Assassin’s Creed Publisher Makes Next Generation NFT Games

The blockchain gaming world is largely populated by startups built specifically to pave the way for the emerging crypto-game industry, whether it’s unchanged with the warrior Gods Unchained, Sorare with its popular fantasy football platform, or Sky Mavis behind the Pokémon inspired Axie Infinity.

However, there is one very big exception: Ubisoft, one of the largest traditional game publishers in the world, and the big brand behind mega-franchises like Assassin’s Creed, Far Cry, Just Dance, and various shooters from Tom Clancy. The gaming giant, which has dozens of international studios, first showed its interest in blockchain technology by unveiling a proof-of-concept prototype called HashCraft, a crypto-applied reef on Minecraft, in 2019.

Ubisoft has since continued in space by working closely with crypto games and releasing their own small-scale experiments. The ambitious blockchain ambitions come from its Strategic Innovation Lab, led by Nicolas Pouard, Blockchain Initiative Director. “It’s a brainstorm and a ‘do’ tank, as we like to put it,” Pouard said. Decipher during a recent telephone interview. “Our mission is to anticipate the future and help Ubisoft prepare for it.”

Until recently, Ubisoft’s movements in space have erred more on the ‘think’ than ‘do’ side, providing support primarily to blockchain game developers and other crypto projects. But with the recent release of One Shot League, a free fantasy football game created in collaboration with Sorare, we are starting to put the business into action with more of these ambitions. Given Ubisoft’s position in the gaming industry, it could be a leading force in the acceptance of blockchain.

Take their lap

On the one hand, One Shot League looks like an attempt to create an accessible driveway to Sorare and on the idea of ​​cryptogames as a whole. The free-to-play game, which is in the middle of the first beta season of five weeks, requires a Sorare account. However, it does not force players to buy cards or deal with cryptocurrencies. In the last few weeks of the current Belgian Jupiler Pro League season, the game offers free digital cards for users to arrange in fantasy setups to earn the most points on the leaderboard.

However, there are benefits to using purchased Sorare cards in the form of performance enhancements. For existing Sorare players, this is another way to make the most of their investments. More importantly, for newcomers, One Shot League can be a bridge in crypto games – with the allure of added benefits and ongoing participation that entices them into the true Sorare experience.

While it’s officially a collaboration between Ubisoft and Sorare, the Ubisoft Strategic Lab is actually the developer behind One Shot League. It is not primarily described as a Sorare product, but rather as a separate experience that makes use of Sorare’s assets. According to Pouard, it was one of the big lures on their part: the prospect of interoperability between games that can seamlessly share the same crypto-assets.

This is one of the big key hooks that blockchain games offer over traditional gaming experiences. The Crypto games company Enjin, for example, has made the interchangeable Ethereum ‘multiverse’ assets a major pillar of its development platform, and has even developed a server plugin for Minecraft that allows users to bring cryptoassets into play. Pouard pointed to a collaboration between CryptoKitties and Good intact in 2019, and said the idea is something they want to explore further with One Shot League.

‘Since then, we have not really seen experiments that offer a real chance to build a real by-product around blockchain assets built by another company. This is what we wanted to investigate: how we can change the behavior of the players with the help of these assets, and how it can change the value of these assets, ”he said. ‘How do you expand the ecosystem of a game and start it with the assets themselves? This was the occasion. ”

One Shot League is holding another short beta season to cover the playoffs of Jupiler Pro League, and then the staff will take the summer to evaluate the data and decide if they want to continue with the game. It has the potential to broaden exposure NFT’s and their applications in games even further than the recent NFT boom, but at the moment there is no promise that the game will continue over the first beta seasons.

“One Shot League is a way for us to help mainstream players better understand what NFTs are, and how you can enter this vast field of opportunity that is NFTs,” Pouard said. “To be honest, we’ll see if it works or not.”

Stay busy in the lab

Ubisoft and Sorare have been linked for some time by the publisher Entrepreneurs Lab’s accelerator program, which invites startups for guidance and collaboration. The program has worked with several crypto-startup reports over several seasons, including the teams behind games like Nine Chronicles, Splinterlands and Axie Infinity.

Sorare participated in the fourth season of the program in October 2019 and shortly thereafter became one of the most prominent crypto games. The fantasy platform has more than 125 licensed teams from around the world, including Juventus FC, Real Madrid and all the Major League Soccer (MLS) teams, and the trading volume has increased tremendously over the course of 2020. Its licensed player card also benefited from the NFT boom, and just before the announcement of One Shot League, Sorare announced a $ 50 million Series A funding round to take part in the $ 4 million seed round set in July 2020 was collected.

