it into the heart and soul of all their titles, the end of Ubisoft itself. It seems like a very high risk strategy. The only logical reason I can think of for them doing it is that someone at Ubisoft has sold the board on the idea, and is essentially running a Tezos pump and dump scheme, and they've made a chunk of change from the 30% increase in the price that this announcement brought.
- echelon 5y ago
  Ubisoft won't be building transactional support. NFTs are pogs. You can't use your Cornflakes Rooster Pog to unlock Minecraft content. There's no point in moving around your Ubisoft pogs. You can't use them in Fortnite. And because anyone in the world can print cardboard, they're infinitely inflatable and worthless. They're rows in the database. That's it.
  - onion2k 5y ago
    People put value on weird random crap all the time, they arbitrarily decide it's worth tens of thousands of dollars for no good reason, and they buy it and sell it on trading sites. It happens. That's not the interesting part. The fact that the tech is quite boring and could be replaced by a MySQL database isn't very interesting either. The NFT angle is essentially marketing. Ubisoft are cashing in on the NFT hype. As far as that goes I'm quite impressed, and maybe even happy for them. People making money by spotting an up and coming trend and executing an idea for it is very much the startup ethos I admire most. What I don't understand is why you'd bet a company that has a $5bn market cap on it.
corysama 5y ago
The only case where NFTs genuinely make sense is where multiple services want to cooperate and all voluntarily recognize a user's ownership of some token, but the user does not want any of those services to be in charge of controlling the database that records and validates those tokens. So, the NBA, NFL and MLB might all hand out "I'm a VIP sports fan" tokens, and Nike, Adidas, Red Bull etc.. might treat you special because of it. You can't dupe it. But, you can transfer it to anyone you want and Nike can't take it back.
- mrweasel 5y ago
  > But, you can transfer it to anyone you want and Nike can't take it back. That might actually be the two exact reason any of these organisations/companies wouldn’t want to use NFTs for something like VIP tokens.
  - corysama 5y ago
    Agreed. Getting companies to voluntarily put themselves into this position would require some creativity. But, that's what everyone is talking about with "Keep your stuff as you move between metaverses!" How would that work? Each service would have to recognize your ownership of the stuff and have some implementation of how they want to handle it. But, you can't force a World of Warcraft magic axe into Call of Duty if CoD doesn't want you to.
- eterm 5y ago
  That makes no sense, if they "treat you special" then they can absolutely control who they treat specially, there's no way to decentralise that.
  - corysama 5y ago
    There's no way to force any action outside of the blockchain. If you want the blockchain to influence the outside world, that action must be financially motivated.
chowells 5y ago
Ubisoft's NFT plans make perfect sense to Ubisoft. All of these NFT schemes companies keep announcing are just blatant cash grabs. There are people who have a small amount of money and desire to part with it in exchange for nothing more than proof they parted with it and a dream of getting rich. And whenever that happens, lots of immoral parties will spring up to take advantage of it, no matter the externalized costs. In most cases, these things are being run by small-time scammers offering big companies free money in exchange for using their IP. I can't really blame non-technical companies for falling for a slick pitch offering revenue at almost no risk. But Ubisoft's approach is special. They're running the whole thing themselves. They already have pre-mined however many currency tokens they want, and they can mint as many new NFTs (strange name, as they actually seem pretty fungible aside from their ownership history) as they want. They own the whole ecosystem in order to extract as much money from it as the suckers will bear. It's slimy, but it fits right in with Ubisoft's history of being slimy, and much worse. They know exactly what they're doing here. It's up to us at large to determine whether we find that acceptable or not. Sadly, I think far too many people will accept it as long as they get their next Assassin's Creed or Far Cry.
nindalf 5y ago
Lot of people in this thread criticising NFTs and honestly I’d like to pile in. I don’t understand what Ubisoft is doing here. The best case I can make for NFTs is securing ownership of digital assets. Let’s say I spend a few thousand on the Steam store. Then for some reason I charge back a transaction on my credit card. Valve will instantly ban me and I lose access to everything. Now if there was instead a system where my ownership was recorded on a token outside of valve’s control and that ownership entitled the holder of the token to access the game in perpetuity, that would be useful. Maybe. But even I’m not convinced by this. Steam and other digital stores like Kindle are already hugely successful. It’s possible that people would spend more on digital goods if their ownership was irrevocable and transferable but I doubt it.
- phire 5y ago
  The only new thing that Ubisoft have here is making the database of all transactions public. These hardly count as real NFTs. You can only transact them on Ubisoft approved market places, only centrally registered Ubisoft accounts can hold them. And since they control the game, they have all the rights to ban items from the game, even if they insist they can't reverse transactions.
- Latty 5y ago
