Ubisoft has said that it is working on games that use Web3 technology and those games will likely launch this year.
This category of game falls into the responsibility of Nicolas Pouard, vice president of the Ubisoft Strategic Innovation Lab and head of blockchain initiatives at Ubisoft Entrepreneurs Lab.
Pouard is a pioneer at Ubisoft when it comes to blockchain games, and he talked a lot about Ubisoft’s Quartz blockchain gaming initiative with Ghost Recon: Breakpoint triple-A game back in 2021. That became the subject of a fan uproar over blockchain games at triple-A game companies and it caused big companies to tread much more carefully with hardcore gamers on Web3.
Since that time, Pouard said that the company has learned to work closely with a community of interested gamers who are familiar with Web3. He also told me in an interview that the early technology wasn’t mature enough. Now the tech has been improved and Ubisoft will offer very specific Web3 experiences in upcoming games, rather than just a tech layer for existing games, he said.
While blockchain gaming is still looking to find a mass audience, Ubisoft has since moved on to various new blockchain gaming partnerships and startup relationships. It has expanded its blockchain gaming team and it is licensing its intellectual property to Web3 gaming companies including VeVe and Cross the Ages (a Watch Dogs card deck partnership). And it is working with blockchains Aleph, Flow and XPLA — as well as Sequence. Ubisoft is working on Champions Tactics with Oasys. By the end of the year, two Ubisoft Web3 games will likely be available to the public, Pouard said.
I caught up with Pouard at the recent Game Developers Conference in San Francisco. Here’s an edited transcript of our interview.
GamesBeat: What have you been up to?
Nicolas Pouard: Since Quartz, two years ago–that was a very good learning experience for us. It’s helped us go to the next steps. First, we’ve been digging more into the tech. We’ve worked a lot with partners, specifically on infrastructure. We’re working with chains like XPLA, which you might know, and Flow. Aleph, I don’t know if you know Aleph. It’s a decentralized data storage solution. They have their own network as well. It was very important for us to continue exploring this infrastructure layer to be more involved in the ecosystem itself, to create new partnerships, and to be aware of new developers chain-wise. There’s still a lot of research going on.
I was leading the blockchain team when we worked on the Quartz project. We were a very small team. Since then we’ve expanded a bit to work more deeply with the tech, but also to develop licensing partnerships. We’re still working with different Web3 projects and we’re licensing them our IP. The latest example is Cross the Ages. We have a partnership around Watch Dogs. They’ve developed a deck of cards. We’ve worked with VeVe and others. It’s a way for us to explore another aspect of what we’re doing.
GamesBeat: Are any of those live to consumers now?
Pouard: Yes, exactly. That’s the purpose for us, to be able to identify an audience for Ubisoft in Web3. We’re doing these partnerships with two objectives. The first is to develop an audience, but the second is to work on interoperability, to see if NFT assets, if these collectibles–if they find an audience and they use them in different experiences. It’s still research and development. It’s difficult to find a common standard between all these experiences.
The last step is to develop games. We have two in development. One was already announced, Champions Tactics. That was a partnership with the Oasys blockchain in Japan. That’s been interesting, because Japan is a very specific market. We’re learning a lot there. They’re very dedicated to video games. It’s important for us to be in this group around Oasys, along with Square Enix, Sega, and others. It’s been quite interesting.
[Pouard said that there is at least one Web3 game being announced soon]. Our focus now is developing games, but along with the community. Thanks to the different partnerships we’ve done–we have two Discord servers with a few thousand web3 gaming enthusiasts. We’re trying to find new ways to involve them in development and fulfill one of the promises of web3, which is the governance layer. That’s been very interesting for us, and we want to make it real, make it concrete.
GamesBeat: What does your road map for 2024 look like?
Pouard: This world is much more concrete now for us compared to when we started five years ago. We have two ongoing games and others that will come after. We’ve already tested our IP. In terms of road map, we have this announcement in April. After that, we don’t have a launch date yet, but I’d say between June and September we’ll see the two games going public.
GamesBeat: How did you step back and learn from the Ghost Recon controversy? That maybe didn’t go as expected.
Pouard: We learned that first, we should involve the community from the start to see if the value proposition is good enough for them. We didn’t work enough on that part. That’s what we learned the most – how to involve the community from the first step of the project. We need to have some players almost within our development team. Thanks to the Discord, that’s something we’ve been able to tackle. Having players to talk to every time we need to. That’s very important for us. It’s part of the Web3 value proposition.
Second, the technology was not mature enough, I would say, or the ecosystem around the technology. The expectation was not there in the audience. Trying to put this kind of technology into a very well-known type of game with a lot of expectations from the core players about the game itself was not a good idea. We were coming with something on top of the experience that was good enough, perhaps, but which could have been improved. The players and the community were waiting for something that was part of the core experience of the game.
We learned that we need to offer a very specific experience around Web3 for people who want this kind of experiment. It’s still very new, very innovative. We see that it’s a new market. At the time we were thinking that it wasn’t a market per se, but more like a technology layer that we could add to existing games. Now we know that there are people who want this kind of experience, and we should work both for and with those people. That’s the main learning we picked up around that.
