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In a move that seems to reflect an ever more greedy and insistent gaming industry to sell us things no one asked for, Ubisoft has finally stealthily launched its first-ever PvP blockchain RPG title, Tactics of Champions: Chronicles of Grimoria – complete with playable characters as NFTs, purchasable via in-game currency or cryptocurrency, as spotted by IGN.

What’s notable here is the pricing scheme: the most expensive character at launch is Inquisitor Swift Zealot, who will cost a whopping $63,372.19 USD, converted from crypto. Other champions (2,732 total) are also available, with just one costing tens of thousands of dollars ($25.1k for Glowing Beast) and the rest costing $5,000 or less. You can confirm these prices and more on the game’s official website Walk page.

Are you willing to spend (literally) thousands of dollars to play a video game? Ubisoft seems intent on finding out – although, to its credit, it’s not like any of these multi-thousand dollar NFTs have production costs even vaguely close to what end users are expected to get pay. The outlook for Free-To-Play looks particularly bleak, given the game stat boosts premium players and their premium characters will benefit from in this PvP-only competitive game.

That said, people spend thousands of dollars on items in other free games, such as Counter-Strike 2 — however, unlike “Champions Tactics“, Counter-Strike 2 does not involve pay-to-win mechanisms and wisely limits these financial aspects to cosmetics. If “virtual items that cost real money” sound like NFTs to you, you’re not wrong: it’s just that AAA and AA games have been doing it without blockchain for over a decade.

A similar system with NFTs might have been more acceptable to a wider gaming audience, but NFTs with inflated prices embodying the concept of “pay to win” are unlikely to attract players of games such as Marvel Snap Or Hearthwhich offer similar PvP F2P RPG gameplay without having the price audacity of the $63,000 playable characters.

Maybe Ubisoft realizes this – it was a low-key launch, after all – and is just hoping that a few true NFT believers will participate anyway. It probably began its development before the loss of 95% of the market value of the NFT last yearbut still declared this game as part of its NFT initiative in July.

In addition to this game, there are a number of other blockchain/web3 games built around NFTs, and they have a good variety of genres. A live count of the 50 best employees is even kept at PlayToEarn.com. The general business model is similar though, and unless you’re a true NFT enthusiast, there isn’t much reason to engage with these titles compared to traditional F2P games.

Even though these F2P games have business models that often resemble games of chance (including Counter-Strike 2where you buy keys to open crates that yield items of widely varying monetary value (usually none, but sometimes thousands), they at least have a bigger audience and often more profit margin.