  Except the game still has to be tied to the token somehow. So when you get banned on Steam in that situation, you just have a worthless token that Steam will no longer respect. Some other store is going to respect that token you paid them no money for and give you access to the game anyway? Why? Are they going to do that for all the games bought with stolen credit cards? This story keeps getting told and it just makes no sense to me.
- elevader 5y ago
  NFTs stop making sense as soon as anything they are used for doesn't involve the blockchain. Ownership of an NFT that points to some fancy Team Fortress 2 hat means absolutely nothing if Valve decides that it doesn't.
- ziml77 5y ago
  Ownership of what the NFT represents isn't irrevocable though, only the NFT itself. Amazon could decide one day to ban you from reading the Kindle books you purchased because you violated their terms of service. An NFT is going to do nothing for you there other than prove that at some point Amazon did recognize that you bought licenses to read some books. But that really not what's under question when looking to appeal the ban with Amazon or bring them to court over it.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
smashem 5y ago
These companies should focus more on Bitcoin + Lightning. Keep It Stupid Simple. * Decrease reliance on Visa. * Instant, cross-border payment settlement. * Other features like money streaming.
- mdoms 5y ago
  > Decrease reliance on Visa. Has Visa ever let them down? > Instant, cross-border payment settlement. Like Visa? > Other features like money streaming. ?
bathtub365 5y ago
The reason Ubisoft is deploying this as an NFT instead of using the centralized market model that Valve uses is so they won’t be subject to the same regulation that Valve has to deal with (reporting proceeds from sales to tax authorities). If the secondary market is on the blockchain and the money doesn’t pass through Ubisoft’s hands they can avoid dealing with this while still having “you can sell your items to other people” as a feature.
axyz00 5y ago
I once interviewed with a startup closely associated with Ubisoft (same founders, building across the block from their biggest studio, employees are all ex-ubisoft, Ubisoft as their only client...) One of their current projects they mentioned at the time was to "use AI to predict Bitcoin hashes". I wonder if their understanding of crypto has improved since then.
Animats 5y ago
It makes more sense than most NFT products. Ownership of the NFT does something. There's an piece of artwork that isn't a total joke. It gives you some connection with other players, like owning a skin someone known was wearing when they won something. Of course they don't need a blockchain. A big fraction of the NFT sector is Axie Infinity, which is a Ponzi on the downslope. Their Smooth Love Potion Token is down 75%-80% from peak, and their Axie token is down about 25%. Thousands of poor people in the Phillipines have bought into this Ponzi. Since all the money comes from new users buying in, it has to collapse at some point. OpenSea is most of the rest of the NFT sector, and most of their offerings are low-effort junk. Someone is selling "colors" - solid color squares for each of the 6 hex digit combinations you can use on the web. Really. I'm worried that the NFT clown car is going to take down the entire virtual world sector. I'm all in favor of interesting metaverses, but what the NFT crowd is producing is total crap at insane prices. About two new vaporware NFT worlds are announced each day on Reddit. If you are selling an NFT to US persons for something that doesn't exist yet, it's a security offering and you have to register with the SEC. The SEC brought the hammer down on the ICO crowd in 2018, which is why you seldom see ICOs any more. NFTs are mostly an effort to get around securities regulation. The window of opportunity for crypto is closing. China has pretty much banned it. India is cracking down. The major countries that allow crypto are starting to regulate them as financial institutions. Scam operators are retreating to the Cayman Islands and Bulgaria.
- jthefgt 5y ago
  Another NFT thread, another opportunity for John to repeat the same talking points. You never get tired of yelling at clouds, do you? Yikes.
- da-x 5y ago
  I think crypto will only have long-term success or maturity if the unwilling people such as myself combined with the general population will be compelled or feel obligated to use any of it, to the same level of utility such as electricity or the internet itself. Otherwise, at some point this rather self-contained 'crypto-sphere' will fallback on itself and the non-core participants (i.e. not the enthusiasts) will lose interest.
yakkityyak 5y ago
If a company wants to quickly bootstrap a marketplace for cosmetic items like CS:GO on steam, is minting NFT's a cheaper and faster solution for the offering company? If so, I guess it could kind of work, but the friction of setting up all the necessary things to actually purchase an NFT is way too much right now. Not to mention a successful marketplace would almost certainly incentivize Ubisoft to just create their own centralized market place on Uplay.
Karliss 5y ago
Is there any information on what blockhain the thing will be running on? Is it going to be one of existing chains or their own Proof of Authority based blokchain? Thus answering to question "how it's better than Ubisoft owned DB" with simple answer "it will be Ubisoft owned DB" and decentralization meaning distributed between 10 servers in different AWS regions. The servers can vote for adding new trusted authorities, but since the initial set is fully controlled by Ubisoft or companies that Ubisoft has contract with, they will never vote for adding anyone else.
- ddeyar 5y ago
  tezos.com :)

