We don’t even have a week in 2022 and already another major video game publisher – this time it’s Square Enix – is praising the Metaverse and blockchain gaming and planning to invest more resources in this terrifying version of the future. And according to Square Enix President Yosuke Matsuda, the publisher could even publish its own NFTs (non-fungible tokens)) at an unspecified time in the future.
In a New Years open letter posted January 1st, Matsuda came up with hundreds of buzzwords and phrases to convince people that Square Enix’s plans with Metaverse, NFTs, and blockchain technology were absolutely not terrible. While the letter touches on a few different topics, including Metaverse and AI games, most of it focuses on Matsuda’s excitement over NFTs and the future of crypto.
According to Matsuda, 2021 was just “NFTs: Year One” and he expects the technology to become “more commonplace with the general public” in the future. It’s actually a bit difficult to analyze what Matsuda is trying to say, as the letter reads more like someone is copying catchphrases and ideas from other places and pasting them into a Word document while trying to hit a certain number of words .
For example, here is a small excerpt from the letter that talks about NFTs and how they appear to be helping people create user-created content for some games.
“I understand that some people who ‘play for fun’ who are currently the majority of gamers have expressed reservations about these new trends, and understandably so. However, I believe that there will be a certain number of people whose motivation is to “play to make a difference,” which I would like to help make the game more exciting. Traditional gambling has not offered any explicit incentive to this latter group of people, who were motivated solely by such conflicting personal feelings as benevolence and volunteerism. This fact has nothing to do with the limitations of existing UGC (User Generated Content). UGC was created solely because of an individual’s desire for self-expression and not because there was an explicit incentive to reward them for their creative endeavors. I see this as a reason why there wasn’t as much important groundbreaking content user-created as one would expect. “
My eyes glazed over trying to read this part of the letter, but not enough to miss the sentence that talks about how some people play games for “fun” and how he almost sounds disappointed with it . Instead, Matsuda wants more players who “play to contribute,” like mod makers, a thing that already exists but is now tied to technology that is also promoting Art theft and contributes to the increase in e-waste and global warming through large-scale digital mining operations. It’s also a cheat’s paradise, money-hungry celebrities, and slimy graves.
It should be noted that nowhere in this letter which is still endlessly ridiculed on social media by game developers and gamers
None of this should come as a surprise. Square Enix dipped its corporate toes in NFT waters earlier this year And it was clear then that the company had bigger plans for blockchain games.
Square Enix President wants the company to join a growing list of game publishers and Studios that do, stage, or to apologize for plans NFTs into it Video games. Ubisoft upset a lot of people (including some of its own employees) last month after the announcement of plans to put boring looking NFT equipment in one Ghost recon Game that nobody plays anymore. (Spoiler: Nobody seems to be buying or selling this crap.) Other studios have announced themselves NFT plans and canceled or sent them back after the backlash from players got too much.
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