For the last four years, Ubisoft has been experimenting with blockchain projects, hoping to find a new revenue stream for the $1.5 billion games company. But does it have a stance on how this stuff directly affects the climate crisis?
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45 Comments
google proof of stake please
I really love your content but as a miner I really hate this anti crypto propaganda. If you're so worried about the environmental impact then you should close your bank account and go into crypto because the simple truth is that mining and the Blockchain industry had a far, far lower environmental impact than the traditional financial markets and all of their physical buildings and infrastructure. Plus being the the largest cost in mining is energy do you not think that is miners would want to minimize that cost? You know say by maybe using renewable energy? In fact if you look at which industries are investing most into the development of renewable resources then would you like to guess whose on top? I'll give you a clue, it's not the traditional financial markets. Yes, us miners use a lot of power but we use a lot less power than many others and we use that power to create a decentralized financial system. Seriously, people do some actual research instead of just starting with the same false narrative that the banks and mainstream media have been spreading for a whole decade.
Fun idea | Desperate people
Thank you for shining a light on this. Your report deserves way more views!
crypto isn’t bad. there’s so many things that aren’t constructive to anyone in society that we should be paying attention too. not something that has the potential to make lots of people in society rich and more free. crypto’s run on decentralized networks so there’s no government or central body running them, and i think we can all agree thats a good thing. also theres already plans in place by upgrading/switching the mining process to a different method that would reduce its carbon footprint by 99.5%. the internet wasn’t perfect when it first came out either.. i think people just don’t understand it and a rejecting the idea but mass crypto adoption would mean a more free society and thats the direction i think we all want to be heading
God damn this is infinitely more complicated than I thought. How the hell are people smart enough to figure ALL of this out but dumb enough to buy NFTs?
"We're going to announce a scalability solution… 🙄… what I mean by that is that we are going to scale the numbers to the point they become unreadable."
another important point here is that due to how they're implemented here and Ubisoft's related terms of service, they could've implemented this functionality (in-game limited edition tradable items tied to player accounts) using a normal database. So if they want to be more environmentally friendly about it, they can just strip out the NFT part because it doesn't actually add anything.
£1000 in ETH to transfer a football card. 😂😂😂
Maybe use cardano? ☺
Atari still exists???
its also important to also compare the amount of people useing the electricity thats been used. so if more people ude bitcoin then there are people in pakistan you should adjust the power efficency statistic to acount on it too
Should've really checked how the tech works, or consulted some updated information from the last 3 years…
Bitcoin tx can now cost up to 1/42000000 energy than they used to thanks to it's L2 (lightning)
ETH in L2 (optimistic and ZK rollups) uses even less energy than that, but is moving to other consensus (PoS) which would take even 98% less energy
And this is a similar tech to what Ubisoft is using right now, which takes around 98% less energy than what ETH does right now in L1 (Tezos)
All in all, I'm really disappointed with the lack of research on this one…
"Ubisoft is committed to create games that will inspire players to take action on environmental issues." Players, not corporations or other entrenched systems of power.
The video kinda makes sense… buuuut… what about the cost of the real world banking system?
This really is simple. Ubisoft, and so many other gaming companies, are chasing money. They don't care about the cost. At this point the only way to show them they have to stop is to refuse to interact with any product that uses pointless blockchain tech. If they can't market and sell it, they'll stop.
And I know this will mean the loss of games that some people love. I am a Blizzard fan. I know what it feels like to see a company you love choose money over quality. It hurts. But it may be the only way to send a message they will hear.
honestly, a better choice for "unused computational performance" would be with scientific distributed computing like folding@home
I really appreciate most of your other investigations/documentaries, but there are a lot of inaccuracies in this one.
First the numbers you gave about the energy consumption in a few examples are, I suppose, based on the inital publication that started the whole "NFT ecological disaster" wave, but if that's the case, the numbers in that artical have been recognized to be extremely biased. I had tried to see if there were more recent and unbiased serious research done on the issue back in october and couldn't find anything new.. haven't looked up recently though.
Second, you say this issue concerns all NFTs. Thats absolutely wrong. A lot of the new NFTs launched lately are on proof of stakes blockchains (I have no numbers at all though.. I'd say maybe 50%?), with no mining and therefore absolutely zero ecological impact afaIk. Also layer2 ETH blockchains like AVAX or polygone for instance have proofs of work that are much easier to complete than ETH hence much lower energy consumption (I think that maybe that's what the Sorare guy refered to when he mentionned a "scalability solution", he meant moving their NFT to an "ETH layer 2" currency? not sure though).
Third ETH itself will move to proof of stakes in a not so distant future (Vitalik said a while back that ETH would have to at some point, and the current high fees isssues of ETH might help make it happen sooner).
I want to eco terrorism so bad
Thank you for making this video. I see red whenever NFTs and blockchain come up, especially for games. I'm glad to see strong journalism on why they are so bad for the environment.
Its especially apparent when their own response today is shockingly horrible and so demeaning.
Aren’t there some kind of NFT/Blockchain incorporation to Ghost Recon now?
He truly doesnt give a shit.
About the world.
Only about his f'ing money.
