Square Enix president Yosuke Matsuda on 1st January released a public letter discussing Square Enix’s overview for the year 2022.
In his address, Yosuke Matsuda spent most of his time discussing the rise of NFTs and Blockchain technology in gaming. He termed this rise as “decentralized gaming”. He also said that the metaverse was “a hot topic in 2021, inspiring a lively global conversation first about what the metaverse is and then about what sort of business opportunities it presents.”
He said that single-player and multiplayer games have evolved from the traditional formula of unidirectional flow of creators providing and players consuming. By contrast, blockchain games are built on-premise of token economy and enable self-sustaining game growth where players will be motivated towards “play to contribute” and “play to earn”.
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According to Matsuda, the traditional formula offered no explicit incentive and promoted players to stick to the old retrograde of “play to have fun” and get inconsistent personal feelings such as goodwill and volunteer spirit from games. This lead people to devote themselves to a single game and/or franchise and generate UGC (user-generated content) that was limited to a single game/franchise.
Matsuda believes that by design the blockchain gaming will allow UGC to be used in any game that’s in the blockchain gaming ecosystem. This will motivate and inspire players to connect with one another and try out more games without losing their access to UGC.
Although Matsuda also agrees that there are unfortunate examples of overheated trading in NFT-based digital goods with somewhat speculative value and ownership of content.
This, obviously, is not an ideal situation, but I expect to see an eventual right-sizing in digital goods deals as they become more commonplace among the general public, with the value of each available content corrected to their true estimated worth, and I look for them to become as familiar as dealings in physical goods
Matsuda
Previously, Square Enix sparked controversy with its first public use of NFTs when it collaborated with a blockchain startup called Double Jump Tokyo to sell NFTs for the first time via Million Arthur assets. That announcement quickly garnered negative reactions and fans’ concerns about Square Enix’s attempt to further monetization.
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