In a recently published open letter, Square Enix president Yosuke Matsuda has discussed plans to “ramp up our efforts” to develop business involving NFTs, the metaverse and blockchain tokens – all of which they see as a big part of the future of the gaming industry.
The letter stops short of explicitly saying Square Enix will put NFTs into games, saying that the company is watching the technology and plans to “develop a business accordingly, with an eye to potentially issuing our own tokens in the future.”
Matsuda also acknowledges lots of players have not been happy with the whole NFTs in gaming thing even as publishers keep on trying to get into that arena:
“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.
With advances in token economies, users will be provided with explicit incentives, thereby resulting not only in greater consistency in their motivation, but also creating a tangible upside to their creative efforts.”
He then goes on to say “by designing viable token economies into our games, we will enable self-sustaining game growth” and cites this new potential ecosystem as “decentralized gaming”.
This sees Square Enix joining the likes of Sega, Ubisoft and EA who’ve all explored blockchain gaming and the potential use of NFTs in the gaming world recently – their first efforts meeting wit ah major public backlash.
This letter has as well, the reaction from those who “play to have fun” have voiced their concerns on social media about the tokenization of gameplay, the ‘play to contribute’ model being the foothold for ‘play to earn’ models to follow, and of course the ongoing and costly environmental impact of blockchain technologies and the scepticism over NFTs.
a New Year's letter from the Square Enix president talks about new tech/concepts including NFTs, the metaverse, and particularly how blockchain games "hold the potential to enable self-sustaining game growth" https://t.co/qtdFCvQdeB pic.twitter.com/FOG4S9Hpgb
— Wario64 (@Wario64) January 1, 2022
Source: Square Enix