88 points by AlexandrB 5y ago

I don't get how Blockchain technology is in a publishers/studios interest. Why do they ever want to give up control over revenue streams? And there are simply not enough games with large-enough eco system and longevity (like WoW). I really want to see pitches that don't contain any hype BS bingo lines to share holders (like me).

meheleventyone 5y ago
They aren’t giving up control, they’re hoping for a fat payday by taking a percentage of all secondary sales in a hype driven NFT market. In the case of Quartz they’re also trying to do an end run around consumer protection laws by refusing refunds and grant users a very strict licence about use. You can’t even display them on video for example.
acdha 5y ago
> I don't get how Blockchain technology is in a publishers/studios interest. It's not, and they're not going to give up the control needed to deliver the hyperbolic claims being made by blockchain PR people. The question the studio executives are asking is not “how could we make this more useful to our customers?” but rather “How can we get those speculators to give us more money for the same feature?” or “How can I have my own cool project to brag about over cocktails?”.
rideontime 5y ago
As the article explains, they don't give up control in this case. The blockchain they're using is locked down to the point of negating all the supposed benefits of blockchains.
- einrealist 5y ago
  Exactly.

twirlock 5y ago

ITT we all pat ourselves on the back for pretending we don't know what NFTs are for when any idiot could figure out what NFTs are for if he thought about it for five seconds instead just repeating shit he overheard some other pseudo-intellectual say.

gjulianm 5y ago

Article summary: > And despite all the bold talk of "decentralization," the Quartz system is still so deeply controlled by Ubisoft that we wonder whether a simple internal database managed directly by the company would be a better fit. It's also NFTs for just a single game.

