Ethereum NFT card game Cross The Ages is releasing a new card collection in collaboration with Ubisoft and the Watch Dogs gaming franchise.

On April 3, the public can purchase cards featuring Watch Dogs characters in the continent of Artellium, a new map collection in Cross The Ages.

Cross The Ages announced the launch on Twitter with a link to the official trailer for the expansion.

The trailer features Aiden Pearce, the grey-hat hacker star of the Watch Dogs franchise, an open-world GTA-style action adventure series first released on PC and consoles back in 2014.

Cross The Ages is an NFT card-battling game that uses NFTs minted on Ethereum scaling solution Immutable X. Although Immutable is the leading layer 2 for games built on Ethereum, over the last seven days it has traded lost nearly 12% of its value and currently trades at $2.95, one of the only leading cryptocurrencies to post losses this week.

Beyond NFT’s: Ubisoft’s Path To Adoption

Ubisoft’s partnership with Cross The Ages first began as a strategic investment, when the publisher giant participated in a $12 million investment round in March 2022. Later that year Kingdom Hearts publisher Square Enix also became a strategic investor in the game.

Ubisoft is now on the cusp of releasing its first in-house NFT title, the multiplayer turn-based RPG, Champions Tactics: Grimoria Chronicles. It teased the game with an event back in December that let early supporters mint playable Ethereum-based avatars/figurines.

Prior to this, Ubisoft had included some NFT features in Ghost Recon: Breakpoint. Ubisoft launched the NFTs through its NFT platform, Ubisoft Quartz, back in 2021. Quartz is built on Tezos and the company has said it hopes to put out more NFTs for its franchises through the platform.

Ubisoft has been taking a major interest in blockchain for a while now.

In 2018 it demoed an in-development blockchain title called Hashcraft at a San Francisco crypto gaming convention.

The company’s Strategic Innovation Lab also partnered with Sorare on a playable NFT fantasy football experiment called OneShot League. The Lab also experimented with NFTs from the publisher’s popular Rabbids franchise.

Sorare was an alumnus of Ubisoft’s Entrepreneurs Lab accelerator program, which has provided support and investment to crypto gaming startups, including the popular Axie Infinity project.

In 2023, blockchain games accounted for 34% of Dapp activities and attracted 1.1 million active users daily, according to a new report by DappRadar.