Ubisoft has quietly released its own NFT game to join the ranks of other vaunted, widely-played blockchain enabled titles like Axie Infinity and…uh, Ember Sword. Champions Tactics: Grimoria Chronicles launched earlier this month with relatively little fanfare or marketing. The game comes two years after Ubisoft’s failed bid to make NFTs work in Ghost Recon: Breakpoint, a solid three years after NFT prices and purchases fell off a cliff, and barely a week after it announced it would disband the team behind the critically acclaimed Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown.
Surface level, Champions Tactics is a PC strategy game where players assemble teams of champions to fight their way up the rankings. Teams are composed of three champions, each with their own attributes and abilities that can exploit enemy teams’ weaknesses. At the beginning of each round, players roll dice to determine combat order. Next, they select abilities for their champions before combat plays out simultaneously. Rinse and repeat until one team is defeated. All in all, the game looks like a surprisingly decent, if generic, tactics game.
But then there’s all the NFT garbage. Champions are the game’s NFTs associated with the Oasys blockchain. To acquire champions you have to either forge them from existing champions you own or purchase them off the game’s marketplace. To purchase champions, you can either use the OAS cryptocurrency or plain ole cash money, with the cheapest going for about $7 and the most expensive sitting at an eye-watering $63,000 whole-ass American dollars. To understand what’s in it for Ubisoft to perpetrate this nonsense, the company takes a six percent “royalty fee” for every marketplace transaction, and there are about 2,700 active listings on the site.
But wait! There’s worse! Having more champions increases your VIP status. The higher your VIP status, the more experience points and in-game currency you earn, thus incentivizing players to spend money accumulating champions. To entice even more dollars out of customers, Champions Tactics also features an additional exclusive collection of NFTs to buy called warlords. According to the game’s website, owning a warlord unlocks access to “special events” and even more in-game boosts to earning EXP and gold. Players can use their warlords as their in-game profile pictures. Here’s what they look like.
Ubisoft is one of the biggest developers still apparently all-in on implementing blockchain technology within video games. In addition to trying and failing with NFTs in Ghost Recon: Breakpoint, last year, the company announced a strategic partnership with web3 gaming platform Immutable after reports of Ubisoft employees internally criticizing the company’s blockchain projects. The tragedy is that Champions Tactics seems like it has decent mechanics that’d work just fine as a mobile gacha game. Purchasing champions and forging new ones seems perfectly suited to take advantage of the kind of microtransaction activity gaming companies salivate over. This game doesn’t need NFTs to make the kind of money Ubisoft is after.
But what’s worst of all is that Ubisoft spent money developing a game with features that gamers and developers actively hate, only to push it out to essentially die in obscurity mere days after it essentially said “No, thanks” to the people who made one of its best games in years. Yikes.