"...up to an including the fact that if you get banned you...lose your NFTs."
That cant be right, well Ubisoft could still fuck this up. I can sell my NFTs on marketplaces completely independent of ubisoft. Sure they could invalidate, not honor the NFTs, but i wouldnt expect them to do so unless criminal activity like money laundering is involved.
You're missing the point that this would motivate a marketplace where Ubisoft is not the only portal for these NFT-owned games. nftgamingportal.com could exist which accepts these NFTs (in addition to many others) despite whatever restrictions Ubisoft decides to impose (which they are free to do... they own the walled garden).
> nftgamingportal.com could exist which accepts these NFTs (in addition to many others) despite whatever restrictions Ubisoft decides to impose
Ubisoft's coin is on a public chain right now, and they have restrictions that prevent people from using arbitrary 3rd-party marketplaces to trade the NFTs. So it's a nice theory, but it doesn't seem to be working in practice; being on a public chain isn't currently preventing Ubisoft from restricting other portals.
I think people believed this portability was inherent to how NFTs work, that of course anything on a public chain would have to allow 3rd-party marketplaces. But I don't see what mechanisms actually exist to force that outcome; I think that's just a hope that people had rather than an inherent technological property of how blockchain contracts work.
Not really hope, but this is one of the biggest value propositions. If your NFTs give more rights/power to the owner they are going to be more attractive and thus more valuable.
On the other hand being able to have more restrictive tokens enables smart contracts to comply with regulations. But for gaming NFTs it really destroys any added value/utility which is something i should have expected of Ubisoft.
People have pointed to the fact that Ubisoft is using a separate chain, but I want to point out that even on Ethereum you're not guaranteed to have the kind of universal access that you want. Smart contracts are code, and an Ethereum contract can be coded to rely on a centralized service or to only allow selling through a specific marketplace. Additionally, even on Ethereum Ubisoft could monitor the sales and reject tokens or ban account that go through sales endpoints that they dislike even if they didn't code the restrictions into the smart contract. The blockchain makes that kind of historical monitoring and restriction really easy.
Of course, Ubisoft could in a theoretical world also not do that stuff, but the point is they could also allow you to transfer your games using a centralized service. The NFTs don't force them to be more open or customer friendly, if they were customer friendly they would already be allowing you to download games without DRM or transfer them around. They could already offer you a Steam key with every game you bought from the Ubisoft store; it's corporate politics and competition between Ubisoft and Steam that prevents this from happening, not technology.
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What Ubisoft demonstrates so well here is that the incentive structure behind NFTs also doesn't really seem bias companies towards being more open. There's no commercial incentive for any other game to integrate with Ubisoft's NFTs. Doing so would be a pure act of charity with no upside to those companies, and with a ton of liability since Ubisoft would be allowed to mess with those NFTs which would now be part of the customer experience on a separate game.
What you're seeing with Ubisoft is not going to be an exception, this is going to be the norm of how companies work with NFTs. A quick heuristic you can use: releasing a game DRM-free is easier, cheaper, simpler, and more directly beneficial to consumers than building a consumer-friendly NFT system; so whenever you look at a company that says they're going to work with NFTs, do yourself a favor and check to see if their games are currently DRM-free. Do they currently allow game trading/gifting? If they don't, then I think it's a strong probability that their NFTs are going to look more like Ubisoft's and less like the ethical systems that people imagine and hope for. Because I can't stress enough that it's not hard to build the systems and restrictions on the blockchain that Ubisoft has, it really comes down to corporate choice about how they proceed rather than the technology.
In short, NFTs offer no additional positive incentives to be more consumer friendly, and the technology doesn't make anything possible that wasn't possible before with good-old-fashioned OAUTH or signed public databases. If Ubisoft wanted to allow game transfers, there are dozens of ways they could do it today, many of which could survive as authentication mechanisms even if the company folded. Game ownership on the blockchain is not going to go through the kind of revolution that people suppose. My advice is, if you want a revolution in game ownership then lobby to reform copyright and/or establish a legal digital right of resale. If you want to more directly protect your games, boycott and criticize companies like Steam/Epic/Ubisoft/EA/etc that bundle DRM into their storefronts.
There's no commercial incentive for any other game to integrate with Ubisoft's NFTs. Doing so would be a pure act of charity with no upside to those companies, and with a ton of liability since Ubisoft would be allowed to mess with those NFTs which would now be part of the customer experience on a separate game
What about bootstrapping a new game?
