this post was submitted on 05 Jul 2024

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Ubisoft is still trying to make NFTs happen (www.gamedeveloper.com)

submitted 4 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 69 points 4 months ago (1 children)

We're on the AI grift train, catch up

[–] [email protected] 7 points 4 months ago

Some exec probably over invested in this project and now they're trying to push it through so they don't have to call it a failure yet.

[–] [email protected] 40 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Ubisoft is run by people who are as greedy as they are dumb. They have no idea why their games succeed and genuinely do not understand that they are making the worst game business decisions since Square-Enix. They will not survive the next decade if they don't adapt.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 4 months ago

I really hope they don’t adapt and their IPs get sold to someone with 2 brain cells to rub together

[–] [email protected] 17 points 4 months ago (2 children)

This brings me hope Ubi might rot from within and collapse. And some nice Lemming will buy all their IP for a song and release it with a copyleft license.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 4 months ago

The nice lemming will likely be either EA or Microsoft. I'm not hopeful for either of these companies to do anything positive with it.

If steam were to buy it that means there might be some light left at the end of that tunnel. Though I fear what will happen if steam changes owners inevitably...

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago

lol

[–] [email protected] 8 points 4 months ago (4 children)

Didn't Ubisoft used to be good...What happened to them?

[–] [email protected] 9 points 4 months ago

"Omg we need to make more money for our investors!" and then they hire a bunch of consultants who sell them on bullshit like NFTs instead of making good games.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 4 months ago

MBAs is what happened.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 4 months ago (1 children)

...when?

[–] [email protected] 19 points 4 months ago (1 children)

They were one of my favorites over 20 years ago. I played many of their games: Splinter Cell, Beyond Good & Evil, Child of Light, Assassin’s Creed. I never played Far Cry, Prince of Persia, or got heavily into Rayman, but they certainly did make many gems.

Then somewhere around 10-15 years ago, they enshittified.

Now they’re an evil and anti-consumer corporation. I don’t buy their games anymore, which is a shame because I’d love the Beyond Good & Evil remaster and the upcoming sequel. I’d love to play Immortals Fenyx Rising. But their track record shows they will only release games that are: “safe” copy-and-paste games, not innovative, unoriginal, loaded with micro transactions and predatory telemetry, and equipped with DRM and kill switches.

Why purchase and play Immortals Fenyx Rising when in 10 years they’ll just take it away from me? Such a shame. I won’t participate in Ubisoft games anymore unless they course correct (read: They will never course correct).

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Have you looked at the Stop Killing Games campaign?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago

This needs to be known more

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

Did you just wake up from a time capsule? Ubisoft hasn't been good for over 10 years.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 4 months ago

Stop trying to make Fetch happen!

[–] [email protected] 6 points 4 months ago

What year is this?

[–] [email protected] 5 points 4 months ago

lol too late to the party, so late by now everyone knows it was a scam. get on the AI train before it leaves Ubi. Or was it some stupid shareholders idea "AI is too expensive lets try to revive NFTs and squeeze some juice out of it"

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 months ago

Ubisoft web3 technical director

Bruh

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago

Stop trying to make ~~”fetch”~~ NFTs happen

[–] [email protected] -4 points 4 months ago (1 children)

There is nothing wrong with the core technology of using a blockchain token as a validator in a game.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 months ago (1 children)

True, but the problem is that there is no point to do it. Just use a database. Games are already centralized. Why bother?

Unless the big gaming companies come together and develop a system that would allow you, for example, to get skins in rainbow six siege and use them in battlefield or call of duty (which is almost impossible to build anyways because of different engines, model formats etc), there is absolutely no reason to have any decentralised crypto/nft bullshit involved.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 4 months ago

More or less there are 2 clear use-cases: Foss trade system not centrally controlled by the game, and cross-game usage of a token. Neither is reliably implemented by a single company or centralized db.

[+] [email protected] -7 points 4 months ago (3 children)

NFTs don’t make sense for a ton of things, but item trading in video games is one of the few ideal use cases, and, implemented properly, it would benefit players.

