Square Enix's New Year's Convolution | This Week in Business
Brendan Sinclair
Managing Editor
Friday 7th January 2022
As anyone who read our 2021 recap column might remember, last year the games industry had the decency to wait a few days before going completely off the rails. We had no such respite in 2022, as Square Enix president Yosuke Matsuda released A New Year's Letter from the President on January 1 Japan time, when many of us were still stuck in the waning moments of 2021.
He starts the letter off wishing everyone a happy new year, then does seemingly everything in his power to ensure that doesn't happen. He says the metaverse "is not a mere buzzword but here to stay." He predicts that NFTS will "become as familiar as dealings in physical goods." He promises to invest more in cloud gaming, even though Square Enix has already been down that road (under Matsuda's stewardship, no less), and abandoned it after a year and a half when it couldn't convince anyone else to invest in it.
Yes, this is the same Square Enix whose quintessential game in its flagship franchise is about a megacorporation destroying the planet with its careless waste of resources
Those bits of the letter are varying degrees of absurd, but they were just preamble for Matusda's grand vision of blockchain gaming.
QUOTE | "I realize that some people who 'play to have fun' and who currently form the majority of players have voiced their reservations toward these new trends, and understandably so. However, I believe that there will be a certain number of people whose motivation is to 'play to contribute,' by which I mean to help make the game more exciting. Traditional gaming has offered no explicit incentive to this latter group of people, who were motivated strictly by such inconsistent personal feelings as
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