Square Enix celebrates the New Year by talking about NFTs, Blockchain and the Metaverse

The President of Square Enix, Yosuke Matsuda, wanted to wish a happy new year to the players of the industry, although he did it in a somewhat curious way, talking about the NFT, the games based on the blockchain, or the metaverse, which already indicates an interest in adapting these technologies due to the impact it has, and of course, to help increase revenues from digital products.

“I would like to start by wishing everyone a happy new year.

The metaverse was a hot topic in 2021, inspiring a lively global conversation, first about what the metaverse is and then about the kinds of business opportunities it presents. In this context, Facebook changed its name in October to Meta, which shows that the concept is not a simple buzzword, but that it is here to stay. The metaverse garnered so much attention that 2021 was dubbed the “Year of the Metaverse.”

I attribute this in large part to advances in extended reality (XR) technology, the increasing prevalence of the cloud and 5G, more sophisticated blockchain technology, and other technological evolutions that have taken place in various fields in recent years. . This is because these advancements are leading to services that fall under the metaverse umbrella. The metaverse is likely to see a significant transition to a commercial phase in 2022, with a wide range of services appearing on the scene. As this abstract concept begins to take concrete form in the form of product and service offerings, I hope it will bring about changes that will also have a more substantial impact on our business.

Another term that quickly caught on in 2021 was “NFT” or “non-fungible token.” The advent of NFTs using blockchain technology significantly increased the liquidity of digital goods, allowing a variety of such goods to be traded at high prices and sparking conversations around the world. I see the year 2021 not only as “Metaverse: Year One”, but also as “NFTs: Year One”, since it was a year in which the NFTs were received with great enthusiasm by a rapidly expanding user base. However, we see examples here and there of exaggerated trading of NFT-based digital goods with somewhat speculative overtones, regardless of the observed value of the content provided.This is obviously not an ideal situation, but I hope to see an eventual resizing in digital goods transactions as they become more common among the general public, with the value of each available content corrected to its true estimated value, and I hope they become as familiar as physical goods transactions.

To cope with these changes in our business environment, the medium-term business strategy that we unveiled in May 2020 identified AI, cloud, and blockchain gaming as new domains that we should focus our investments on, and we have subsequently been aggressive in our R&D efforts and investments in those areas.

By last, there are blockchain games. Whether single-player or online games, games have traditionally involved a one-way flow whereby creators, like us, provide a game to the consumers who play it. By contrast, blockchain games, which have come out of their infancy and are now entering a growth phase, are based on the premise of a token economy and therefore have the potential to enable the self-sustaining growth of games.

Diversity is the driving force behind this self-sustaining growth of games, both in the way people engage with interactive content such as games, and in their motivations for doing so. Advances in token economies will likely give further momentum to this diversification trend. I think the ‘play to win’ concept, which people are so excited about, is an excellent example of this. “