Just in case you were thinking that Ubisoft had stopped huffing the guff of Web3, blockchain, and crypto, allow a VentureBeat interview with blockchain head Nicolas Pouard to rid you of that presumption, as he discusses with great zeal what the company is working on in this field and its general plans for 2024.
Pouard confirms that Ubisoft is planning on releasing two Web3 games sometime between June and September, one of which being Champions Tactics, which recently shared an alpha gameplay trailer.
In the meanwhile, Pouard says that Ubisoft has been working to secure partnerships, dish out licenses, and gather fans, “a few thousand” of which are in Discords according to him. He also specifically calls out targeting the Asian market owing to its general lack of regulatory oversight.
On the subject of those fans, Pouard talks up interaction with crypto gamers in order to better create an actual game with Web3 integration as opposed to simply ramming it into a title and failing. Pouard also claims that the technology has matured since the Ubisoft Quartz incident, and he says that Quartz was “ahead of the curve in some ways.”
Of course, none of this interview really talks about what a good Web3 game looks like — or how Ubisoft has come up with an answer to the question. Pouard continues to talk about how young and “innovative” Web3 gaming is, going so far as to try and draw parallels between Web3’s maturation to the 30 years’ worth of work on AI neural networks.
Despite the admittance that five years have provided no functioning product, Pouard and Ubisoft is resolved to press forward. “We need to keep working on this,” he says. “We haven’t had any real proof for the last five years because the games weren’t at the level users expected. We need that to happen at some point: a proper game using this technology. We have to continue.”
