Ubisoft’s grand NFT experiment is ending exactly where most people expected it to: with the servers being switched off.
The publisher has announced that Champions Tactics: Grimoria Chronicles will shut down on October 30, bringing the curtain down on a game that launched less than two years ago. In-app purchases have already been disabled, although the game will remain playable until the servers disappear into the great digital void.
And I wouldn’t normally cover something like this, but it’s a slow news day.
“After careful consideration, we have made the decision to sunset the game,” Ubisoft told players. The company thanked the remaining community for its support and said more details and reminders would be shared before the closure.
Champions Tactics launched in October 2024 as what Ubisoft described as a “Web3 competitive turn-based RPG.” Players assembled teams of three fantasy characters and sent them into tactical battles, which sounds perfectly normal until you reach the part where those characters were NFTs.
The champions could be bought, forged and traded through a marketplace using regular money or cryptocurrency. Shortly after launch, some were reportedly listed for more than $63,000, because apparently the natural next step after buying horse armour was remortgaging your house for a pretend wizard.
Ubisoft had already begun dismantling the entire point of the game in May. Wallet functionality was frozen, its marketplace and Forge were closed, and players’ blockchain-linked champions were copied into the game as ordinary digital items. VIP perks were preserved, but the supposedly unique assets had effectively become normal videogame characters stored inside a normal videogame.
Champions Tactics therefore became a conventional game, which raised the fairly obvious question of why any of this needed a blockchain in the first place. The answer, it seems, was that it didn’t.
Removing the NFT systems was not enough to save Champions Tactics. Just a few months later, Ubisoft has decided to shut the whole thing down instead. The company has not publicly revealed how many people were still playing or exactly why it made the decision, but live-service games generally do not get “sunset” because they are overflowing with players and money.
A quick look on SteamDB shows that while the game did get a massive (that’s sarcasm) 1,443 concurrent players on release date, those numbers fell fast. Over the last year, the highest concurrent players was just 37 people. And since mid-April, it hasn’t broken 10.
This was not Ubisoft’s first awkward encounter with blockchain technology. The publisher previously attempted to introduce NFTs, which it called “Digits,” into Ghost Recon Breakpoint through its Ubisoft Quartz platform. The response was overwhelmingly negative, but Ubisoft remained convinced that players simply had not yet understood their genius.
