Square Enix president signals interest in blockchain and NFTs

The Japanese video game developer and publisher Square Enix is studying blockchain technology as the basis for a platform to create ‘autonomous game content’. The company president Yosuke Matsuda disclosed this in an interview with Yahoo! Japan.

“In the future, I would like to take on the task of providing autonomous game content. Today, many of our games are delivered as finished products, gamers consume this content. … However, there is a certain number of players in the world who would like to contribute to make the game more interesting. And they will do so,” Matsuda said.

According to him, blockchain capabilities can be used to reward and incentivize such people. The company president noted that this would help foster innovative content.

In January 2022 Matsuda published a New Year’s address in which he expressed enthusiasm for new trends and spoke about Square Enix’s desire to develop projects using blockchain and NFT.

The company president’s position was criticised by users and industry participants, including game designer Brandon Sheffield.

Among all the grossness of this whole letter, and even this quote, what gets me is the idea that people who play games to have fun are only “currently” the majority, and the implication that changing this is a good idea

— brandon sheffield (@necrosofty) January 1, 2022

“In all this enormous letter and even this quote, the idea that people who play for fun constitute the majority only ‘at the moment’, and the subtext that changing that is a good idea,” he said.

Earlier in December 2021, Ubisoft announced the launch of the beta version of the Quartz platform, designed for trading in-game items in NFT format.

Players reacted with sharp criticism to the introduction of non-fungible tokens. Vice president Nicolas Poir explained that gamers “do not understand what the secondary digital market can offer them”.

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