There could be items that are literally unique and not just labeled “unique” but everyone can get one. Some collector-type players love that stuff. Limited run items could actually be limited run even if the studio waited a couple years and brought it back because you could tell original-run item vs cash-grab item by creation date and so on.

In the future, if standards are established, you could even move items from ESO to GW2, for example.

One benefit to devs and their players who care about fairness is rolling back (or entirely preventing) a duplicating glitch. I know there is always at least one case of this in every MMORPG I’ve ever played. Devs have to scramble, lock databases, screw up the rollback or don’t even attempt it, and the non-cheaters are all pissed.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Literally none of that requires an nft. Standardising items between games also makes zero sense, games by their nature are very different technically and would require the items to be implemented in every game, which wouldn't happen.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Not to mention art direction. A call of duty character running around minecraft would look completely out of place (ignoring all of the technical complexities)

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

Why do you think Epic is trying to jam everything into Fortnite?

[–] [email protected] 6 points 4 months ago (1 children)

You don't need NFTs or block chain for any of that.

Also, "moving items from ESO to GW2" is utter nonsense. Every piece of that idea is a fever dream. The games have different mechanical rules for how they work (eg: the stat numbers on items, how they behave, who can use them). The technical stack that puts them in the game and on your screen are different. Different engines may have different needs for texture and mesh stuff.

If they wanted to do some sort of cross game promo, some games already do that. TF2 has weird cross game promo stuff. But there's not really a universe where you can just drag and drop an "item" from one game to another. And even if you could, you don't need NFTs for that.

[–] [email protected] -3 points 4 months ago (1 children)

You don't need NFTs or block chain for any of that.

unique items with serial numbers
record of ownership for items
transaction history of who bought/ sold the item
currency to pay for items
account balances
all that tied to some external reference to a blob of data that represents the thing being traded

Sure, you don’t need blockchain and NFTs to do all that but once you invented that system you’d have effectively reinvented blockchain and NFTSs.

The meta-problem here is two fold:

For reasons I don’t comprehend, a lot of folks have been fooled by central banking propaganda that “crypto bad; me no like crypto bros”. Alan Greenspan, or whoever is modern equivalent is, ain’t yer buddy. And neither is the PR firm his friend hired to program y’all’s brains via Reddit posts from hundreds of deep socket puppet accounts.
Involved video gamers (as opposed to people who merely play video games) from my experience, more than a typical person, tend to angrily seek scapegoats for I’m-not-sure-what. Therefore, a successful profitable and enduring enterprise like Ubisoft is one of their favorite targets of ire. So like any angry mob, whatever Ubisoft is doing then they hate it.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 children)

unique items with serial numbers

record of ownership for items

transaction history of who bought/ sold the item

account balances

All of that is pretty trivial to do in a standard postgres database.

currency to pay for items

I've never worked on currency stuff, but my understanding is this is a well understood and developed problem space. No one is blocked on software development because they can't figure out how to charge a credit card, or implement their own stupid "Microsoft Points" system

all that tied to some external reference to a blob of data that represents the thing being traded

I don't really understand what you mean by this. Maybe this is a load bearing point of yours?

Sounds like an API layer on top of the DB, though, which is also pretty trivial. Like Gw2Efficiency uses the GW2 api to read the items you have on your account.

For reasons I don’t comprehend, a lot of folks have been fooled by central banking propaganda that “crypto bad; me no like crypto bros”. Alan Greenspan, or whoever is modern equivalent is, ain’t yer buddy. And neither is the PR firm his friend hired to program y’all’s brains via Reddit posts from hundreds of deep socket puppet accounts.

I think it is an error and deeply presumptuous to make that kind of claim about the other people in an argument. How would you feel if I said you were fooled by crypto propaganda? Not likely to change your mind or even have a amicable conversation. Especially if you add the insulting "me no like" phrasing.

There are many reasons to reject NFTs and cryptocurrency that do not stem from being "programmed".