Yeah… NO FUCKING WAY. The feds are getting ready to go after Crypto Currency as of 2 days ago.
remember when people kept pushing the idea that digital was more environmentally friendly than paper/physical stuff.
so this is why NFTS exist?
tell ubisoft about screenshotting, copy image, ctrl+shift+i, phone cameras, and vintage cameras
I think we can all agree that ubisoft DID NOT manage to make block chain work smoothly into their games
nft culture is heavily centered around selling whatever you buy to someone else; trading
because then you get Returns from it, the other big selling point (remember that "oh, maybe people should get something from games beyond the intrinsic value" quote from konami i think?)
forever on the blockchain, nevermore in your hands
Man we need follow up for some of your videos. I always seem to wonder what has happened since this journalism has came out. Maybe that's on purpose ;). Keep these up bro amazing!
YOU BETTER NOT ADD NFTs TO GROWTOPIA!!!
Obviously, the decision is all about the money. If the revelations of over a decade of rampant abuse and sexual assault at the likes of Ubisoft and Activision-Blizzard-King couldn't kill those companies, then why would they ever worry about complex tech that few people even have a cursory understanding of? Not to mention, with every major corporation in the world going head-over-heels for tech used exclusively to commit fraud and to scam people out of their money, they will have scammed such a ludicrous amount of cash out of their marks that even if they face consequences, no fine issued by any regulatory body will actually make a dent in the sheer level of profits they've made.
The problem with the argument about "who knows how much of it would have been wasted energy that bitcoin miners found a use for" is….that's not how on demand power systems work.
The big advantage that power plants like hydro, coal (or other combustible), nuclear, etc have over wind and solar is they have precise control over their energy output. This means that they can balance their output to match the required input from their customers who use that power. They do slightly overproduce power, because underproducing means brownouts or blackouts, which is not desirable, but if you use that margin of power they overproduce by, they'll throw a bit more fuel on the fire or open the water flow a bit more or pull a control rod out a bit to bring up that output to their targeted margin of overproduction. This is called load balancing and it's a critical issue that wind and solar power have to solve in order to become viable as a primary or exclusive power delivery system. (Most of the power demand is in the evening, when everyone's houses are lit and they're cooking dinner. Most of the year, there's not much solar power at that time of day. For example)
So….when it comes to energy sources that do load balancing, how much of the energy is being wasted? Literally none of it because the wastage you did use up prompted them to throw more waste on at the power plant so the next crypto mining rig doesn't destabilize the whole system when they flick the switch. If you're running your crypto mine purely on the waste power provided by off-grid solar and wind power producers – ones that don't have a power plant on the network that can scale back its power production to absorb the excess being made by the green energy system, sure, that's fine. But….who are you and why do you have a private off-grid solar/wind farm? You're connected to the internet so you clearly could be on the grid….
Remember when graphics cards were for actual gamers & didn't cost twice the price of a new computer?
Pepperidge Farm remembers.
wow video games with blockchain and cryptocurrency, this is like a nightmare from a horror show.
Offsetting is far from being a solution, and for many cases, it's even worse, as it can consist in destroying acres of forest ecosystems in order to plant acacia trees which have a very low carbon capture efficiency.
Ubisoft's blockchain approach has many issues, this being one of them, but not really sure it's the focal point. By this logic you could argue Video Games in general are awful for the environment – the development, distribution and consumption are all bad for the environment at every single point of the journey. Interesting video still though!
Tezos blockchain is actually proof-of-stake, meaning it doesn't mine coins like bitcoin does, it is much more environmentally friendly, that being said… please keep crypto out of serious AAA games, that crap should be reserved for candy crush knock offs and farming games.
At least you were able to get a sort of response from the company for once. I honestly gasped when I heard the estimate per transaction… between this and NFT’s I think people participating are not objectively taking into account the amount of energy being used.
"cryptocurrecies" are bad in every way, environmentally, logically, economically.. I'm surprised they're not generally regarded as illegal, as, if taken seriously, they amount to minting your own money – and that IS illegal.
To think this was a year ago, and how much of the Blockchain and NFT shit has been pushed by games companies since then.
9:15 Offsetra has a financial incentive to give the highest believable estimate for all categories of activity, to draw the highest activity to their site. Earlier in the video (3:53) the idea that financial incentives are corrupting incentives gets discussed, and comes up multiple times. When Nicholas talks about being uncertain about Offsetra's estimates (11:09), how did you weigh the opposed incentives?
Typical CEO, ask any question about the negatives of something: "We are working on that. I don't know. I don't have the answer to that. We're totally doing a better thing though."
The CEO's repeated answer of "we're looking into it" when the environmental impact should have been something they considered before putting a single dime into actually making anything is infuriating. Especially because you know they're not going to.
All Crypto "solutions" always end up being kicking the can down the road using alternatives that are equally damaging in their own way. The only ethical solution is just to stay off the damn chain.
Ubisoft is run by sex pests
it's like the corporate jerks are saying don't worry even if we're getting rid of gasoline polluting cars and replacing them with electric that doesn't mean we don't have new ways of killing the environment introducing cryptocurrency the multi-level marketing scheme that the Boomer politicians are too stupid to realize what it is for the people that get off of killing the environment don't worry crypto will replace your gasoline vehicle who knows maybe it's the mark of the beast I'll never tell, this is the kind of thing you would hear in evil illuminati people saying in secret evil business meetings