New Delhi, March 29 (Reprentative) Ubisoft has been very active in the NFT (non fungible token) game and has been making several investments to expand their portfolio. The gaming giant’s latest investment of an undisclosed amount has been in a mobile gaming application called Cross the Ages or popularly known as CTA. CTA is a free-to-play card collectible game set in a dystopian future based on a series of free to read novels where these digital cards also work as NFTs. Players compete in this free-to-play game to get their hands on as many NFTs as they can. Players can also print these digital cards and collect them physically. CTA announced a $12 million seed round at an undisclosed valuation on Monday. The funding will go toward a development program, talent retention and go-to-market activities. The game is slated to add metaverse components by somewhere in mid-2023, including quests based on clues in the novels. Developers, artists and gamers will also have the ability to create new cities and games.
The beta version of the CTA game will launch in late May followed by digital and physical cards in June. CTA will then debut an NFT marketplace and decentralized finance (DeFi) protocols suite, the latter of which will give users access to farming, pooling and bonding for optimized trading options within the game’s infrastructure. Cross the Ages’ co-founders include chairman and serial crypto entrepreneur Christophe de Courson, as well as CEO Sami Chlagou, who has developed games like Guns of Mercy and Finding Teddy for console and mobile platforms and PC. Cross the Ages is described as a “mobile-first” experience, optimized for smartphones and tablets. “The CTA DeFi product will be accessible via the main user interface, but it will operate as its own standalone platform,” CTA co-founder and CEO Sami Chlagou told CoinDesk in an email. “We want to keep the gaming experience somewhat separate to ensure that the more commercial aspects of the CTA experiences do not distract from what will be a dynamic and unique metaverse gaming experience.” Ubisoft is the largest video game publisher that’s currently making moves in the crypto gaming space.
The company began its ventures in the world of crypto by prototyping blockchain games a few years back, and has released experimental NFT projects while supporting crypto game developers along the way. Ubisoft also invested in Animoca Brands last October. The publisher broke new ground in December by releasing NFT in-game items for an existing video game, Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Breakpoint, via its Tezos-based Ubisoft Quartz platform. Ubisoft has faced a lot of criticism following their latest ventures in the NFT department, with the most notable criticism being that players felt these Digits were not backwards compatible and were only tied to one game. Another complaint that players had was that they were worried the NFTs were not energy efficient, even though Ubisoft promises energy efficiency. The introduction of Cryptocurrency and NFTs is still a matter of great confusion for the world with the reception being entirely polarized as many look at them as valuable investments while others feel that they are an unstable and ultimately useless asset to invest in. The question of determining their worth will only be answered somewhere in time as just like any other investments, NFT and Crypto carry a great risk factor and thus the world stands divided at this new wave of investment opportunities.