Involved video gamers (as opposed to people who merely play video games) from my experience, more than a typical person, tend to angrily seek scapegoats for I’m-not-sure-what. Therefore, a successful profitable and enduring enterprise like Ubisoft is one of their favorite targets of ire. So like any angry mob, whatever Ubisoft is doing then they hate it.

People of any sort are susceptible to believing what their group believes. I don't think "gamers" are more suspectible to this, but they may be louder in spaces like lemmy.

But, to your point, I don't think people would focus their ire on Ubisoft if they were like "You know what? We decided to let our workers unionize, and we're getting rid of microtransactions." I mean, maybe. I don't know. There are certain groups that if they told me the sky was blue and there was free ice cream, I'd still be suspicious.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 4 months ago (1 children)

I get that you are insulted by my comment about crypto critics, but a few of your comments have shown that you lack the understanding of crypto to criticize it. Thus, you have validated my comment you found insulting.

I listed a series of bullet points & you said Postgres can do that. Of course you can define those tables in any database. But the logic to perform operations on those tables for a transaction and accounting system must still be written. One of the main aspects of blockchains are exactly such an API.

Second, you have shown that you don’t understand NFTs either. But thank you for at least admitting that you don’t understand what I meant by refs to blobs of data. So there is hope. Almost no crypto currency stores NFTs on-chain. Blockchains are designed to be super efficient since they are distributed transaction systems. When you buy an NFT, the actual data for compromising the NFT itself is stored somewhere else. The blockchain just has the token proving ownership.

But the meta-problem is more important here. You are debating so confidently and asserting things so boldly, yet you don’t have the knowledge of the topic that a 2 hour tutorial would give you. That is the real problem. Why are people like this? Why do they read something that is essential an editorial and then go around vehemently repeating the points from that editorial?

[–] [email protected] 0 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Thus, you have validated my comment you found insulting.

I don't think insults are going to benefit anyone.

But the logic to perform operations on those tables for a transaction and accounting system must still be written. One of the main aspects of blockchains are exactly such an API.

Transactions are one of the most basic things databases do. Audit trails are also extremely common. Have you done any development that uses a relational database? Nothing you're describing is difficult or uncommon.

When you buy an NFT, the actual data for compromising the NFT itself is stored somewhere else. The blockchain just has the token proving ownership.

I don't see how this is a plus or unique. A typical row in a standard table would be like pk, item_id, owner_id, etc. Foreign keys are extremely common.

You are debating so confidently and asserting things so boldly, yet you don’t have the knowledge of the topic that a 2 hour tutorial would give you. That is the real problem

I mean, maybe, but I'm really not getting the impression from you that you know how existing technology works. I've been a software developer for more than a decade so I've got that going for me.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago (1 children)

So you’re a developer. Beautiful. That makes it easy then.

Look, you mentioned Postgres. But why use it at all for anything? Because redoing all the features that separate product provides is a giant pain in the ass. Now, what if your needs didn’t quite work with trad-relational DBs? Too much data, reads a million times higher than writes, no need for real-time accuracy. Then you use a specialized db like BigTable.

There are other services you plug into instead of reinvent. You stand up web servers with special features like redirect rules as configuration. You could write your own web service every time you start a new app, but that’s crazy. The need Apache or whatever is filling is a communications management piece.

Ok. Now. You are building a service and you need to build a transaction system for trading of digital assets with fiat currency. You could write your own or you could use a specialized service. NFTs on crypto currency are that prebuilt service. I’m switching metaphors now, but it’s just like picking a Docker provider.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago

Look, you mentioned Postgres. But why use it at all for anything?

It's a good tool for the job. It's well tested, supported, documented, etc

I really don't see the value that NFTs and block chain offer for games (or much else). I don't want to store my game data on some block chain. That's going to be slow and awkward. A quick Google says etherium can handle like 10 transactions a second. Bitcoin takes like 10 minutes. That's unacceptably slow.

So it's more like switching from postgres to an Excel sheet.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago

Uuua use u**f xx d