oh_sigh 5y ago
I know NFTs are popularized on decentralized blockchains, but is there anything inherent to NFTs that they need to be on a decentralized blockchain?
- vmception 5y ago
  No, it is just a set of standardized functions. A class. Can be in any language, any platform.
- YXNjaGVyZWdlbgo 5y ago
  No.
- meheleventyone 5y ago
  Only the risk of a centralised service going away, which also exists for decentralised technology but is considered less likely.
- indigochill 5y ago
  > is there anything inherent to NFTs that they need to be on a decentralized blockchain? Technically you absolutely can run a centralized blockchain and mint NFTs on it (EVE Online did this recently in their latest Alliance Tournament, where IIRC the corpses of player characters who were killed during the event became immortalized as NFTs on an isolated branch of Tezos that was created for the event). But at that point congratulations, you've just made a worse database. The only point of blockchain tech is decentralization (if you care about features and not just branding your product with the latest hype).
- gjulianm 5y ago
  If you consider "NFT" to be a unique asset represented digitally, no they don't. A lot of games and software deals with the equivalent of NFTs, in the end it's just tracking ownership of something with an unique ID. However, for all the NFT features (mainly being able to reliably transfer ownership without relying on any specific company) you do need a blockchain.

1cvmask 5y ago

We can have url rot on both centralized and decentralized systems. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Link_rot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Link_rot

sva_ 5y ago

> NFT plans > make no sense That's a lot of redundancy for such a short title.

errcorrectcode 5y ago
Brought to you but the redundancy department of redundant redundancy for redundant titling. For some reason, I think the uber rich of the world have waay too much money and are willing to throw it around in spectacularly-risky trends without caring about value investing.
vmception 5y ago
an NFT plan can make sense for the issuer and the consumer this one only makes sense for the issuer consumers want one that makes sense for consumers obviously there is an audience that doesn’t want any NFT plan to exist at all, that audience matters the least

webkike 5y ago

Valve has already done this stuff in a way that makes far more sense. A lot of people lament CSGO’s skins (and yes they have some issues) but here are some points about them: - Skins are purely cosmetic and tied to a competitive game that many people tie their life to. Cosmetics of differing expense make sense, the better players show off their personality in the expense and style of their cosmetics. - Skins are tradeable on the steam market which itself is a ledger, no reason for it to be distributed. - The best thing about skins is that after you buy them and you don’t want them anymore, you can resell them and recoup a portion of the money you spent, or in some cases even make profit. - Additionally, because the ledger isn’t distributed, valve can actively change skins and fix mistakes to them. This allows for user submitted skins to even work, as they can respond to DMCA take downs

Hokusai 5y ago
> no reason for it to be distributed Many decisions are taken to increase market value. It makes sense a distributed ledger based on blockchain if that increases the shares value, but I guess that you mean that it does not improve the product at all. And I can't agree more that if anything it makes it worse.
- webkike 5y ago
  It hinders the product. By controlling the ledger and being able to make changes, user submitted products are possible. Otherwise they wouldn’t be able to respond to DMCA in the case of accidentally accepting copyrighted material
  - detaro 5y ago
    They could always block stuff they don't want from actually doing anything in the games and not host it, which would resolve that problem. (similar to how with IPFS public gateways often have blocklists of content they won't deliver, even if it is available in the IPFS network)
    - 5y ago

sneak 5y ago

Most things people try to use blockchains to solve are better served by a single centralized database. I'm an advocate of blockchain tech in general, but this criticism is a) valid, and b) as old as blockchains.

hpoe 5y ago

You could probably remove the frist 2 words and the article would be just as good. It feels to me like NFTs are one of those things that sounds really good in concept and seems so sensical and appealing from people in the "business" but looking at it form the outside it seems like just complete nonsenese. The closest thing to compare it to is MS BizTalk, XSLT, or half a dozen of those other "enterprise" services and technologies that always promised to change the world but seem to never really pan out, and everyone who hears about the project responds with a "WTF why are you doing it that way?" it seems like it is trying to solve a metaproblem that not many people have. But I'll admit maybe I don't understand the whole thing and am just not enlightened enough to see the brilliance. I know plenty of architects who are fluent in powerpoint that would tell me the same thing about Enterprise Integrations.

