Ubisoft has announced a new partnership with doublejump.tokyo for its upcoming NFT RPG, Champions Tactics: Grimoria Chronicles, doubling down with implementing NFTs in gaming, despite NFTs being an obvious market failure. This marks a continuation of its 'Quartz' NFT initiative established in 2021.
The new development from Ubisoft isn't too surprising. Back in November 2023, Ubisoft partnered with Immutable, another NFT-focused gaming company with a lineup of three existing NFT games. Since those games are all built around NFT ownership, it stands to reason that Ubisoft's planned games are Immutable and now Doublejump. Tokyo will also be centralized around NFT ownership.
This leaves Ubisoft's own NFT initiative, dubbed Quartz when it was announced in December 2021, in a strange place. Ubisoft claimed that Quartz remained active as underlying infrastructure at the time, but these partnerships would lead one to believe Ubisoft is instead leaning on Web3 partners for these needs.
At least, it would seem that Champions Tactics will be built upon doublejump.tokyo's backend rather than Ubisoft's.
Champions Tactics certainly...looks like a video game. If you've played any Free To Play card game for mobile devices or PC in the past five years, you've basically already played this.
The provided gameplay trailer gives no information whatsoever on how NFTs are implemented within Champions Tactics, though presumably, Ubisoft's reported partnership with "double jump. Tokyo" will allow them to properly implement the blockchain in its most wasteful form into an RPG. Maybe the advertised "thousands of unique heroes" will correspond to NFTs.
In any case, tracing this story back to a June 3 doublejump.tokyo post reveals a bit more information, as well as a few official website, trailer, and Discord links. The most pertinent piece of information is that Champions Tactics will be using the "HOME Verse" blockchain, which is run by doublejump.tokyo, and certified by Oasys. Doublejump.tokyo is also partnered with the likes of Square, Bandai Namco, and Sega for their NFT gaming projects, none of which have experienced success.
