The game became popular before NFT was released. What did Ubisoft do right?

Source: Metaverse Daily Explosion

In the cold winter, the Web3 circle suddenly sounded the call for "Summer of Games". One of the signs of recovery is Ubisoft, a traditional 3A game manufacturer. A Web3 game is being made, and the NFT in the game is available first.

On December 19, the NFT series The Warlords of Champions Tactics (hereinafter referred to as "The Warlords") of the game "Champions Tactics: Grimoria Chronicles" was launched as soon as the public minting was completed. Within a few hours Sales exceeded $2 million.

Data from the NFT trading market Opensea shows that the floor price of The Warlords NFT is now quoted at 0.18 ETH (equivalent to about 2,800 yuan). Currently, only 8% of the 9,999 NFTs are on sale, and the number flowing into the secondary market is not large. This indicates that the majority of addresses minting this NFT are holding it, rather than selling it.

The Champions Tactics game has not yet been officially launched, and potential enthusiasm is lurking. The main reason is the official information released. The gameplay and production of this game tend to be traditional chain games, and it also cooperates with the Web3 Game Guild  Yield Guild Games has reached a cooperation. This guild is also a famous "gold farming commune" in the chain gaming circle.

This is a strong signal that this game not only provides entertainment value to users, but may also have economic value, which is the "Earn" in Play To Earn.

01 Only 8% of the 9,999 minted NFTs have flowed to the market

The chain game "Champions Tactics: Grimoria Chronicles" (translation) produced by Ubisoft itself "Champions Tactics: Grimoria Chronicles") was exposed in July this year. At that time, the company released a trailer for the game and high-profile positioned it as a Web3 game.

On December 18, the game "Champions Tactics: Grimoria Chronicles" (hereinafter referred to as "Champions Tactics") NFT series "The Warlords" came first with a round of priority list casting, and more people who were not qualified waited for the next day.

On December 19, The Warlords opened to public casting, 20 minutes It was all finished. Not long after, this series of NFTs appeared on the trading market Opensea, generating sales of US$2 million within a few hours, and quickly topped the market's "24-hour hot list".

The Warlords sales are booming

Official information shows that a total of 9999 Warlords NFTs have been issued. The issuance chain of this series of NFTs is Ethereum, but the game "Champions Tactics" itself is deployed on an Ethereum network compatible On the Oasys blockchain, 8,000 NFTs are available for users to mint, which only requires Ethereum fees (ETH) to mint. Another 1,000 NFTs are provided to the Oasys community, and 999 NFTs are retained by Ubisoft. , for future marketing.

In other words, only 20% of NFTs are retained in the hands of groups with "team" attributes, and more NFTs are oriented to the mass market.

NFT II On the first-class market Opensea, the floor price of this pixel-style NFT is currently quoted at 0.18 ETH. Only 8% of the total issued NFT is on sale. There are almost only 800 Warlords NFTs listed for sale in the market by minters. Most minters seem to want to keep them. Save this NFT.

In addition to the possibility of "holding the currency and waiting for it to rise", this user intention is that some people are waiting to use it, and they cannot be ruled out as game users.

Because according to the official statement, holding  Warlords NFT  is equivalent to getting a ticket to visit the game's "Foundry", and you can cast 5 "Champions Tactics" game for free at a later time. role; in addition, these "Creation NFTs" also have additional rights such as "airdrop" and "minting whitelist".

Let’s take a look at how the game is played.

The official positioning of "Champions Tactics" is a PVP tactical role-playing game, which should be familiar to users who have played "Honor of Kings". The game requires players to have combat strategies and calls on the character's "champion" for team battles. From "Warrior" to "Wizard", each champion has its own ability points, and players who control these characters can use tactics and terrain to achieve victory.

The game characters are carried by NFT

The developer of "Champions Tactics" promises to provide a rich narrative experience, starting from the second half of the game name "Grimoria Chronicles"  Looking at "Grimoria Chronicles", this game will give a grand story, and NFT will be the character carrier in the game.

There are NFTs issued on the open public chain Ethereum, and there are also games deployed on the Oasys blockchain. Ubisoft’s “championship” can be called a true full-chain game, and it has With the French gaming giant’s AAA production capability endorsement, it’s no surprise that the market is so popular.