ghaff 5y ago
>It feels to me like NFTs are one of those things that sounds really good in concept and seems so sensical and appealing from people in the "business" but looking at it form the outside it seems like just complete nonsenese. I would have almost said the opposite (for certain use cases). From a totally rationalist point of view (which many tech people like to think they have), artificial scarcity of digital artifacts--especially those related to fashion--seems like nonsense. However, if you concede that there is a such a thing as fashion, collectibles, etc., why wouldn't it extend to an online environment? IMO, it breaks down once you aren't owning a digital thing and it just becomes effectively an online receipt for something you don't actually own. But in a game/online world environment it makes as much sense as a lot of unique collectibles. What is also true though is to the degree those collectibles exist within one company's playground, there's no need for decentralized ledgers.
AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
> it seems like it is trying to solve a metaproblem that not many people have A particular disease of people deeply engrossed in a field is the tendency to come up with interesting solutions and reverse engineer the problems they solve after the fact. Right now that's about 80% of 'interesting' things happening in computing.
5y ago

delusional 5y ago

The legacy of NFTs is going to be the license they granted corporations like Ubisoft to finally launch this kind of store. They don't need the technology, but they very much do need the marketing wank to make it go down smoothly.

TigeriusKirk 5y ago

Boy, someone was clearly paid by the word. As an NFT proponent, the biggest problem I see here is that even on 3rd party sites buyers are limited to "eligible" participants. I assume that's built into the contract and the marketplaces will have special code to verify it. Ugh. Very much against what I'd like to see, but perhaps inevitable.

neom 5y ago

Internet today did a good job of covering this this-morning: https://youtu.be/KZx9OwkBA14?t=1969 https://youtu.be/KZx9OwkBA14?t=1969 My fav barb was when they discussed zooming in on the authenticity barcode to confirm it's "authentic".

cardosof 5y ago

Are there NFT plans that make sense? I'm sorry if I'm being too cynical for the general quality of this forum, but all I see regarding NFTs look like get rich quick schemes, so I'm not putting a cent in that. Am I losing the opportunity of a lifetime?

speedgoose 5y ago
> Am I losing the opportunity of a lifetime? If you feel like participating in a large scam, perhaps. Personally I would feel bad and I rather not touch this.
- throw_nbvc1234 5y ago
  If you don't want to participate in the scam aspect, just don't resell. Or make sure someone you're selling to is comfortable with the value going to 0 (and wants artist to make any smart contract royalties). You can still use it as a way to invest in artists.
  - speedgoose 5y ago
    When you say "invest in artists", do you mean you want to support artists or you want to exploit artists in the hope of making profits ?
    - kobasa 5y ago
      Why is absolute braindead comments like this still tolerated on here. I mean you'd hope that at some point the people who missed out on one of the biggest investment and technological opportunities of our time would just suck it up and either admit they were wrong or quietly move on with their lives but this place is just filled with angry cope comments like this that seek to vilify participants in a new space without even having a moderate understanding of what they're talking about. Maybe just maybe past all the evil scams and get rich quick schemes out there (which is present in any nascent industry), there are some things and people who are interested in this space and aspects of it that don't amount to eXpLoItaTioN. And just to actually touch on this specific aspect of artists and being exploited, it's a laughable suggestion to mention this in this context when NFTs are one of the first times in recent history when artists can actually take back control from being exploited and unable to provide for themselves without succumbing to essentially giving up their soul - to unlocking their creative freedom and earning potential like we've never seen before.

woah 5y ago

The crux of the article is that the NFTs are on a blockchain, but that Ubisoft has published some legalese: > For a supposedly decentralized and "open" technology, Ubisoft places a lot of restrictions on who can own and use Digits. Quartz users have to be 18 years old, reside in one of a handful of countries ("USA, Canada, Spain, France, Germany, Italy, Belgium, Australia, or Brazil" for now), and use two-factor authentication on their Ubisoft Connect accounts. > Quartz owners also have to reach "XP Level 5" in Ghost Recon Breakpoint before they can collect or use the NFTs, a system seemingly designed to discourage pure speculators and to ensure "the Ubisoft Quartz platform is made for players, and for players only," the company says. That XP level status is confirmed by linking Quartz to your Ubisoft account, which is, of course, centrally controlled and subject to its own terms of use above and beyond the detailed Quartz terms of use. To me, that's kind of a minor point. Just because some lawyers made them put a bunch of tiny font writing in their EULA doesn't really mean much at all. If it's possible for a player to control their private keys (which it is if there's any ability to transfer NFTs to a wallet outside of the game), then these restrictions are meaningless. If this is the case, players will be able to transfer their owned items to other games (which support them), even games not produced by Ubisoft. That's what would be really interesting to look into, not just some 15 minute dunk piece from some writer skimming a EULA.

