Square Enix President Yosuke Matsuda has detailed how he expects the game developer and publisher to take advantage of blockchain technology in a new interview.
Matsuda suggested that traditional game development, especially in the Japanese domestic market, is now “not enough” for the company, adding that he wants to “exploit the power of [autonomous game content] to create games that will continue to evolve “and use blockchain technology to motivate such user-generated content.
“In the future, we would like to try our hand at providing ‘autonomous gaming content,'” the president told Yahoo Japan (as translated by VGC).
“Until now, in most games we have delivered the content as a finished product, and the players played that content. However, there are a certain number of players in the world who want to help make games more interesting, by creating new settings and ways to play on.
“In the future, we want to use the power of these people to create games that will continue to evolve,” he added. “If, instead of relying on goodwill, we can also provide incentives to those who contribute to the development by using technologies such as blockchain, there is a possibility that innovative and interesting content can be created based on users’ ideas.”
The comments follow a controversial New Year’s letter in which Matsuda expressed hope that NFTs and blockchain technology will become a “major trend” in gaming, and that he believes they will be key growth areas for the industry by 2022, including cloud- games, AI, and blockchain games.
The latter “is built on the premise of a symbolic economy and therefore has the potential to enable self-sustaining game growth,” Matsuda said at the time.
ICYMI, Activision Blizzard apparently also measures players’ interest in cryptocurrency and NFT products. In a YouGov survey released to gamers over the weekend, Activision Blizzard asked gamers how “interested” they were in a range of “new / future gaming trends”, including blockchain “games to earn games” using cryptocurrencies and NFTs.