In a move that seems to reflect an ever-greedier gaming industry insistent on selling us things no one asked for, Ubisoft has finally stealth-launched its first-ever PvP blockchain RPG title, Champions Tactics: Grimoria Chronicles — complete with playable-characters-as-NFTs, purchasable through in-game currency or cryptocurrency, as spotted by IGN.
What's notable here is the pricing scheme: the most expensive character at launch is Inquisitor Swift Zealot, which will cost a whopping $63,372.19 USD, converted from crypto. Other Champions (a total of 2732) are also available, with just one other costing tens of thousands ($25.1K for Glowing Beast) and the rest costing $5,000 or less. You can confirm these prices and more on the game's official Marketplace page.
Are you willing to spend (literal) thousands of dollars to flex in a video game? Ubisoft seems intent on finding out — though, to its credit, it's not like any of these multi-thousand-dollar NFTs have production costs even remotely close to what the end users are being expected to pay. The Free-To-Play prospect seems particularly bleak, considering the gameplay stat boosts that premium players and their premium characters will be enjoying, in this competitive PvP-only game.
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That said, people do spend thousands of dollars on in-game items in other Free-To-Play games, such as Counter-Strike 2 — though, unlike "Champions Tactics", Counter-Strike 2 does not involve pay-to-win mechanics and wisely restricts these financial aspects to cosmetics. If "virtual items that cost real money" sound like NFTs to you, you aren't incorrect — it's just that AAA and AA games have been doing this without the blockchain for over a decade.
A similar scheme with NFTs may have been more palatable to the larger gaming audience, but NFTs with overinflated pricing epitomizing the concept of "pay to win" is unlikely to bring over players from games such as Marvel Snap or Hearthstone, which offer similar F2P PvP RPG gameplay without having the audacity price playable characters at $63K.
Maybe Ubisoft realizes this — it was a quiet launch, after all — and is simply hoping that a few true NFT believers will participate anyway. It most likely started development before the 95% loss of NFT market value last year, but still declared this game as part of its NFT initiative back in July.
Aside from this game, a number of other blockchain/web3 games built around NFTs do exist, and they do have a decent amount of variety in genre. A live tally of the top 50 earners is even kept at PlayToEarn.com. The general business model is similar, however, and unless you're a true NFT devotee there's not much reason to engage with these titles compared to traditional F2P games.
While those F2P games have business models that often resemble gambling (including Counter-Strike 2, where you buy keys to open crates that give items of highly variable monetary value — usually none, but sometimes thousands), they do at least have a more sizeable audience and often more room for profit.
