Remember NFTs? Before generative AI came along to ruin the internet, steal the work of real artists, and hold down the gas pedal on the climate crisis, we had non-fungible tokens to do basically the same thing. Fortunately, everyone except a dwindling group of crypto fanatics has left the useless technolog entirely behind — at least it seemed that way, until Ubisoft inexplicably released an NFT game just last week.
If you’re lucky enough to have forgotten, NFTs are basically horrible little pictures you can pay a lot of money for with the hope that someone else will pay you more for them at a later date. Each NFT is tracked on the blockchain, which means it’s specifically tied to its owner through an online account, which in turn means functionally nothing. Still, NFTs were all the rage a few years ago among people who don’t know anything about video games and who had somehow convinced themselves that NFTs would allow them — among other things — to move custom items between totally unrelated games or somehow become rich by amassing a hoard of ugly jpegs.
Apparently some of those true believers are still holding out hope for their deeply unappealing vision of the future, and Ubisoft is here to cater to them. Champions Tactics: Grimoria Chronicles is now available as a free download on PC, and by no means should you even consider downloading it. From the looks of it, Champions Tactics is a tactical RPG every bit as generic as its name, with the twist that it’s player-versus-player only, and you need to pay real money (or at least, fake money that you’ve paid real money for) to purchase new troops to send into battle.
As unremarkable as Champions Tactics looks, it’s still a fascinating oddity for a couple of reasons. The game’s launch trailer originally included an extremely rare Adults Only rating from the ESRB, but as IGN reports, it was never submitted to the ratings board at all. That means the game can’t be sold on consoles or many retailers, meaning it’s only available from Ubisoft’s website. If you do decide to give the game a shot (again, don’t), you can expect to shell out anywhere from under $10 to over $50,000 to purchase one of its digital dudes for your collection. Assuming anyone ends up playing the damn thing, more powerful units will end up carrying a higher price tag, making it pay to win in the most literal sense.
But the most interesting thing about Champions Tactics is that it exists at all. Ubisoft first announced its venture into NFT games in 2021, meaning the company has had three years to reconsider and pivot to something more reasonable, which includes basically anything else it could have done with its development budget. Arriving on the scene now puts Ubisoft behind the likes of GameStop, which closed its NFT marketplace earlier this year, and… Ubisoft, whose first attempt to sell in-game NFTs in Ghost Recon: Breakpoint paid off to the tune of a reported $400 in sales. Yes, that number has the right amount of zeros in it.
I’m not going to pretend I can see the future and tell you Champions Tactics will meet a similar fate. After all, Square Enix’s own awful-looking NFT game is still kicking despite the fact that no one outside of dedicated crypto speculators seems to even be aware of it. It’s no real surprise that Ubisoft is grasping at whatever straws it can find to stay afloat, after its most recent financial report showed a massive 22% drop in total sales for the last quarter, but I can’t help but think that directly trying to squeeze crypto out of players with more money than sense is the wisest way to go about that.