‘It’s never taken for granted that a business will succeed, but here they actually had all the ingredients. A soccer or soccer card game is one of the simplest ways to gather all the value that an NFT can hold, ‘Pouard said. ‘Of course you have the players’ names. You have the rarest. And you have the fantasy yourself as a football or soccer lover. You need this kind of substrate to grow your imagination and build your own fantasy. There were many good ingredients. The team is something that impressed a lot of people within Ubisoft when we worked with them in the startup program … and they have a good sense of timing. “

With the Entrepreneurs Lab program, Ubisoft can be exposed to a variety of crypto-startup programs that can potentially be collaborators, and the publisher’s abundant resources and extensive knowledge are certainly valuable to startups that want to reach many players.

Ubisoft’s first published crypto game, Rabbids Token, came from a collaboration with another Entrepreneurs Lab alum, the South African startup Wildcards. The game, launched in June 2020, was based on the Ethereum network blockchain CryptoKitties collectibles by letting people buy ERC-721 NFTs, inspired by the popular Rayman Raving Rabbids franchise. However, there is a twist: the owner has to pay a recurring tax in ETH to hold the NFT, otherwise it can be snatched up by someone else without you making money in the process.

It may seem like a lot of punishment, but here’s the benefit: all the money goes to charity UNICEF, and if you own the NFT, you get ‘proof of plausible ownership’ to add to your collection. According to the website, UNICEF has so far raised 38.2 ETH (more than $ 68,000). This is a strange starting point for any gaming experience, but especially one with the characters and the weighty brand of Ubisoft.

“We were finishing a project and wanted to do something crazy, something different, and we really wanted to create our own NFTs and see how far we could go in the programmable aspect of things,” Pouard explained. ‘We saw in the sign the opportunity to build a continuous donation, so it was a side project at first – and the idea was not really to build a real collectible game, but to see how far we could go. is about a new version of ERC-721. ”

The prospect of crypto games

Along with the release of One Shot League and Rabbids Token, Ubisoft has also formalized its relationships with some of the above crypto game developers. The publisher validates transactions for Axie Infinity, as well as the EOS-based game store Ultra, and joins startup accelerator Hashed over an advisory partnership for Nine Chronicles. Ubisoft also gives advice on Flow, the blockchain behind the upcoming NBA Top Shot.

When asked about some of the current crypto games that excite him personally, Pouard pointed to the play-to-earn model from Axie Infinity that has yielded dazzling NFT sales so far, as well as the accumulating experience of Top Shot, and the potential Roblox- such a game-as-a-platform appeal of the creation game The Sandbox. “Since we’re still at the beginning of this whole blockchain game thing,” he explained, “every project tries to pave the way for their vision of what blockchain games can be.”

Pouard believes the current NFT explosion could be very beneficial in introducing crypto games into the mainstream, but is concerned that rising item costs will affect the ability of such games to attract users.

‘[The NFT boom] help pay attention to blockchain games. My fear is that all the excitement might lead to very high values, and maybe that’s not a good thing for blockchain games, ‘he said. ‘It’s very difficult to predict the future, but for now we can see that it helps good teams to make money and build their games, so it’s great. It draws the attention of the mainstream, so it is useful. But we have to be very careful on the monetization side. So we wanted to build a free game with One Shot League. ”

“[The NFT boom] help pay attention to blockchain games. ‘

Nicolas Pouard

What are the next moves of Ubisoft in the blockchain space? Unfortunately, there are no current plans to release HashCraft to the public. It was no longer actively developed, yet its creation helped stimulate Ubisoft’s blockchain ambitions and even influence other creators in space, Pouard said.

‘We were very happy to see how inspiring it was for many people. For example, we discussed a lot with The Sandbox. “They shared it with them, it helped them shape what The Sandbox could become, especially in the voxel part,” he said. “It was proof of concept for us, a great prototype, and it was also very inspiring in Ubisoft.”

But the Ubisoft stable contains many distinctive and very popular properties, such as the aforementioned Just Dance and Assassin’s Creed. Just like Rabbids Token, a classic franchise has created something new and compelling with a crypto twist, Pouard admits they are looking at other potential franchise expansions.

“Yes of course. It’s our job at the Strategic Innovation Lab to explore the future of the blockchain field and NFTs, so of course we continue to explore the field,” he said when asked about possible crypto-game projects. based on existing Ubisoft franchises. “I can say ‘Yes.’ It’s not a promise, but it’s our job to explore the new kind of opportunities and see how they will change the industry.”