Square Enix president has voiced his opinion about the rise of NFTs, blockchain gaming, and the Metaverse concept in the gaming space
Yosuke Matsuda, the president of Square Enix, the game company behind multibillion-dollar franchises like Final Fantasy, has detailed the next steps when it comes to including new, blockchain-based technologies in his plans for the new year. In a new year’s letter, Matsuda explains that these new technologies, including non-fungible tokens (NFTs) and the concept of the Metaverse, had a rise during the last year, and that these will evolve to a more actionable phase during this year.
“I realize that some people who “play to have fun” and who currently form the majority of players have voiced their reservations toward these new trends, and understandably so. However, I believe that there will be a certain number of people whose motivation is to “play to contribute,” by which I mean to help make the game more exciting. Traditional gaming has offered no explicit incentive to this latter group of people, who were motivated strictly by such inconsistent personal feelings as goodwill and volunteer spirit. This fact is not unrelated to the limitations of existing UGC (user-generated content). UGC has been brought into being solely because of individuals’ desire for self-expression and not because any explicit incentive existed to reward them for their creative efforts. I see this as one reason that there haven’t been as many major game-changing content that were user-generated as one would expect.”
Moving into 2022, Square Enix joins the growing chorus of AAA gaming publishers. Huge companies like Electronic Arts and Ubisoft who have expressed major support for blockchain gaming. Maybe we’ll be seeing an ENIX token in the future. In November last year, the gaming company first signaled its intention to explore the NFT space. Company did it by offering consumers collectibles and blockchain video games. In March of 2020, the Japanese developer also invested in Ethereum-based Sandbox.
