There is sometimes a bit of a disconnect between critics and regular gamers. A few reasons cause this rift - my job is to critically evaluate games, and yours is to enjoy them. Not only do these ideas clash, my evaluation sometimes actively diminishes your enjoyment. I also get sent games by publishers, and I’m not even as good at Assassin’s Creed as you are, so that seems unfair. That certain content creators have made it their business to define critics as ‘the enemy’ hasn’t helped either. I don’t want to spend too much time on our differences though, and instead rally around our similarities - namely, we all hate NFTs. So why is Ubisoft embracing them?

If you’re thinking “I love NFTs,” well… look. Let’s just stay friends and you can go back to those pictures of monkeys in hats, eh? Remember, they’re yours. You’ve got a digital receipt and everything. The rest of us have no time for NFTs, especially when they’re a pure profit-driving scheme with nothing else to offer.

Related: Gaming's Flirtation With NFTs Isn't Surprising, But It Sure Is DisappointingA brief rundown of what an NFT is - it takes a picture on the internet (of which there are an infinite number) and arbitrarily attempts to limit the number available by selling digital ownership receipts. You can still right click and save for free, but you won't ‘own’ the image, not without the reciept. Sound stupid? Great, you’re all caught up. Oh, and it’s also tremendously bad for the environment, thanks to the huge energy drain caused by the underlying blockchain technology that powers it.

ezio collection

It’s this blockchain technology that Ubisoft is embracing. While the company’s earnings call avoided the letters NFT, it heavily discussed blockchain and the idea of implementing it into gaming. "[Blockchain] will enable more play-to-earn that will enable more players to actually earn content, own content, and we think it's going to grow the industry quite a lot," chief financial officer Frederick Duguet said. "We've been working with lots of small companies going on blockchain and we're starting to have a good know-how on how it can impact the industry, and we want to be one of the key players here."

Essentially, everything you have in a game is a copy. Your Ezio, your sniper rifle, your Chorizo... these are not the original model. The original is on a Ubisoft server somewhere. Everyone is happy with this arrangement, and it's how games have always worked. The idea with NFTs and blockchain is to allow Ubisoft to sell the original (or multiple versions of the original, which defeats the point a little) in order to offer a new level of ownership.

It’s not just Ubisoft, however. It may be the first major company to bite the bullet on NFTs, but I doubt it will be the last. There are three groups when it comes to NFTs, and the maths checks out when it comes to profiteering. The smallest group is ‘crypto bros’ - these people actively love and invest in NFTs. It’s through these people you make your money. Then there are people like me, who hate NFTs, the commodification of art, the reduction of creativity to clout, and the environmental damage all of this causes. Crypto bros affectionately call us ‘right clickers’, because of our suggestion you can just right click and save any image on the internet you like.

Mario Kart Tour

Right clickers appear to outnumber crypto bros by a significant margin. We all live in our own echo chamber, but if you check the mentions or QRTs of any notable NFT post, you will see far more dunks than adoration.

Just re-read that paragraph back though. Echo chamber. Mentions. QRTs. NFTs. Only the Terminally Online among us even know what those words mean. While ‘right clickers’ outnumber ‘crypto bros’, the ‘I don’t care about any of this and I think it’s weird that you do’ outnumber both of us handsomely - and that's why NFTs will probably find footing, at least for a little while, in gaming. Most people have far more interesting things in their lives to care about, and when they're told NFTs are just a new form of MTXs that let them really own that gun skin they just bought, they'll simply roll their eyes and get on with it.

Eventually the bubble will burst though, and that's because NFTs are irredeemably shit. Just look at them. Check out the garbage NFTs of Pinhead as part of the Dead by Daylight crossover. They're like weird, pixel inversions of a Picrew, thought up in five minutes and copy-pasted with minimal tweaks in the name of uniqueness. In a recent Bloomberg interview with the people behind Axie - a gaming NFT firm focused on GameFi, which is essentially embedding NFTs and crypto into gaming - we saw the most ridiculous example of this yet.

fifa
via Gaming Intel

The suggestion was that Mario could become an NFT - that of all the millions of people around the world playing Mario Kart, you would be the only one playing as Mario, because you had paid out your arse for the privilege. It's like when Facebook - sorry, Meta - tries to talk about gaming being the future of the metaverse and the clip is Zuckerberg playing virtual chess with a hologram of himself. That's not how games work, and no one who plays games wants that.

The reason gamers and critics don't always get along is because gamers just want to grill. If you don't get that joke, then congratulations on not being Terminally Online. Gamers just want to play games, and that's why critical examination is sometimes at odds with their sensibilities. This is not (ironically) a criticism - it's an objective fact. There's nothing wrong with just playing games to have fun.

If you just play games to have fun, you will probably put up with microtransactions being renamed NFTs, and won't care about the digital ownership or environmental stuff - you just want a FIFA Ultimate Team card or a Valorant gun. But that's not what NFTs are doing. The idea of 'owning Mario' is not something any gamer anywhere cares about. Imagine playing an online shooter and finding out that one of your teammates paid $35,000 in real money for their gun. The same gun you got for free in the game, but theirs is gold. Who wants to be that guy?

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