One year after posting a letter that was roundly mocked for focusing on web3, blockchain, and NFT, Square Enix President Yosuke Matsuda has once again posted a New Year’s letter…focusing on web3, blockchain, and NFT. NFT.

It’s a disconcerting sign that despite the industry’s round rejection of the NFT concept for the past two years, causing even early evangelists like Ubisoft and EA to shy away from the concept, Square Enix is ​​the only one still trying to make this happen. happen.

To be clear, Matsuda’s NFT references aren’t just passing, on this card, they make up almost half of everything. The 1,525-word letter has 655 words dedicated to web3 and NFT, with Matsuda dismissing the NFT market crash last year by calling it “volatility.”

“New technologies and frameworks lead to innovation, but they also create considerable confusion. Having weathered such social tides, some of these technologies and frameworks gradually become part of people’s lives, eventually giving rise to new businesses and growth. Following the excitement and jubilation that surrounded NFTs and the metaverse in 2021, 2022 was a year of great volatility in the blockchain-related space. However, if this proves to have been one step in a process leading to the creation of rules and a more transparent business environment, it will definitely have been for the sake of the growth of blockchain entertainment.

Keeping an eye on these environmental changes while considering from a high-level perspective what Web 3.0 and blockchain entertainment are really about presents a different perspective than if we focus on them solely in terms of technological or speculative investment. As I said in last year’s New Year’s letter, if we consider that traditional games have been centralized, then blockchain games must operate based on a self-sustaining decentralized model. It is that concept, that philosophy that I consider key”.

It’s the old “people don’t hate NFTs in games, they just don’t understand them” philosophy, which Ubisoft once used before gamers rejected its web3 forays so roundly they don’t even talk about it anymore.

The reason for this focus is that Matsuda reiterates that Square Enix has several blockchain games in development and will start even more this year. He expects “blockchain gaming to transition to a new stage of growth in 2023.”

It’s honestly amazing. True, web3, crypto, blockchain, and NFT are not dead as a concept despite recent crashes, but in terms of their integration into video games, it’s been disaster after disaster. Anything even tangentially related to the NFTs of traditional publishers has been roasted so much that it has made these companies feel like they have touched hot stoves. In the broader NFT gaming space, we saw the complete collapse of the game that was held up as a beacon of web3 gaming potential, Axie Infinity. Square Enix lives in a fantasy world where none of this seems to have happened, and they think it’s definitely a great idea to spend a lot of money down this hole while selling off studios like Eidos and Crystal Dynamics that made real video games.

Good luck Matsuda, you’re going to need it.

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