Square Enix President Yosuke Matsuda has reiterated his desire for the Final Fantasy publisher to create ‘play to earn’ blockchain games.
In a new interview with Yahoo Japan, the board said he believed focusing only on traditional games would be “not enough” for the company going forward, describing his vision for titles where users would create content and be rewarded for their work ( Matsuda said earlier that Square Enix could create its own cryptocurrency).
“In the future, we would like to try our hand at providing ‘autonomous gaming content,'” the president told Yahoo.
“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 frameworks and ways of bet on.”
He added: “In the future, we want to use the power of these people to create games that will continue to evolve.
“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.”
Matsuda was previously criticized by some in the gaming industry for a New Year’s letter in which he expressed the company’s enthusiasm for new trends and committed to making blockchain and NFT games.
In the letter, the president said he believed that blockchain gaming “holds the potential to enable self-sustaining gaming growth” by pushing for the “play to earn” concept.
The director went on to suggest that users’ ability to profit from their in-game digital creations could revitalize user-generated content, arguing that the lack of incentives had previously limited user creation.
“I am aware that some people who ‘play to have fun’, and who currently make up the majority of players, have expressed their reservations about these new trends, and understandably so,” he wrote.
“But I believe there will be a certain number of people whose motivation is to ‘play to contribute’, which I think helps make the game more exciting.”
The president’s letter was criticized by many industry commentators, including game designer and consultant Brand Sheffield, who wrote: “Among all the roughness of this whole letter, and even this quote, it’s what makes me think that people who play games should have fun. is only the ‘current’ majority, and the implication is that it is a good idea to change this ”.
Game development veteran Shahid Ahmad added: “We already have a rights issue among many players and I would argue that the behavior of large organizations has been a factor in that shift. It will accelerate and get ugly if large organizations then try to make their players mechanical Turks for their utopian metavers ”.
But at the time, Matsuda’s letter triggered an eight percent jump in Square Enix’s share price – the biggest one-day rise since August last year.