Champions Tactics: Grimoria Chronicles is a new turn-based dark fantasy RPG fromUbisoftthat focuses solely on PvP combat. The free-to-play title provides players with a free set of heroic figurines, which resemble Heroscape models when in action, but in order to get more and create your team of highly-trained combatants, you need to use the in-game currency, which is standard for most free-to-play games these days, but that’s only one option.
The other option, is to use cryptocurrency, and purchase figurines, or “Forge” your own, because as it turns out, every character is represented by a NFT (Non-Fungible Token), withthe high-end heroes on sale in the marketplace for over $300. If the pay-to-win gameplay wasn’t bad enough, for the last few days, the game has been dominated by one player automatically matched up against every player, who wins their matches immediately, ringing up an astronomical 52,000 matches in under a week and making it so that no one can actually play the game.
Ubisoft Confirms it Disbanded Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown Team Due to Poor Sales
The talented team that developed Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown has been disbanded due to the title’s poor sales performance.
Hearing about blockchain, cryptocurrency and NFTs may sound like a blast from the past, because it is:Ubisoft announced web3 games in 2021, when the technology was being championed by major corporations, but it didn’t take long for the hype to die down. Champions Tactics: Grimoria Chronicles was announced in 2023, representing the French company’s first full-blown web3 game powered by cryptocurrency, but it was a year earlier, in 2022, that Ghost Recon Breakpoint included special NFT gear, briefly at least, as Ubisoft Quartz was supported for barely four months before being shut down.
To date, no one has been able to crack the code required to make a blockchain enabled game that’s both fun and a commercial success. Most companies, including Gamestop, have abandoned plans to incorporate NFTs, which is what makes the quiet release of this game so odd, even before it was taken down by one of the worst bugs in modern gaming history.
A Game-Breaking Bug
Players exploiting glitches is nothing new, but it’s rare that a situation like the one that has stopped Champions Tactics: Grimoria Chronicles is able to take place, as it requiresa catastrophic failure on the server end. As it turns out, the player, known as Paulstar111 or schilleri11, wasn’t exploiting a glitch; instead, it was a bug on Ubisoft’s side. How a bug can cause every single player to be matched with one person, that then automatically gets a win for every single match, is still unknown, but the team at Ubisoft is looking into a long-term solution. They did warn players that it might occur again at any moment, though for now, the game is reportedly playable once more.
Regardless of if the bug is ever permanently fixed or not, Champions Tactics: Grimoria Chronicles, represents what gaming communities hate the most about micro-transactions and in-game purchases: it’s still a pay-to-win game.
Regardless of if the bug is ever permanently fixed or not,Champions Tactics: Grimoria Chronicles, represents what gaming communities hate the most about micro-transactions and in-game purchases: it’s still a pay-to-win game. Releasing a pay-to-win title powered by NFTs on the Steam marketplace right after word got out that thePrince of Persia: The Lost Crownteam had beendisbanded due to poor salesis a poor look for a company that is having a no-good very bad year.
Ubisoft recently delayedAssassin’s Creed Shadowsto 2025 for another round of last-minute polish, andStar Wars Outlawsalsofailed to meet sales expectations.
