Ubisoft Partners with HBAR Foundation to Bring Play-to-Earn Gaming to Hedera

The HBAR Foundation has inked a strategic partnership deal with Ubisoft. The new alliance seeks to support the development, growth, and launch of next-generation gaming in the Hedera ecosystem. As part of the arrangement, Ubisoft will become a member of the Hedera Governing Council, participating in key governance activities and more, according to a press release on February 3, 2021.

Ubisoft Joins the Hedera Ecosystem

The HBAR Foundation has announced that it has signed a partnership deal with Ubisoft Entertainment SA, a traditional video game company based in Montreuil.

While Ubisoft already boasts a vast array of video game franchises including Assassin’s Creed, Far Cry, For Honor, and Just Dance, amongst others, the team has hinted that the new partnership will see to the development, growth, and launch of next-gen gaming on Hedera Hashgraph.

It will be recalled that Ubisoft for the first time ever, integrated non-fungible tokens (NFTs) into one of its existing mainstream games, Ghost Recon: Breakpoint, last December, and this latest move is a strong hint that the 36-year-old gaming giant, maybe nursing plans to dive deeper into the world of blockchain gaming, despite the initial backlashes that plagued its first NFT experiment.

Commenting on the partnership, Didier Genecois, Blockchain Technical Director at the Ubisoft Strategic Innovation Lab noted that the firm strongly believes in the potential of distributed ledger technology in the gaming ecosystem.

In his words:

“At Ubisoft, we believe that distributed ledger technology is a key to the future of gaming by opening new opportunities for players to become true stakeholders of our games. The Hedera network offers a promising take on this technology, notably through its scalability, energy efficiency, and innovative consensus mechanism. We look forward to exploring the Hedera ecosystem through our participation in the Governing council.”

Ubisoft Joins Hedera Governing Council

As part of the partnership, Ubisoft has now become a member of the Hedera Governing Council and will participate in governance, product direction, and other important processes in the Hedera ecosystem.

What’s more, Ubisoft says it will collaborate with the HBAR Foundation to launch a Hedera-dedicated track in the Ubisoft Entrepreneurs Lab, which is designed to support entertainment-focused startups from across the globe.

Via the collaboration, the HBAR Foundation and Ubsifosft will fish out promising projects and startups and provide them with the much-needed economic investment, developer support, and all other support they need to hit the ground running.

“Through this initiative, Ubisoft and the HBAR Foundation are forming a deeply collaborative partnership, which recognizes the value proposition the Hedera network presents for the video games industry. Ubisoft has been a pioneer in its engagement with DLT, and the decision to directly engage with THF to enhance the support it provides to entertainment and gaming innovators provides tremendous opportunities for devs, startups, and users alike,” declared Alex Russman of the HBAR Foundation.

The news of this latest partnership comes alongside the mainnet launch of the smart contracts 2.0 functionality on Hedera. The team says smart contracts 2.0 plus the Hedera Token Service (HTS) integration will usher in a plethora of benefits for the gaming industry, including carbon-negative transactions, low-cost fixed fees, and more.

At press time, Hedera’s native HBAR crypto is trading around $0.24, with a market cap of $4.36 billion according to CoinMarketCap.