GM

No intro today, just a photo of a family enjoying a delicious home-cooked meal.

Links for the Top 25 drops are HERE.

Honest opinion on this gaming NFT

Context

This month, Ubisoft will release a free 10,000 supply collection called Warlords. 

These grant early access to another future collection called Champions, which will be used in their upcoming NFT game Champions Tactics. 

They’re still giving out access spots for the mint. 

Our take

Where do I begin? 

Ubisoft is a $3.4 billion company. They’ve created some amazing, highly successful franchises like Assassin’s Creed, Rainbow Six, and Far Cry. 

They’re one of the most well-known publishers in the world. 

But when it comes to Web3…this is the best they can do? 

This is a sneak peek of Champions Tactics, their second attempt at NFTs after their failed Quartz experiment back in 2021. 

This gameplay image is not easy to find. It’s nowhere on their social media or home page. Instead, it’s stuffed inside of a press kit in their website footer, where no one ever looks. 

I wonder why? 

Ubisoft is running a playbook we’ve seen a lot from Web2 brands

1. Announce a free drop, which acts as a homing device calling all bots to your mint.

2. Set up a Zealy campaign with a tasklist for your new bot army. This includes meaningful contributions like “retweeting” and “visiting the website”. 

3. Set up a private discord so all the bots can gm each other through the night.

4. Build fake social media hype, because nothing screams organic enthusiasm like a comment section that looks like this: 

And then finally, the coup de grâce: don’t tell anyone about it. 

As usual with these drops, there are no mentions of it on primary social media accounts: Champions Tactics has never shown up on Ubisoft’s Twitter or YouTube channel. 

Instead, it’s quarantined to its own little corner, like some forgotten stepchild, which makes it easier to pretend it never happened.

If this all sounds familiar, it’s because I covered a similar story last month with FiatPass.

Fiat also gave out a trillion free NFTs, before trying to raise ~$1.5 million with a 10,000 supply paid mint on Arbitrum. 

Although the mint is still going, they’ve only been able to sell 500 so far.

The saving grace here is that it's all free, so there's no real downside to participating. But it still feels like a missed opportunity from another big brand.

NOTE: These drops are lightly curated. Our only requirement is that they have recognizable founders. As usual, DYOR. To learn more go here.

SPINᵗ by NumbersInMotion

Bright Moments continues their monthly artist residencies with SPINᵗ, a December open edition from Matt Jacobson, a.k.a. NumbersInMotion.

Spirals are the primary motif in this collection (hence the name), echoing Jacobson's past explorations, like the 2021 Art Blocks Curated Watercolor Dreams.

THR33S Charity Mints

You can start racking up good karma this holiday season with these Nifty Gateway and Rarible mints from THR33S – a basketball, art and music event happening in Miami this Saturday.

The mints support the Mario Chalmers foundation, featuring auctioned pieces from notable artists like ALIENQUEEN on Nifty Gateway, and an open edition from cryptoart OG Big comic art on Rarible

Hold up, is that Bobby Shmurda on the performance list? I still wanna know where his hat went nine years ago (iconic beat).

Gilim by zolfaqqari

An affordable generative art mint is on it’s way to Foundation with Amir Zolfaqari’s Gilim.

The 32-supply, abstract collection explores rectangles in a style of colorful palettes seen in his previous work since 2021.