Ubisoft has released a new arena shooter – without much marketing and new trailers. A special feature could also deter many potential players.
What kind of game is this? Just two weeks after Ubisoft announced that arena shooter XDefiant was shutting down and no longer accepting new players, the publisher has released a new game called Captain Laserhawk: The GAME.
This is a top-down arena shooter. This means that you look at your character, the map and your opponents from above. “Captain Laserhawk: The GAME” is a multiplayer game, modes such as team deathmatch are played.
“Captain Laserhawk: The GAME” is, so to speak, a game adaptation of a series adaptation of a game. The arena shooter is intended to deepen the universe of the anime series “Captain Laserhawk: A Blood Dragon Remix” broadcast on Netflix, which itself is a series spinoff to “Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon”.
You can see a trailer for Captain Laserhawk: The GAME here:
Ubisoft shows the new top-down shooter “Captain Laserhawk: The GAME” in the trailer
More videos
Autoplay
Ubisoft is relying on controversial technology in the new shooter
What kind of technology does the shooter rely on? “Captain Laserhawk: The GAME” relies on blockchain technology. For example, you can only play the game in Early Access if you have a so-called “Niji Warrior ID Card”.
This ID card is an NFT that is generated somewhat individually for each player. A total of 10,000 of these NFTs were given away for free. No more cards are currently planned. If you want to play “Captain Laserhawk: The GAME”, you have to purchase one of these ID cards – i.e. an NFT – on a corresponding marketplace.
As with other collectibles, there are various marketplaces for NFTs where collectors can trade their purchased items.
In order to buy such a card, you obviously need a crypto wallet and a crypto currency like Ethereum. The cheapest card we saw on such a marketplace cost 0.005 Ethereum at the time, which is the equivalent of around 13 euros.
Why did gamers hope that this technology died years ago? In 2021, NFTs and blockchain technology emerged as a new trend in gaming. Many developers saw a lot of potential in NFTs and released games based on or using this technology.
In the shooter Ghost Recon: Breakpoint, for example, Ubisoft used NFTs as a kind of further development of normal cosmetic items. But that didn’t go down well with the players and a huge wave of protests against Ubisoft’s NFTs followed. One player even spoke of the “day Ubisoft decided to go completely evil.”
For many players, NFTs are a signal to make even more money with a game than they would with normal cosmetic items – after all, successful NFTs would create a steady trade in the digital collectibles. In addition, NFTs are often expensive energy guzzlers to produce, as are crypto currencies. They are therefore considered environmental offenders.
In 2022, the hype around NFTs in gaming increasingly died down. This was also because many games that relied on NFTs and blockchain died quickly and players lost the money invested in NFTs forever. In 2024, there were significantly fewer game announcements with NFTs.