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Square Enix latest company to double down on NFTs and blockchain games

Square Enix latest company to double down on NFTs and blockchain games

Japanese publishing giant Square Enix has signalled its intention to jump into the blockchain games space.

That's going by a letter from the company's president, Yosuke Matsuda, in which he listed non-fungible tokens (NFTs), the metaverse, cloud technology and cryptocurrency as trends that he intended for the company to explore in the future.

Specifically, Matsuda believes that introducing cryptocurrency and NFTs to its games could attract a new audience. He does, however, also note that people who play games to enjoy themselves have concerns about these new trends within the sector.

"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," Matsuda said.

"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."

The Square Enix boss also said that blockchain tech could breathe new life into the user-generated content model as players would be able to make money off of their work.

Square Enix is the latest company to hop onto the crypto trend, following in the footsteps of Atari and Ubisoft.


PCGamesInsider Contributing Editor

Alex Calvin is a freelance journalist who writes about the business of games. He started out at UK trade paper MCV in 2013 and left as deputy editor over three years later. In June 2017, he joined Steel Media as the editor for new site PCGamesInsider.biz. In October 2019 he left this full-time position at the company but still contributes to the site on a daily basis. He has also written for GamesIndustry.biz, VGC, Games London, The Observer/Guardian and Esquire UK.