On New Year’s Day, President Yosuke Matsuda of Square Enix (the company that makes super games like Final Fantasy 14) posted an online letter to share his excitement for the metaverse, NFT, Blockchains , etc… – concepts that are currently causing fever in the gaming industry. At the same time, he also shared more about the company’s plan to combine them in the company’s upcoming 2022 projects. Immediately, Yosuke Matsuda’s letter caused a stir on the Internet, starting a fierce controversy among gamers, but at the same time pushing the company’s stock price up.
First of all, it is understandable that fans and gamers are annoyed with this move by Square Enix. Although sought after in the gaming industry, NFT is still a controversial issue, even if some of the president’s statements in this letter are not very easy to understand. Matsuda wrote that he noticed that “some gamers ‘play it for fun'” and others are quite reticent about new trends. However, gamers have countered this opinion of Matsuda with very clear arguments related to the experience with the game.
In essence, neither the term NFT nor its meaning has been widely accepted and popular with netizens in general, especially players of Final Fantasy 14. However, most recently, in an article from Bloomberg, It was revealed that Square Enix shares jumped 8% in the first day of trading shortly after the letter was published (that is, Tuesday Tokyo time). This is Square Enix’s biggest leap since August of last year.
Contrary to the “play for fun” comment above, Matsuda believes that there are some players who play for the purpose of “giving”, “I mean it makes the game more interesting… traditional gaming doesn’t bring any benefits.” motivates the players who come later.” It’s not really known if this is true or not, but gamers have made it easy to understand why they don’t want the company to accept the concept of NFT.
Many players said that, with potential games like Final Fantasy 14, the traditional way of playing requires competition, trying to perform the player’s task. Rewards such as armor, items honor their efforts and create excitement for them. However, if the NFT appeared in the game, all they would see when looking at a beautiful armor was that its owner was too rich.
It doesn’t matter what Square Enix’s plan will be, but now its results are almost like a double-edged sword when shareholders are excited and fans are fiercely opposed. Other game studios like Ubisoft have announced they will stick with the NFT (but the NFT in their Ghost Recon also failed to achieve commercial success.Stalker 2 development team put the plan on hold due to gay backlash. While It Takes Two creator Josef Fares announced that NFT will be included in the game soon, however, the outcome of this trend is still difficult to say.