In fact, before "Champions Tactics", Ubisoft had been eyeing Web3 games for a long time, but it was not very successful. ‍

02 Not marked as 3A but injecting "gold-making" expectations

2021 is the "end year" for Ubisoft to enter Web3, and the method at that time was just Testing the water + investment, including building Ubisoft Quartz, a platform that can support NFT, and also launching "playable NFT" to PC players on this platform that can be used in the 3A game "Ghost Recon: Breakpoint"; in addition, Ubisoft also invested US$65 million in the blockchain game company Animoca Brands that year.

The return on investment is unknown, but the free NFTs awarded to users in "Breakpoint" did not impress PC players, and even attracted criticism from some users who said "I don't know what these NFTs are for." In April 2022, the follow-up development of "Breakpoint" was stopped, and NFT, which was not very popular, also died.

But Ubisoft does not intend to give up on the Web3 game market.

Baptiste Chardon, the company’s blockchain product director, believed at the time that in the long run, the integration of games and blockchain contained new opportunities, “such as interoperability between games... We believe that blockchain is a way for creators to put the value they create back into the hands of players through games."

Ubisoft has always been known for its narrative and production capabilities in game masterpieces. Since it started to test the waters of Web3 games, blockchain game players have been looking forward to this big manufacturer to produce a big game that has both AAA quality and blockchain game characteristics. In short, it has good graphics, strong playability and good performance. A "gold-making" chain game.

But this requirement is not easy to achieve, because the current blockchain network is far less smooth than the bottom layer of the traditional Internet, and cannot support 3A games that "make miracles with great effort".

The AAA large-scale production concept proposed by Japanese game manufacturers uses money to create visual impact and gaming experience, but whether it can recover the cost depends on the market response. In recent years, Ubisoft has not been able to replicate the popularity of the 3A masterpiece "Assassin's Creed", and its market value has continued to shrink. At one point, it even had to rely on classic IP to "fried rice".

In this context, the Web3 game that Ubisoft has been waiting for finally saw the light of day in the NFT sales of "Champions Tactics". If you notice, Champions Tactics is not labeled "AAA" either. Ubisoft, which has been deeply involved in Web3 games for two years, has finally figured out this market. Whether it is NFT in the game or the chain required by the game, it cannot be built on its own platform, but needs to rely on a wider open area. Blockchain is the huge pool of traffic and funds.

This is also the biggest difference between "Champions Tactics" and "Breaking Point" launched two years ago. The latter is that the game is online, the NFT is on the chain, and the result of "two skins" is two parties Many users don’t buy it, PC players can’t understand NFT, and NFT players have no money to make in the game.

It can be seen that Ubisoft also wants to understand that if it is only obsessed with designing Web3 games to be "as good" as traditional games, then it will lose the "watermelon and sesame seeds" and take advantage of the weaknesses of the blockchain and The strengths of traditional games are compared.

As for the Web3 game circle, although developers are indeed holding back "big production", judging from the market response, 3A-level exquisite graphics are not an absolute "magic pill" to stimulate players' nerves. The most popular Web3 game "BigTime" this year is indeed a step up from other chain games in terms of graphics and sound effects, and the token BIGTIME, which has increased by 265% in a week, is the fuse that directly ignites market enthusiasm.

Excellent production is at best the icing on the cake for Web3 chain games, but more importantly, the design of the in-game economic system can attract capital inflows. "BigTime" has attracted more than 20 game guilds to compete, and the funds entered into the game have exceeded 21 million US dollars.

The most prominent attribute of Web3 games is value circulation, which is why it is called Play To Earn. Players play games on the chain because the time spent in the game can be generated through various NFT and token monetization.

Warlords NFT has opened the prelude to character collection, and "Champions Tactics" has also attracted game guilds. The famous chain game guild Yield Guild Games  (YGG) has cooperated with it. The guild has been on the phenomenon level. The Web3 game "Axie Infinity" set a record of over 100 million US dollars in revenue in a single month.

By cooperating with organizations like YGG, "Champions Tactics" can undoubtedly accelerate the opening of the Web3 player market.

As for how quickly it can gain a foothold, it still depends on when the game will be officially launched. A user on Reddit believes that only when this game can provide a new gaming experience and attract a large number of attention and active players can it become an important milestone in the development of Web3 games.