Ubisoft tries NFT grift in 2024, and wait for it, it goes badly
By Brian Allen
Ubisoft is in the midst of the kind of year that gets executives fired. It delivered Star Wars Outlaws to such low sales numbers that Assassin's Creed Shadows got delayed until 2025. Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown debuted to great reviews but faint sales. After a promising start, long-gestating shooter XDefiant may be shuttered soon.
After reliable franchises such as Assassin's Creed and Prince of Persia let them down, Ubisoft did the only logical thing: it released an NFT-based game in late 2024. Champions Tactics: Grimoria Chronicles is a blockchain RPG and predictably, it's an absolute dumpster fire. Players have been reporting that a single user has compromised the game so that everyone who plays matches up against them and they win automatically.
Game executives are always chasing the next big trend, and must have felt outmaneuvered during that brief timespan when NFTs were all the rage. After all, selling customers worthless digital flotsam was the video game industry's thing first.
Almost every gaming company gaming announced it was working on some NFT-based thing. The Olympics even ended their long-running series of successful Mario vs Sonic games to chase the crypto craze. Thankfully, most of these projects got abandoned as NFT went the way of tulips. But Ubisoft, in the throes of its terrible, very bad, no good year went full speed ahead. There will be a book about how bad 2024 was for Ubisoft, if not several.
In a September Ubisoft press release, the gaming giant revised its second quarter expectations from $500 million to around $350-370 million. Clearly, Grimoria Chronicles won't be helping them out of this hole.