When Ubisoft announced its plans to use NFTs to its games, the controversy surrounding the practice was pretty good underway. This allowed the company to preemptively take action on the players’ concerns, particularly in the context of the environmental damage caused by mining Bitcoin and the transfer of cryptocurrency NFTs to the blockchain. Because of that, Ubisoft told us that it won’t use the energy-hungry Ethereum, and instead would prefer to use the more efficient and eco-friendly blockchain of Tezos.
Nevertheless, this promise didn’t come to the end. Frontier, Ubisoft’s NFT partner, has already started selling tokens with OpenSea and Ethereum. The tokens are on sale now, and even though they aren’t part of Ubisoft Quartz, they come from a company that publicly uses the Ubisoft brand, sharing prominent a wide social media experience.
Related: If only there was a way for Game Companies to Know NFTs Were Bad Before The Backlash?
After speaking with Axios, Ubisoft briefly outlined the situation. It is our role, as a key investor, to educate them on most sustainable, efficient technology choices. This seems to be an attempt to dissociate itself from the initial NFT sale, stating it’s just playing an advisory role.
There isn’t any indication that Frontier is planning on changing the manner of its NFT business, despite its apparent guidance from Ubisoft. It seems that it’ll continue using the same blockchain that a gaming company recently criticized for its energy consumption.
This isn’t the only problem with the sale of the stock. OpenSea, the platform itself’s biggest controversies, recently started to run out of its own controversies, as bot accounts have been known to steal and sell art. As we have recently reported, artists complain they can’t contact OpenSea because they stole their work. In addition to that, a bot account was caught in the scam stealing from YouTubers, to try and sell their entire YouTube channels as NFTs without their permission. After our report, OpenSea removed this account.