gjulianm 5y ago
> If it's possible for a player to control their private keys (which it is if there's any ability to transfer NFTs to a wallet outside of the game) I don't think it is possible. Apparently they can only trade on two third-party marketplaces, approved by Ubisoft. I guess that the private keys and blockchain nodes must be tied to Ubisoft accounts. Also, > Players who don't meet any of Ubisoft's requirements "will not be able to acquire Digits whether on the Ubisoft Quartz platform or an authorized third-party marketplace, nor have another player transfer their Digits to you... If you are not eligible, the transaction will fail." It doesn't seem to be just an EULA.
rideontime 5y ago
> players will be able to transfer their owned items to other games (which support them), even games not produced by Ubisoft. No such game exists, and it's unlikely that it ever will, as the article explains. > which it is if there's any ability to transfer NFTs to a wallet outside of the game In your own skimming of the article, you seem to have missed the point that the blockchain they're using is very tightly controlled by them. It's even mentioned in one of your own quotes.

onion2k 5y ago

What I don't quite understand about Ubisoft's NFT offering is that, assuming it actually works and people get onboard with it and NFT items do actually start becoming valuable, wouldn't that mean you'd want to move your valuable NFT assets to a cold wallet? If they're in a cold wallet, you then wouldn't be able to prove you own them to use them in a game. If you keep them in a hot wallet then the game could verify they're still yours, but then you risk someone stealing them if someone finds an exploit in the Quartz code. Everything about the 'useful' side of NFTs where people actually use them for something promotes bad cryptocurrency opsec. One day someone will steal all the in-game skins and guns and hats or whatever, and there's nothing Ubisoft will be able to do about it. They won't be able to refund people, or replace items, of offer any sort of fix. That will be the end of the whole idea, and if Ubisoft have built it into the heart and soul of all their titles, the end of Ubisoft itself. It seems like a very high risk strategy. The only logical reason I can think of for them doing it is that someone at Ubisoft has sold the board on the idea, and is essentially running a Tezos pump and dump scheme, and they've made a chunk of change from the 30% increase in the price that this announcement brought.

echelon 5y ago
Ubisoft won't be building transactional support. NFTs are pogs. You can't use your Cornflakes Rooster Pog to unlock Minecraft content. There's no point in moving around your Ubisoft pogs. You can't use them in Fortnite. And because anyone in the world can print cardboard, they're infinitely inflatable and worthless. They're rows in the database. That's it.
- onion2k 5y ago
  People put value on weird random crap all the time, they arbitrarily decide it's worth tens of thousands of dollars for no good reason, and they buy it and sell it on trading sites. It happens. That's not the interesting part. The fact that the tech is quite boring and could be replaced by a MySQL database isn't very interesting either. The NFT angle is essentially marketing. Ubisoft are cashing in on the NFT hype. As far as that goes I'm quite impressed, and maybe even happy for them. People making money by spotting an up and coming trend and executing an idea for it is very much the startup ethos I admire most. What I don't understand is why you'd bet a company that has a $5bn market cap on it.

corysama 5y ago

The only case where NFTs genuinely make sense is where multiple services want to cooperate and all voluntarily recognize a user's ownership of some token, but the user does not want any of those services to be in charge of controlling the database that records and validates those tokens. So, the NBA, NFL and MLB might all hand out "I'm a VIP sports fan" tokens, and Nike, Adidas, Red Bull etc.. might treat you special because of it. You can't dupe it. But, you can transfer it to anyone you want and Nike can't take it back.

