It is still a "metacosm".
At the beginning of 2022, when players were still imagining what big games would be in the new year, the famous game company Square Enix threw out its own "New Year's New Plan".
On January 1, SE published a long article titled "President's New Year's Message" on its official website:
The last payment of this article is SE President Yoyuki Matsuda. Since taking office, every New Year's Day President Matsuda has issued a "New Year's Message", which basically includes nothing more than "summarizing the past, thanking players, and looking forward to the future".
Like the 2019 congratulatory message, Matsuda has mentioned "expanding overseas markets" and "establishing cooperative relations with Chinese companies", which are some relatively normal but less eye-catching general content, and the attention of players is limited.
But this year's "SE President's Statement" was quickly followed by widespread attention from the game media and the player community. The reason is also easy to understand, because the keyword of this year's letter is "metaverse and blockchain".
At the beginning of the letter, President Matsuda designates 2021 as the "Meta-Cosmic Year", not only expressing the importance attached to this concept between words, but later hinting at the possible future direction of SE:
"In 2022, as the abstract concept of Metaverse begins to emerge in the form of products and services, I hope it will have a greater impact and change for our business."
In addition to the metaverse, President Matsuda also analyzed and imagined the future of many emerging hot concepts such as "NFTs" (non-homogeneous tokens) and "blockchain games".
Yosuke Matsuda
For example, "NFT", a virtual token similar in nature to Bitcoin, is a blockchain-based digital currency, usually used to represent a unique object, such as a museum art or the property rights of a piece of land. In the letter, Matsuda said that 2021 is still "the year of the NFT" and hopes that "digital transactions" of this nature will eventually be accepted by the public like "physical transactions".
As for the "blockchain game", Matsuda is also positive, saying that the company will listen to the opinions of different user groups and increase the proportion of related businesses in order to release its own tokens in the future.
In short, the whole article can be basically understood as president SE's praise for concepts such as "metacosmity" and his vision of SE's future direction (but does not involve specific details).
The player's response can be easily guessed. Anything related to concepts such as "metaverse" and "blockchain" will cause people to argue fiercely, and players will not hide their doubts about it.
Although the person who wrote the letter was the president of Square Enix, it seems that most players cannot get any substantive information from his statement. On the Reddit forum, the most liked review read:
"I'm still waiting for someone to tell me what specific benefits these concepts have for the game."