NFTs – or Non-fungible tokens – are unpopular, unnecessary, bad for the environment, and pretty goddamn ugly. On top of all of that, they're usually associated with art theft and scams. With that in mind, it makes perfect sense that the gaming industry would want to jump on the bandwagon.
Ubisoft is the first of the bunch to actually plan to put these gross little polluters in a game, announcing the exact same cosmetics that are already available will now come with unique serial numbers, in case you want some clout among Twitter weirdos. This went down like a cold cup of sick, and it seems like the gaming giant is feeling suitably embarrassed – delisting the video on YouTube as it hits 16,000 dislikes.
I'll pop the video below for anyone who missed the unpopular news. As you can see, the digital items, first planned to appear in Ghost Recon Breakpoint, are the exact same cosmetics we've been sold for years now. But now, you have the added bonus of them requiring the same power of a small village to generate, just to prove that they're "yours". Oh, and you can resell them in-game from the looks of it, so you can join in on the fun that comes with ripping off the playerbase.
Of course, YouTube recently rolled out an update to hide dislike counts from users. However, they're still visible to the publisher, so Ubisoft would have been well aware of how it all went down. Anyone who's curious to see what the response is like just has to download the Return YouTube Dislike Chrome extension. At the time of writing, it's on 839 likes and 16,000 dislikes.
It's not known if this delisting means that Ubisoft is walking back on plans to implement NFTs into Ghost Recon Breakpoint. It would free up the company's time to deal with the much more pressing issue of abuse and workers rights concerns within the workplace, so here's hoping.
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