Daily Briefing: Thursday 16th December

Ubisoft's developers aren't too impressed by the company's NFT strategy, either

We've already covered Ubisoft's bizarre attempt to expand into the NFT space a couple of times between our news channel and this very daily newsletter, but the fallout is showing no signs of stopping now that some of Ubisoft's own employees have admitted to being confused by the initiative. That's according to a new report from Kotaku which outlines that Ubisoft's internal messaging hub is filling up with questions, queries, and general disappointment from staff.

• One developer outlined “I still don’t really understand the ‘problem’ being solved here. Is it really worth the (extremely) negative publicity this will cause?” This is a prudent point because, honestly, will the gains Ubisoft may stand to make be enough to outweigh the negative press they will and have already received. Another developer expressed concern about potentially being directed to include NFT content in their game, which again makes sense because Ubisoft's current rollout is currently being dubbed an "experiment." Surely we'll see more things like it if the experiment is successful?

CD Projekt have settled with investors following lawsuit

This is another update on an existing story we've covered a couple times, though it did get a bit of extra spice this week when actor Keanu Reeves managed to thoroughly drop CDPR's management in it. Following the ramshackle launch of Cyberpunk 2077 last December, a group of investors sued CD Projekt over miscommunication surrounding the game in the lead up to its disastrous launch. CDP have remained fairly quiet on proceedings ever since but sparked back into activity this week with news that a settlement had been reached.

• Under the teams of the settlement, CD Projekt will pay just $1.85m to the plaintiffs. This seems like a very small number considering CD Projekt made over $563m in sales during Cyberpunk 2077's launch month alone and spent just over $2m on the subsequent refund campaign. The whole point of the lawsuit was to do with misleading communication from management regarding the stability of the game on then-current generation consoles. It seems strange that such a small sum would rectify what must surely be quite a sizeable breach in trust. But perhaps there's something else at play here we don't know about...yet.

Final Fantasy XIV pulled from sale amid too much popularity

Here's a story that manages to serve as good and bad news simultaneously. The bad news is that Final Fantasy XIV has been temporarily pulled from sale, but the good news is that it's because the game is simply too popular for servers to handle. Square Enix made the call as part of a wider attempt to handle the still ongoing player congestion from Endwalker's launch last week. It's no real surprise that player queues are getting out of hand, Final Fantasy XIV has proven one of the most popular and successful games of this year, not to mention the fact that it added one million new players before the expansion even launched.

• As for what is being done about it, it very much seems like the team is on the case. Square Enix closing the flood gates was a good move as far as temporary measures go, and should afford the main team the time they need to get everything under control. As recompense, Square Enix have offered players an additional 14 days of free game time on top of the seven that were announced last week. So that's nearly an entire additional month of free play as a sorry and thank you, which is a commendable show of good will from the team. Hope everything gets sorted soon, none of us want Yoshi P to be upset.