In a move that seems to reflect an increasingly greedy gaming industry that insists on selling us things no one asked for, Ubisoft has finally released its first-ever PvP blockchain RPG title in stealth, Hero Tactics: The Grimoria Chronicles – complete with playable characters as NFTs that can be purchased with in-game currency or cryptocurrency, he noted IGN.
The pricing pattern here is noteworthy: the most costly character at launch is the Inquisitor Swift Zealot, which will cost a whopping $63,372.19 in cryptocurrency terms. There are other Champions available as well (2,732 in total), with only one costing tens of thousands ($25.1k for Glowing Beast) and the rest costing $5,000 or less. You can check these and other prices on the game’s official website Market side.
Are you willing to spend (literally) thousands of dollars on a video game? Ubisoft seems intent on finding out — though admittedly the costs of producing any of these multi-thousand-dollar NFTs are nowhere near what end users are expected to pay. The outlook for Free-To-Play seems particularly bleak given the augment in gameplay stats that premium players and their premium characters will enjoy in this competitive PvP-only game.
That said, people do indeed spend thousands of dollars on items in other Free-To-Play games like Counter-Strike 2 – although unlike “Tactics of champions“, Counter-Strike 2 it doesn’t involve pay-to-win mechanics and wisely limits these financial aspects to cosmetics. If “virtual items that cost real money” sounds like NFTs to you, you’re not wrong – it’s just that AAA and AA games have been doing it without a blockchain for over a decade.
A similar scheme with NFTs may have been more acceptable to a broader gaming audience, but NFT games with inflated prices embodying the “pay to win” concept are unlikely to attract players of games like MarvelSnap Or Hearthstonewhich offer similar F2P PvP RPG gameplay without the need for playable characters at a price of 63k. dollars.
Perhaps Ubisoft is aware of this – it was a still launch, after all – and is just hoping that a few true NFT supporters will participate after all. Most likely, development began before NFTs lost 95% of their market value last year, but they still considered the game as part of their NFT initiative in July.
Apart from this game, there are many other blockchain/web3 games built around NFTs and they have a decent variety of genres. There is even a live ranking of the 50 highest-paid people PlayToEarn.com. The overall business model is similar, however, and unless you’re a true NFT aficionado, there’s little reason to get involved with these titles compared to conventional F2P games.
While these F2P games have business models that often resemble gambling (incl Counter-Strike 2where you buy keys to open cases that give you items with a highly variable monetary value – usually none, but sometimes thousands), at least they have a larger audience and often more room for profit.
