beincrypto.com
One of the world’s largest gaming companies has just entered the non-fungible token (NFT) space in a big way with the announcement of Ubisoft Quartz. It will use the Tezos blockchain which has caused a massive spike in XTZ prices.
Tezos’ native token XTZ has surged around 40% over the past 12 hours on the news that it has been selected by gaming titan Ubisoft.
XTZ is currently trading at around $5.45 after hitting an intraday high of $5.85. According to CoinGecko, XTZ is up around 11% over the past fortnight where most of the rest of the market has declined.
XTZ hit an all-time high of $9.12 on Oct 4 as reported by BeInCrypto.
Ubisoft to launch in-game NFTs
On Dec 7, gaming giant Ubisoft announced a new platform to bring NFTs to its in-game items. Starting this week, Ubisoft Quartz will enable players to acquire “Digits.” These are the first NFTs to be made available in a triple-A game.
An AAA game is one classified by the video game industry as one produced and distributed by a major publisher and they don’t get much bigger than Ubisoft.
The beta will launch with Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Breakpoint on Ubisoft Connect for Windows PC on Dec 9. The Digits will be collectible in-game vehicles, weapons, and pieces of equipment. The Ubisoft Quartz experiment will offer three drops of free Digits on Dec. 9, 12, and 15, to reward the early adopters.
Energy Efficient NFTs on Tezos
Digits will run on energy-efficient technology according to the announcement. Ubisoft has selected the Tezos network for the properties of its proof-of-stake consensus which is more energy-efficient than mining.
The first batch of Digits will launch with limited editions with a fixed number of unique in-game items. They can be purchased with cryptocurrency, but are only available in the U.S., Canada, Spain, France, Germany, Italy, Belgium, Australia, and Brazil at the moment.
Vice President of Ubisoft’s Strategic Innovation Lab, Nicolas Pouard, commented:
Ubisoft Quartz is the first building block in our ambitious vision for developing a true metaverse. And it can’t come to life without overcoming blockchain’s early-form limitations for gaming, including scalability and energy consumption.
Didier Genevois, Blockchain Technical Director at Ubisoft, commented on the choice of Tezos. He stated that “Energy efficiency is a key requirement to propel blockchain technology into a future where it can be widely used by millions of players.” Tezos is an industry leader in “clean” NFTs with a low carbon footprint.
The world’s largest PC gaming marketplace, Steam, recently banned NFT and blockchain games from its store while Epic Games welcomed them.