After Square Enix’s president, Yosuke Matsuda, went into great detail in his New Year’s letter (we wrote about it then), his stance was not well received.

Matsuda gave an interview to Yahoo in Japan, which was then translated by VGC. In the interview he was still very optimistic about blockchain, tokens and NFTs. “If instead of relying on goodwill, we can also provide incentives to those who contribute to development by utilizing technologies such as blockchain, there is a possibility that innovative and exciting content can be created from users’ ideas.

Until now, in most games, we provided the content as a finished product, and the players played that content. However, a certain number of players in the world want to contribute to making games more interesting by creating new settings and ways of playing,” Matsuda said. So he still stands firm by the technology (and he’s not alone: last week, we also reported that Lord British, aka Ultima creator Richard Garriott, will develop an MMO based on this technology), which may not be a good thing in this climate.

Let’s go back to Matsuda’s letter from January. To quote a paragraph from it: “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. However, I believe that a certain number of people will be motivated to “play to contribute,” which I mean to help make the game more exciting. Traditional gaming has offered no explicit incentive to this latter group of people, motivated strictly by such inconsistent personal feelings as goodwill and volunteer spirit. This fact is not unrelated to the limitations of existing UGC (user-generated content). UGC has been brought into being because of individuals’ desire for self-expression and not because any explicit incentive existed to reward them for their creative efforts. I see this as one reason that there hasn’t been as much user-generated, game-changing content as one would expect.”

While there is quite a bit of scamming and fraud around NFTs (and individual ownership doesn’t always happen…), it doesn’t hurt to be dubious on the subject…

Source: PCGamer