Ubisoft continues Web3 Push with Rabbids NFTs in the sandbox

Ubisoft was the first major video game publisher give out in-game NFT items with Ghost Recon Breakpoint in December 2021—and while reception was decidedly mixedhas the company continued to make moves in Web3 world. The last one? Today’s launch of Rabbids NFT avatars for Ethereum metaverse games The sandbox.

The NFT publication comes one year later Ubisoft first announced plans to bring its popular Rabbids characters – which spun out of the classic Rayman game series – to The Sandbox. Ubisoft The sale started today for users who have already been added to an approval list, while the public sale starts on Wednesday.

Ubisoft releases 2066 of the Rabbids avatars via Polygonan Ethereum scaling network, where each NFT sells for 100 SAND—about $78 worth, when this is written. The drop is themed after the Lunar New Year, given that 2023 is the Year of the Rabbit, and Rabbids will have various designs that will be unveiled to shoppers this Friday.

On February 28, The Sandbox will then launch a Rabbids game world in the current open alpha test, which houses a limited number of playable experiences. The avatars are billed as a “key to future utility” in The Sandbox, including access to potential future drops.

The sandbox earlier added Rabbids characters to its museum-like NFT Institute experience last September, and released the Rabbids-themed NFT goods and accessories. However, today’s coin marks the first time players can purchase Rabbids avatars for use in the game.

Ubisoft, the studio behind Assassin’s Creed and the Just Dance series, was one of the first major video game publishers to take notice of Web3 and start moving around NFTs. The company made a Minecraft-inspired NFT game prototype called HashCraft in 2018, but the project was eventually shelved. Still, Ubisoft expanded further into the crypto industry.

In 2020, Ubisoft released a Rabbids-themed NFT experiment benefiting the charity UNICEF, by allowing users to collect Rabbids and even steal them from other owners. The following year, Ubisoft and Web3 started fantasy sports Hurt collaborated on One Shot Leaguea Sorare spinoff that used its existing Ethereum NFT soccer player cards.

Ubisoft has also supported NFT game projects such as Axie Infinity and Nine chronicles and invested in firms such as metaverse investment company Animoca brands and game producer Horizon.

The company’s launch of Tezos-based NFTs for the PC version of Ghost Recon Breakpoint was a turning point for the company’s Web3 push, tying the assets to an existing, traditional video game that had no NFT functionality at launch. The “Quartz” NFTs, which Ubisoft tagged themallow users to collect and trade unique weapons and equipment for the team-based shooter.

The launch proved controversial among playersbut many of them have been vocally opposed to NFTs due to fraud in the crypto space, exorbitant prices for some assets, and what some see as another way for game publishers to extract money from players.

However, the Ghost Recon implementation was relatively shallow, and Ubisoft gave away the NFTs for free – but they failed to create much secondary market demand. In April 2022, Ubisoft ended its wider post-launch support for the game, but said it would use the Quartz platform for future games. It has not yet announced any additional Quartz NFT projects.

Last September, Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot said in an interview that the company was “still in research mode” with Web3 implementation, saying the gaming giant should have made it clearer to players that Quartz was an experiment and a work in progress.

Some gamers opposed to NFTs took it as a sign that Ubisoft was pulling out of the space, but the publisher has continued to make moves since.

It invested in Horizon and joined the Mythos Foundation last autumnand recently collaborated with cloud storage startup Aleph.im to develop fully decentralized smart contracts-which holds the code that drives decentralized apps (dapps) and NFT projects – on Tezos. Rabbids’ NFTs are just the latest step in Ubisoft’s continued Web3 expansion.