On Quartz we were ahead of the curve in some ways. We had the smoothest onboarding experience possible. You had to create a wallet, but it used a social login. That was three years ago. It was very new. The gas fees were very low. We took all of that into our hands, so for the players it was nothing. Everything was free. Again, I think it’s more about the experience itself. How does it improve the game I’m playing? Not just the user flow to get into the game. The ecosystem has taken care of that aspect. We’ve invested in a few companies to learn around that specific topic. For instance, we’re working quite well with Sequence. For five years they’ve been focused on user flow and how to get players into a game with just their social login. From there we’re focusing on what kind of experiences Web3 users want and how we can address those expectations.
GamesBeat: On the audience side, how have you thought about finding not only fanatical crypto people, but a broader range of fans who are open to what you’re doing? Without running into fans who just hate it, who you can’t reach.
Pouard: There are two parts to that strategy. The first is to make a good game. That’s still very difficult. That’s why we’re starting small in Web3 games. Building a triple-A game using blockchain–we see some projects like that, but it’s very, very difficult. I cannot say what will happen in the future for these kinds of projects, but for now, it’s very difficult.
On our end, we have to understand how the blockchain is modifying incentives in design. We need to start with a very simple experience, a very simple game. Not necessarily a casual game, but something we know very well how to build. You start with gameplay as a building block and you see how blockchain can change the way people interact with it. Will it change something or not? How can you put Web3 features into the core gameplay loop? Our first strategy, then, is to take a game we’ve already mastered and see how blockchain, when we start from scratch, changes or doesn’t change this experience. That might have been another issue with the Quartz project. We added something that wasn’t in the design from the beginning.
As we do that, we’re talking with our Web3 players first. We think they can be our best ambassadors. If the game is good, then people who might be more curious, they’ll come to it. But we don’t want to do a lot of traditional marketing of this kind of game. It’s very much an experiment still. If you look at the ecosystem right now, no one has found the right business model around Web3 games. We’re all exploring there. If you look at something like Roblox, perhaps the ability to trade your assets will be interesting for everyone. The question is, should that be part of every game genre? Maybe not. But we want to see if we can take this blockchain layer and make it a real part of the game, not just something on top of it.
GamesBeat: There’s a lot of talk about the regulatory framework around this. There are different platform limitations. Valve won’t let you do it. Apple will let you do it so long as there’s a Web2 experience that’s the same as the Web3 experience. Google will let you do it so long as there’s no way it can be interpreted as gambling. In the United States you have to make sure nothing is regulated as a security. You have to operate within a complicated framework. Have you decided which markets matter to you because of those restrictions?
Pouard: We’re very focused on Asia. Asia is a very interesting place right now when it comes to working on this topic. In terms of platforms, we’re PC first. That lets us avoid a lot of problems. We’re full NFT, no tokens, so that makes things easier for us as well. We’re focused on gameplay, on the gaming experience. We know that we’re able to offer a free-to-play entry into the game. We’re doing whatever it takes in terms of accessibility. The discussions with the other platforms will happen at some point, but for now we’ve made our choice. We’re passionate, we’re exploring, and we’re looking forward to better things.
GamesBeat: Within Asia are there certain countries that you feel have embraced this more strongly?
Pouard: We’re working with Oasys, so Japan is a focus for us. In Korea it’s difficult to know exactly what we can do right now, but we’re there as well. We just announced two partnerships for Korea – one with Wemix and one with XPLA. We’re looking for more insights in how we can launch our own games there. The Philippines, of course. But since we’re not play-to-earn, we’ll see how interesting it is there. And since we’re Ubisoft, we know that the western countries will always be looking at what we’re doing.
GamesBeat: The outlook has been very mixed. A lot of companies went in. Some stayed in and others pulled out. New companies are only just getting started. How does the broader outlook on web3 gaming seem to you?
Pouard: To do a parallel to something else that’s very trendy today, it’s like neural networks in AI. For 30 years–I hope this won’t take 30 years for us, but for 30 years, people like Yann LeCun at Meta were working on this. It was very difficult for him to explain what he was doing. There was no way to turn it into a proper product. But at some point, everything happened. I think this is the same, albeit with a shorter time frame, I hope. We need to keep working on this, because it’s the only way to know if the value proposition for the players is worth something or not. We haven’t had any real proof for the last five years because the games weren’t at the level users expected. We need that to happen at some point: a proper game using this technology. We have to continue.
The fact that new companies are still forming is very interesting. It may be tricky to envision what’s going to happen, but there are lots of very good teams in the gaming ecosystem. A lot of them are looking for new business models and new investment. Web3 is still a very vivid ecosystem. There’s a lot of gaming chains looking to find projects. If you go to some of the meetups, you can see that these worlds are growing closer and closer. One of the best proofs–CCP, with EVE Online, what they’ve announced, that’s one more big company that’s trying to build something. There’s a lot of opportunity to build in web3 in the coming years.
The whole game industry is trying to shorten the development phase of their games with things like early access. We need new business models to make that happen. That’s very linked. I think web3 can be a solution.