Ubisoft is Launching In-Game NFTs

Ubisoft, one of the largest companies in the gaming space, announced that they are launching in-game non-fungible tokens (NFTs) starting with the PC version of their game Tom Clancy’s Breakpoint. Ubisoft has been experimenting with NFT gaming integrations for years now in a few different ways: externally by either funding startups making NFT games via their Entrepreneurs Lab accelerator, or through more general partnerships, and internally by releasing their own small experiments via their Strategic Innovation Lab.

The company released their NFT platform, Quartz, as a beta on December 9th to a number of countries, including the United States, Germany, Australia, Canada. Quartz is built on the proof of stake blockchain Tezos, which touts “One Ubisoft Quartz transaction powered by Tezos blockchain consumes 1 million times less than a Bitcoin transaction,” touching on the recent environmental concerns surrounding cryptocurrencies. Ubisoft NFTs, called Digits, are being given out for free to early adopters on December 9th, 12th, and 15th, with more planned for 2022. So far, this looks like skins on weapons and armor for Tom Clancy’s Breakpoint.

Much of the recent NFT game development boom is due to increased tooling in creating NFT games. There are now a number of companies that maintain software development kits (SDKs) of the popular game development engine Unity to allow integration with NFT ecosystems.

On the news of Ubisoft’s integration with Tezos (XTZ), the token price spiked up ~36%.