$100K NFTs Now Worthless as Ubisoft Kills Its Web3 Game

Someone on the Champions Tactics Discord spent $100,000 on digital characters that no longer exist on any blockchain and will soon no longer exist at all. That sentence should be enough to close the book on Ubisoft's Web3 experiment, but the full story is somehow worse.

Ubisoft announced on the Champions Tactics website and its official Discord server that Champions Tactics: Grimoria Chronicles will shut down on October 30, two years after its launch in October 2024. In-app purchases have already been disabled. The game will remain playable until the servers go dark, but there's nothing left to buy, nothing left to mint, and nothing left to trade.

"After careful consideration, we have made the decision to sunset the game. The Champions Tactics servers will officially shut down on October 30. Until then, the game will remain fully playable, and our goal is to ensure that players can continue to enjoy the experience during these final months."

The Web3 component was already dead before this announcement. Back in May, Ubisoft quietly removed the ability to mint and sell NFT characters, citing "upcoming changes to the blockchain infrastructure supporting the game's Web3 features." Every supposedly non-fungible character was converted into a regular in-game asset. As PC Gamer's Lincoln Carpenter put it, they became "thoroughly fungible ones. You know, like the ones that are in a videogame."

The money people lost

What makes this shutdown sting beyond the usual live-service closure is the financial wreckage. According to players still active on the game's Discord, as reported by Destructoid, wallet records show spending ranging from $1,000 to $100,000 on Warlord characters during the game's lifespan. Some of those NFT characters had been listed on the Champions Tactics marketplace for over $63,000 shortly after launch. Whether anyone actually paid those prices is unclear, but the listings existed, and real money changed hands at some scale. Now every one of those assets is gone. Not devalued. Gone.

The remaining Discord community has been doing what you'd expect: arguing about whether the whole thing was a scam. Some players pointed out that initial mints were free, so the financial damage was limited. Others weren't buying it. One user posed what Destructoid's Andrej Barovic called the "philosophical dilemma" of the thread: "Is every Web3 game that shuts down a scam?" I don't think you need a philosophy degree to answer that one.

Ubisoft's consolation prize for its most dedicated players is access to free stuff in Might & Magic Fates, a digital TCG it launched in February 2026. Players who reached Divine rank in at least one of the last three Champions Tactics seasons are eligible. And here's where it gets absurd: Might & Magic Fates itself uses blockchain-powered card trading through Immutable's technology. Ubisoft is migrating players from one sinking Web3 ship onto another one.

This was a company whose VP of Strategic Innovations insisted in January 2022 that players simply "don't get" the value of NFTs. By September 2022, CEO Yves Guillemot was walking that back, promising Ubisoft would only pursue Web3 "when we have something that gives you a real benefit." They then launched not one but two NFT games in 2024, well after the rest of the industry had moved on to chasing the AI hype cycle instead. Champions Tactics never broke into the public consciousness. Its most notable moment before this shutdown was a matchmaking bug that forced every ranked player to repeatedly connect to, and immediately lose against, the same invincible opponent.

I've been critical of Ubisoft's decision-making for a while now, but this one is a special case. When a live-service game shuts down, players lose progress and memories. When a Web3 game shuts down, some of them lose real money they were told had lasting value on the blockchain. Ubisoft removed the blockchain part first, then killed the game. Players who spent five or six figures on NFT characters got a coupon for another blockchain game. The October 30 shutdown date is a formality at this point; Champions Tactics was already a cautionary tale the moment those wallets went to zero.