Ubisoft has shared an announcement trailer for its latest development, Quartz, a new platform that will allow players to acquire and manage NFTs in some of the company’s most popular games.
As noted in the trailer, Quartz will center around Digits, Ubisoft’s name for its in-game, playable NFTs, which comprise limited-edition cosmetics with unique serial numbers that can be tracked from user to user thanks to the beauty of the blockchain. The first game that will support Digits is Ghost Recon Breakpoint, the latest installment of the online tactical shooter series based in the world of Tom Clancy.
Naturally, each Digit can be sold to new owners via third-party marketplaces. Embedded metadata in each Digit also allows a history of previous owners to be easily obtained.
Blockchain Product Director Baptiste Chardon on why the blockchain and NFTs are a big deal for gaming:
Blockchain’s decentralized technology enables gaming companies to move beyond current limitations set by more traditional technologies and lay the foundation of an ambitious and exciting new ecosystem that is, by design, truly community driven. While this can seem trivial at first, it is a totally new approach compared to the walled-garden digital environments we are used to, and it changes the videogame industry by introducing concepts like uniqueness and control, and thus value distribution in our game worlds.
This new approach can even, on a longer term, open up new opportunities such as interoperability between games or a never-before-seen level of autonomy for communities within game worlds thanks to the decentralized nature of the technology. In that sense, added on top of existing tools, we see blockchain as a means of placing back into the hands of players and creators the value they generate through their engagement with their games. We see this as an evolution of real-life possibilities in the digital space.
The beta for Ubisoft Quartz will launch on December 9. Available free for the Ubisoft Connect version of the game, Ghost Recon Breakpoint’s first Digits will be the M4A1 Tactical | Wolves rifle (available on December 9), Wolf Enhanced Helmet A (available on December 12), and Wolf Enhanced Pants (available on December 15).
Source: Ubisoft