Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot recently discussed his intentions regarding NFTs and the blockchain, explaining that his company is currently planning a small backtrack on the matter. The executive said Ubisoft has so far only been “in research mode.” Guillemot argued that most of the controversy surrounding NFTs and the blockchain has been the result of poor communication on the part of the company.
“We’re really looking at all the new technologies. We’re very much on the cloud, on the new generation of voxels, and we’re looking at all the Web3 features,” Guillemot said earlier. “We tested a few things recently that give us more information about how it can be used and what we should do in the universe of video games. So we’re testing the ground with some games and we’ll see if they really answer the player’s needs. But we’re still in research mode, I would say.”
“We probably weren’t good at saying we’re doing research,” Guillemot told GamesIndustry.biz during a recent interview. “We should have said we were working on it and when we have something that gives you a real advantage, we will bring it to you.” The executive went on to explain that “as a company, we were early into VR, early into Wii. We’re always trying new things. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t, but it’s always to make sure we can bring a new experience for players who want to be innovative and interesting.The goal of the company is always to create the best experience and new technologies are always good for that because there is less competition and people are more interested in trying new things on new technologies .”
“Exploration does not mean launch,” Guillemot pointed out somewhat unconvincingly. “This industry is moving fast and it’s very cautious about the impact it wants to have. Like so many things, at the beginning, it’s not as good as it could be, but like other new technologies, they will find the right path.”
Ubisoft has been pushing NFTs and the blockchain pretty hard up until now. The company previously brushed off the concerns, Ubisoft Strategic Innovations Laboratory vice president Nicolas Pouard notoriously noting how “players aren’t getting what a digital secondary market can give them” before adding that “for now, due to the current situation and the context of NFTs, players really believe that firstly it destroys the planet and secondly just a tool for speculation. But what we see first is the end game.”
“That’s the way we think about it and why we want to keep experimenting,” Pouard said at the time. “We will continue to release features and services around this first initiative. And our belief is that the puzzle will be revealed piece by piece and understood by our players. We hope they will better understand the value we offer them.”
The trick is that no one bought any of the hype, including Ubisoft employees. Asked for their opinion during a poll, one worker said they “still don’t fully understand the ‘problem’ being solved here,” and asked “is it really worth the extremely negative publicity this will cause?” In the words of another employee, “how can you look at private property, speculation, artificial scarcity and selfishness and then say yes, this is good, I want it, let’s put it into art?”
