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Author: Admin | 2025-04-27
Imagine a game in which you parachute down to a unique island that your own computer generates. Against a landscape painted in vibrant colors, you run across fields of polygon flowers and shape the terrain, crafting challenges for the island’s future visitors. Take as long or as little as you’d like, and when you’re done, press “publish” and save your creation to the blockchain. It’s yours. You own it—in every meaningful sense of the word.That’s the vision behind Ubisoft’s blockchain-based HashCraft, a project of the French gaming giant’s Strategic Innovation Lab. The Minecraft-inspired treasure hunting and island exploration game runs on the shared computational power of its players. There is no central server. No company in control. Players are free to collaborate or compete with each other on a decentralized, “always-up,” unstoppable network, creating communities big and small and deciding for themselves the rules—even physics—of their world.It’s unlike anything the gaming industry has ever experienced. But, for better or worse, it’s an experience that Ubisoft isn’t yet prepared to release into the wild.HashCraft is a prototype—an experiment in what the future of gaming could be. The game is the brainchild of a small but skillful team led by Ubisoft's Blockchain Initiative Manager Nicolas Pouard and Senior R&D Programmer Robert Falce, whose mission is to envision where the industry is going, not where it is.Ubisoft wants its games to be future proof (of work)“The Strategic Innovation Lab’s mission is to help Ubisoft’s teams to anticipate the future and be prepared for it,” says Pouard, a founding member of the recently formed Blockchain Game Alliance. “We explore technical, social and business trends which can influence gaming and entertainment at large, five or 10 years from now.” Pouard says Ubisoft has been working for years with external experts, including neuroscientists and data scientists, long before other gaming companies began doing the same.The Lab leads Ubisoft’s work in cutting-edge research in a variety of intermingling areas, such as augmented reality, machine learning, and blockchain, “exploring all potential impacts, not only from a technical or gameplay point of view, but also in the business and legal fields,” Pouard explains.For Ubisoft, the blockchain gaming adventure is just beginning. PHOTO CREDIT: UbisoftThe Strategic Innovation Lab spent the better part of last year building the HashCraft prototype and demonstrating its potential both within Ubisoft and at trade shows and conferences. Pouard says he’s been shocked by the game’s reception—crowds of gamers (and eager journalists) demanding to know when will the game be released. And as good as the Lab might be at predicting future trends, this was not something they anticipated, says Pouard.While HashCraft itself might never be released to consumers, Ubisoft’s blockchain experiment has already pushed the
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