If you were launching a new game and wanted to steal marketshare from Ubisoft, integrating their NFT's (if they are open and not in a closed ecosystem) would be beneficial
It wouldn't make a lot of sense financially. The cost to create all the assets, and stay in sync with Ubisofts asset database would be high. Your only incentive would be to try and capitalize on future sales, but without any guarantee that they'd buy the asset from you.
You'd basically only be appealing to people who are bought into the hype...without getting any guarantees in returns.
> integrating their NFT's (if they are open and not in a closed ecosystem) would be beneficial
How so? It is just another way of giving away in-game content to attract new players. But it would be technically more complex and would make your game dependent on a market that is controlled by a competitive third party.
It would be more work and your new game would be subject to Ubisoft's whims. You're not getting any money from the existing NFTs, and you're not getting any money when people trade them. And the game-balance problems of trying to take an existing economy that's built around restrictions in another game, and then retrofitting that onto your economy without resulting in weird pay-to-win outcomes... oof, difficult problem.
If you want to bootstrap a new game that has a lot of content and freebees for new players, just give people a bunch of content, it's the same amount of work. Using Ubisoft's NFTs in your game still requires you to build the mechanics and still requires you to build all of the media assets around those NFTs. So you don't really get to skip anything, and now your digital assets/rewards are harder to balance.
And very importantly, you don't get any money out of it, Ubisoft gets money when you integrate their NFTs. I just don't see what the advantage would be.
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Edit: Well, okay, after more thought I guess maybe carrying over progress in some limited ways, but... who really wants that, either as a game designer or as a player? Nobody really wants someone who started playing Call of Duty 10 years ago to go into a new game in a different genre already dominating everyone else in the game because of pay-to-win mechanics. That's frustrating for designers, but it's also frustrating for players who want to feel like they're starting out brand new games on equal footing with each other.
I want to stress again, we could already be doing this stuff today using OAUTH/account-imports, and we're mostly not outside of a few random, often very limited promotions; and I would suggest the reason is that it turns out there's not a lot of incentive for games made by separate companies to do a lot of integration with each other -- otherwise we'd already see it happening.
It's all well and good to talk about bringing your Magic cards over to another Magic game, but... it's kind of a weird theoretical problem that NFTs don't help with, because first of all Magic isn't something that just anyone can make a game around, it's still a copyrighted game. And if Wizards is the one making all of the legal Magic games, they can use a centralized service to make cards transfer between them (they could also use that service for games outside of their control, but at the very least they don't need a blockchain for a bunch of games that they exclusively own). But second of all outside of Magic, it doesn't make a ton of sense to try and bring your Magic cards into, say, Hearthstone (which again you couldn't do in a literal sense because the card art and text is all copyrighted and Blizzard would get sued if they tried to import your Magic Online library). Hearthstone has separate mechanics, what would the mapping even be?
A lot of these collectable games like Magic/Hearthstone are collectible first and foremost not primarily for gameplay reasons, but as a way to make companies money by encouraging you to buy cards, and Hearthstone ends up incentivizing new players by giving a lot of free stuff away and then pulling players into a store ecosystem that they control. They don't have a lot of financial reason to make it so that giving Wizards money makes your Hearthstone experience better. Even a very small indie game with this monetization model would probably just prefer to give you bonus packs whenever you refer a friend or if you sign up during a promo period.
It's maybe possibly a nice idea to have some kind of artifact of achievement in a game that lives beyond that game, but it's not an idea that NFTs seem to really help with or encourage.
This is a good point, thanks for the correction. It's not even that Ubisoft could theoretically put the same restrictions on a public chain, they are already actively putting the restrictions on a public chain; just on a different one from Ethereum.
The same mechanisms that blockchains use to verify ownership and to trace ownership history are the same mechanisms that Ubisoft (or any other company) can use to block NFTs or add restrictions around them. But of course, the companies don't need to be so clumsy about how they restrict the tokens, they don't need to have off-chain monitoring and coordinate to block NFTs. They can also just code this stuff directly into the smart contract. Being on a public chain offers no guarantee that individual smart contracts will be decentralized.
Public chains like Ethereum/Tezos that implement smart contracts also inherently give companies tools to use those smart contracts as DRM and centralization mechanisms. In a weird way, the only thing that's decentralized about Ubisoft's NFT system is the enforcement of their DRM and the liability when a token gets stolen, lost, or hacked.
That cant be right, well Ubisoft could still fuck this up. I can sell my NFTs on marketplaces completely independent of ubisoft. Sure they could invalidate, not honor the NFTs, but i wouldnt expect them to do so unless criminal activity like money laundering is involved.