mrweasel 5y ago
> But, you can transfer it to anyone you want and Nike can't take it back. That might actually be the two exact reason any of these organisations/companies wouldn’t want to use NFTs for something like VIP tokens.
- corysama 5y ago
  Agreed. Getting companies to voluntarily put themselves into this position would require some creativity. But, that's what everyone is talking about with "Keep your stuff as you move between metaverses!" How would that work? Each service would have to recognize your ownership of the stuff and have some implementation of how they want to handle it. But, you can't force a World of Warcraft magic axe into Call of Duty if CoD doesn't want you to.
eterm 5y ago
That makes no sense, if they "treat you special" then they can absolutely control who they treat specially, there's no way to decentralise that.
- corysama 5y ago
  There's no way to force any action outside of the blockchain. If you want the blockchain to influence the outside world, that action must be financially motivated.

chowells 5y ago

Ubisoft's NFT plans make perfect sense to Ubisoft. All of these NFT schemes companies keep announcing are just blatant cash grabs. There are people who have a small amount of money and desire to part with it in exchange for nothing more than proof they parted with it and a dream of getting rich. And whenever that happens, lots of immoral parties will spring up to take advantage of it, no matter the externalized costs. In most cases, these things are being run by small-time scammers offering big companies free money in exchange for using their IP. I can't really blame non-technical companies for falling for a slick pitch offering revenue at almost no risk. But Ubisoft's approach is special. They're running the whole thing themselves. They already have pre-mined however many currency tokens they want, and they can mint as many new NFTs (strange name, as they actually seem pretty fungible aside from their ownership history) as they want. They own the whole ecosystem in order to extract as much money from it as the suckers will bear. It's slimy, but it fits right in with Ubisoft's history of being slimy, and much worse. They know exactly what they're doing here. It's up to us at large to determine whether we find that acceptable or not. Sadly, I think far too many people will accept it as long as they get their next Assassin's Creed or Far Cry.

nindalf 5y ago

Lot of people in this thread criticising NFTs and honestly I’d like to pile in. I don’t understand what Ubisoft is doing here. The best case I can make for NFTs is securing ownership of digital assets. Let’s say I spend a few thousand on the Steam store. Then for some reason I charge back a transaction on my credit card. Valve will instantly ban me and I lose access to everything. Now if there was instead a system where my ownership was recorded on a token outside of valve’s control and that ownership entitled the holder of the token to access the game in perpetuity, that would be useful. Maybe. But even I’m not convinced by this. Steam and other digital stores like Kindle are already hugely successful. It’s possible that people would spend more on digital goods if their ownership was irrevocable and transferable but I doubt it.

phire 5y ago
The only new thing that Ubisoft have here is making the database of all transactions public. These hardly count as real NFTs. You can only transact them on Ubisoft approved market places, only centrally registered Ubisoft accounts can hold them. And since they control the game, they have all the rights to ban items from the game, even if they insist they can't reverse transactions.
Latty 5y ago
Except the game still has to be tied to the token somehow. So when you get banned on Steam in that situation, you just have a worthless token that Steam will no longer respect. Some other store is going to respect that token you paid them no money for and give you access to the game anyway? Why? Are they going to do that for all the games bought with stolen credit cards? This story keeps getting told and it just makes no sense to me.
elevader 5y ago
NFTs stop making sense as soon as anything they are used for doesn't involve the blockchain. Ownership of an NFT that points to some fancy Team Fortress 2 hat means absolutely nothing if Valve decides that it doesn't.
ziml77 5y ago
Ownership of what the NFT represents isn't irrevocable though, only the NFT itself. Amazon could decide one day to ban you from reading the Kindle books you purchased because you violated their terms of service. An NFT is going to do nothing for you there other than prove that at some point Amazon did recognize that you bought licenses to read some books. But that really not what's under question when looking to appeal the ban with Amazon or bring them to court over it.

