PRESIDENT OF SQUARE ENIX: The NFT economy will help players create thrive

Square ENIX President Yosuke Matsuda posted a New Year's message on his official website. The congratulatory speech talked about his views on the metaverse, NFTs (non-homogeneous currencies), blockchain games and many other booms in 2021.

Yosuke Matsuda

Matsuda reiterated that the Group has already identified artificial intelligence, cloud computing, and blockchain games as key investment areas in May 2021, and made industry predictions that Metacosm will transition to true business practices in 2022. He expects this change to have a substantial impact on the Group's business.

When it comes to NFT and blockchain gaming, Matsuda said that the majority of players are still "playing for fun" (play To Have Fun), so it is understandable that people have reservations about this new trend. But Matsuda believes that the development of the NFT economy will make people more motivated to play games, in addition to the already emerging "Play To Earn" (Play To Earn), but also to inspire more people to "play to contribute".

Matsuda said that there are always some people in the player community who create their own games to make the game more interesting (editor's note: mod and fan art creation and other player-created content), but due to the limitations of traditional UGC (user-generated content), this part of the people can only be driven by self-expression and generate electricity with love, so large-scale UGC content that can change the game is always very rare (editor's note: "Old Roll 5" mod "Forgotten City").

With the emergence of NFTs, Matsuda believes that it can break this deadlock, provide more explicit incentives for UGC, greatly enhance the upward space of user creation, and make more people become "play games for contribution", so that more large-scale UGC content can appear on the market that can change the gameplay.

According to Matsuda, blockchain gaming and the NFT economy are booming, which will be a good thing for any type of player: "players who play for fun" can play a richer gaming experience, and those who "play for contribution" can no longer only appreciate this spiritual level, but also the practical benefits brought by NFTs.

Matsuda said that in contrast to "centralized games" that constitute a one-way relationship such as "manufacturers provide finished games for players", UGC form of game content is "decentralized games", and he believes that this ecology that can allow different types of players to interact with games will be one of the trends in future games. He revealed that the group's strategic theme after the new first grade is to incorporate decentralized games into the group's product portfolio, and continue to observe the trend, listen carefully to the voices of different types of players, and hope to issue "their own tokens" in the future.