A hot potato: Activision Blizzard, a company with a reputation tarnished by multiple sexual harassment lawsuits, has been failing to endear itself to consumers once again by trying to gauge interest in NFTs, which the majority of gamers hate. But company president Mike Ybarra has seemingly confirmed non-fungible tokens aren’t coming to Blizzard games, at least not yet.
Activision Blizzard, currently in the process of being acquired by Microsoft, sent out a YouGov survey to select fans over the weekend that tried to gauge interest in “emerging and future trends in gaming.”
So it seems Blizzard/Activision is trying to see if players are interested in crypto and n.f*t in games. I got a survey from them and it is on the survey. I said very disinterested to them. pic.twitter.com/dIT4bVokDK
— Okage Tadaka BlackLivesMatter StopAsianHate (@OTadaka) April 16, 2022
Some of the areas in the survey included platform cross-play, artificial intelligence content generation, Artificial/Virtual Reality titles, and cloud gaming. While that all sounds reasonable enough, there were a few topics that in most gamers incite feelings somewhere between apathy and downright hatred: the metaverse, play-to-earn games, and NFTs.
While many people would find a Blizzard survey asking about play-to-earn games and NFTs bad enough, the company went that extra mile by ending the questionnaire with a redirection to its Blizzard.net online store. One user reported that answering “no” to the section that asked if they’d played any Blizzard games over the last 12 months ended the survey and opened the shop.
@Blizzard_Ent This survey ended with;
A) “thank you” landing page
B) “your responses have been recorded” landing page
C) The https://t.co/aB9BSPHPV5 Shop
It was C. It was incredibly abrupt. I get that you are a large company and there is a lot of moving parts but come on! pic.twitter.com/eYRzh6pm0c— Oaks | Stuart J. (@Oakshadric) April 16, 2022
It appears that Activision Blizzard president Mike Ybarra, formerly the corporate vice president at Xbox, was aware of the controversy surrounding the survey and responded with a tweet that read, “No one is doing NFTs.” Ybarra was then asked why Blizzard even sent out the poll, but he never answered. Maybe he just meant no one at Blizzard is doing NFTs *yet.*
No one is doing NFTs.
— Mike Ybarra (@Qwik) April 17, 2022
NFTs have not been having the best of times lately. From Jack Dorsey’s first tweet receiving an offer of $6,200 instead of the $48 million the owner expected, to F1 Delta Time shutting down and the Axie Infinity hack. As for Blizzard, it was hit with another sexual harassment lawsuit in March.
