After a bad year for NFTs, Square Enix Boss says the company is still all for them

by James · January 3, 2023

A screenshot shows a large, holographic man towering over the Final Fantasy characters.

A year ago, Square Enix president Yosuke Matsuda said that NFTs (Non-Fungible Tokens) and blockchain games were the future. Then 2022 happened and it became clear to all but the most die-hard NFT investors and crytobros that all this digital JPEG ownership was a scam that the public continues to largely ignore. But apparently, even after all this, Matsuda and Square Enix are not giving up on NFTs or blockchain games. In fact, it sounds like the company is doubling down on “blockchain entertainment” by 2023.

As a reminder: NFTs are digital items that you don’t actually own. Instead, you buy a receipt that says you own the picture of a monkey or whatever, and then you can collect it and hope to resell it for a big profit one day. But you probably won’t make money selling expensive NFTs as the marketplace around them has completely collapsed. It turns out that overpriced jpeg files are not a stable investment. Who could have guessed? (Millions of people did.) Either way, Square Enix isn’t going to let little things like near-universal public backlash to NFTs or giant cryptocurrency exchanges going bankrupt overnight deter the Japanese publisher from continuing to invest heavily in “Web 3.0”.

In a New Year’s open letter published on January 1, Matsuda said that Square Enix invested in various business domains, but that it was “mostly focused on blockchain entertainment.” In the letter, he used a soup of buzzwords and empty ideas to try to paint a picture that blockchain technology was not dying or collapsing, but actually growing and becoming more popular. A proof cited by the Square Enix president: Web 3.0 has become a “firmly established buzzword among business people.”

After a very brief mention of the massive FTX bankruptcy that occurred in November – where a $32 billion crypto exchange exploded overnight and nearly destabilized the entire market in the process – Matsuda addressed the continued pushback against NFTs and blockchain technology. According to the president, this is all part of the plan, and he suggested that new technology like this often creates “confusion” first before people accept it.

“After riding out such societal tides, some such technologies and frameworks gradually become part of people’s lives, eventually giving rise to new businesses and growth,” Matsuda explained. “After the excitement and excitement that surrounded NFTs and the metaverse in 2021, 2022 was a year of great volatility in the blockchain-related space. But if this turns out to have been a step in a process leading to the creation of rules and a more transparent business environment, it will definitely have been for the best for the growth of blockchain entertainment.”

Read more: Square Enix’s Final Fantasy VII NFTs are silly little things

The Square Enix president wrote a similar letter back in 2022, though it was panned by many online. People who criticized his vision for the company were particularly unhappy with a part of the letter where Matsuda talked about people who “play to contribute” rather than people who just play games for fun. But months later, in April 2022, interview with YahooThe Square Enix boss didn’t back down and continued to predict that the future of gaming would include NFTs and the blockchain.

And like last year, Matsuda once again doesn’t lay out any specific or even vague plans for how NFTs or the blockchain will improve video games or how the technology will provide new options for developers or players. Instead, Matsuda says only that the company has “several” blockchain-powered games in development, including those previously announced Symbiogenesis. Get excited, I guess?

“Blockchain has been an object of excitement and a source of unease,” Matsuda summed up, “But with that in the rearview mirror, we hope that blockchain gaming will move into a new stage of growth in 2023.”

It’s not surprising to see Square Enix continue to focus on NFTs, as just last year the publisher sold three game studios – Crystal Dynamics, Eidos Montreal and Square Enix Montreal – to the monolithic Embracer Group and all to help fund future investments in blockchain. technology, AI and cloud gaming.

Meanwhile, Square Enix has spent the last six months shutting down various online games, including Fall of Babylon and Final Fantasy VII battle royale spin-off The first soldier. I’m sure that’s something to worry about as the company pushes to include NFTs in future titles. Yes, your investment in Square Enix’s digital worlds will be completely safe and long lasting…