Last year we first reported on Ubisoft’s third attempt at making NFTs and gaming work with the creation of Champions Tactics: Grimoria Chronicles, a self-described “competitive turn-based RPG” that would be linked to the blockchain in some fashion. It turns out that last week Ubisoft quietly launched the game in full to PC over the weekend, and we can now get the full measure of its NFT integration.
Gameplay in Champions Tactics involves creating or purchasing a team of three NFT figurines to pit them against others in turn-based battles to climb the PvP leaderboard. According to reporting from IGN, players are given some temporary figurines, but they’ll eventually need to either create their own in the forge or purchase some from a marketplace, both of which can be done by spending in-game currency or crypto.
It’s the marketplace that ends up being where things arguably go pretty sour, as players appear to be trying to make money off of this thing: Scrolling through the market, we can see that most of the figures run about $8 to $15 on average at the time of this writing, but there are those who are asking for just over $100 for a figurine, while the most expensive is asking for a whopping $63K, so it would seem that there are no market controls in place.
When approached for comment on the matter, Ubisoft Paris studio director Francois Bodson likened Champions Tactics’ figs to trading cards and trotted out the often-repeated suggestions that the blockchain equates to digital item ownership.
“Our shared goal is to explore new ways to play alongside bringing more value to players based on empowerment and ownership. Champions Tactics offers deep strategic gameplay featuring unique in-game assets and several exciting innovations. These include millions of procedurally generated figurines, each with distinct stats, assets shaped directly by players’ choices, and an open marketplace letting players compose their teams on a peer-to-peer basis – much like a physical trading card game.”
This push into blockchain and NFT gaming – however quietly – is set against the backdrop of more bad fiscal news for Ubisoft overall, as the company saw sales for the first half of the fiscal year dip by 19% YoY.
The report also confirmed that Ubisoft is trying to “[tackle] the dynamics behind the polarized comments around [the company] so as to protect [its] reputation and maximize […] game’s sales,” while also confirming it shed over 2,000 employees as part of efforts to cut costs. We’d argue that firing staff over bad leadership decisions as well as hoping to put out an NFT game on the sly isn’t going to help those efforts.