deleted 5y ago

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smashem 5y ago

These companies should focus more on Bitcoin + Lightning. Keep It Stupid Simple. * Decrease reliance on Visa. * Instant, cross-border payment settlement. * Other features like money streaming.

mdoms 5y ago
> Decrease reliance on Visa. Has Visa ever let them down? > Instant, cross-border payment settlement. Like Visa? > Other features like money streaming. ?

bathtub365 5y ago

The reason Ubisoft is deploying this as an NFT instead of using the centralized market model that Valve uses is so they won’t be subject to the same regulation that Valve has to deal with (reporting proceeds from sales to tax authorities). If the secondary market is on the blockchain and the money doesn’t pass through Ubisoft’s hands they can avoid dealing with this while still having “you can sell your items to other people” as a feature.

axyz00 5y ago

I once interviewed with a startup closely associated with Ubisoft (same founders, building across the block from their biggest studio, employees are all ex-ubisoft, Ubisoft as their only client...) One of their current projects they mentioned at the time was to "use AI to predict Bitcoin hashes". I wonder if their understanding of crypto has improved since then.

Animats 5y ago

It makes more sense than most NFT products. Ownership of the NFT does something. There's an piece of artwork that isn't a total joke. It gives you some connection with other players, like owning a skin someone known was wearing when they won something. Of course they don't need a blockchain. A big fraction of the NFT sector is Axie Infinity, which is a Ponzi on the downslope. Their Smooth Love Potion Token is down 75%-80% from peak, and their Axie token is down about 25%. Thousands of poor people in the Phillipines have bought into this Ponzi. Since all the money comes from new users buying in, it has to collapse at some point. OpenSea is most of the rest of the NFT sector, and most of their offerings are low-effort junk. Someone is selling "colors" - solid color squares for each of the 6 hex digit combinations you can use on the web. Really. I'm worried that the NFT clown car is going to take down the entire virtual world sector. I'm all in favor of interesting metaverses, but what the NFT crowd is producing is total crap at insane prices. About two new vaporware NFT worlds are announced each day on Reddit. If you are selling an NFT to US persons for something that doesn't exist yet, it's a security offering and you have to register with the SEC. The SEC brought the hammer down on the ICO crowd in 2018, which is why you seldom see ICOs any more. NFTs are mostly an effort to get around securities regulation. The window of opportunity for crypto is closing. China has pretty much banned it. India is cracking down. The major countries that allow crypto are starting to regulate them as financial institutions. Scam operators are retreating to the Cayman Islands and Bulgaria.

jthefgt 5y ago
Another NFT thread, another opportunity for John to repeat the same talking points. You never get tired of yelling at clouds, do you? Yikes.
da-x 5y ago
I think crypto will only have long-term success or maturity if the unwilling people such as myself combined with the general population will be compelled or feel obligated to use any of it, to the same level of utility such as electricity or the internet itself. Otherwise, at some point this rather self-contained 'crypto-sphere' will fallback on itself and the non-core participants (i.e. not the enthusiasts) will lose interest.

yakkityyak 5y ago

If a company wants to quickly bootstrap a marketplace for cosmetic items like CS:GO on steam, is minting NFT's a cheaper and faster solution for the offering company? If so, I guess it could kind of work, but the friction of setting up all the necessary things to actually purchase an NFT is way too much right now. Not to mention a successful marketplace would almost certainly incentivize Ubisoft to just create their own centralized market place on Uplay.

Karliss 5y ago

Is there any information on what blockhain the thing will be running on? Is it going to be one of existing chains or their own Proof of Authority based blokchain? Thus answering to question "how it's better than Ubisoft owned DB" with simple answer "it will be Ubisoft owned DB" and decentralization meaning distributed between 10 servers in different AWS regions. The servers can vote for adding new trusted authorities, but since the initial set is fully controlled by Ubisoft or companies that Ubisoft has contract with, they will never vote for adding anyone else.

ddeyar 5y ago
tezos.com :)