Nobody could have foreseen this.
Champions Tactics: Grimoria Chronicles, Ubisoft’s NFT tactics game, will be shutting down in October, as announced on its website and its official Discord. If you need a refresher—I did, despite having previously written about the game—Ubisoft launched Champions Tactics in 2024, long after most of the tech-adjacent industries had relented on trying to push quarter-baked Web3 feature pitches and shifted their attentions instead to the emerging AI boom.
As hard as it is to believe, Champions Tactics was one of two NFT games that Ubisoft launched in 2024, despite previous fumbled rollouts of “pay-to-earn” features that prompted the VP of its Strategic Innovations Lab to insist in January 2022 that we simply “don’t get” the value of NFTs. Surprisingly, that didn’t stifle the backlash much, driving Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot to assure us all in September 2022 that the publisher was only “researching” further Web3 integration and would pursue it “when we have something that gives you a real benefit.”
Well, we can see now how that turned out.
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“Today, we’re sharing an important update regarding the future of Champions Tactics. After careful consideration, we have made the decision to sunset the game,” Ubisoft said in its announcement of the upcoming closure. “The Champions Tactics servers will officially shut down on October 30. Until then, the game will remain fully playable, and our goal is to ensure that players can continue to enjoy the experience during these final months.”
Champions Tactics had already shed its NFT features earlier this year, announcing in May that it would “progressively transition away from blockchain functionality” due to “upcoming changes to the blockchain infrastructure supporting the game’s Web3 features.” In the following days, Ubisoft removed the ability to mint and sell its NFT characters—some of which had been listed on the Champions Tactics marketplace for over $63,000 shortly after launch.
It’s unclear how many of those characters had ever been sold, or for how much—and once the Web 3 features were removed, each player’s supposedly non-fungible characters were converted into thoroughly fungible ones. You know, like the ones that are in a videogame.
But don’t worry, its heavily invested users didn’t walk away with nothing. On May 21, Ubisoft announced that “players who reached Divine rank at least once during the last three seasons” will be eligible to receive free stuff in Might & Magic Fates—a digital TCG it launched in February that lets players earn and trade cards “through an external marketplace powered by Immutable’s technology that will enable and secure these exchanges” and oh my god they’re still doing this?
Before now, Champions Tactics hadn’t occupied much of the public consciousness. It had previously only entered the news cycle when a matchmaking bug forced all its ranked players to spend their first weekend with the game continually connecting—and immediately losing—the same baffled, unkillable guy.
Looking at the Discord, it’s hard to tell how upset the remaining Champions Tactics players are; mostly they’ve been arguing about whether or not the game was a scam. I think the results speak for themselves.
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