Final Fantasy On A Blockchain? Square Enix President Says NFTs And Crypto Will Be Central To The Future Of Gaming

Yosuke Matsuda — president of Square Enix Holdings Co. Ltd. SQNXF, the video game giant behind the “Final Fantasy” series — highlighted the role of non-fungible tokens (NFTs) and blockchain technology in the future of gaming.

What Happened: Matsuda said during a recent interview with Yahoo Japan that — until now — most of Square Enix’s games were offered to players as already finished products, but “there are a certain number of players in the world who want to contribute to making games more interesting, by creating new settings and ways of playing.”

He then explained that the company would leverage those people to allow games to “continue to evolve” over time thanks to blockchain-powered incentives.

“If, instead of relying on goodwill, we can also provide incentives to those who contribute to development by utilizing technologies such as blockchain, there is a possibility that innovative and interesting content can be created from the ideas of users,” Matsuda said.

See Also: How to get free NFTs

The gaming community so far has reacted harshly to the industry’s ongoing adoption of blockchain technology. Major gaming blog Kotaku welcomed the idea of rewarding in-game content creators, but also argued it “doesn’t need to involve blockchain tech or NFTs.”

The post describes the blockchain space as a Bored Apes-filled future of “expensive jpegs and wasteful, destructive crypto tech,” and suggests that Square Enix should “just pay creators using money, no blocks of chains required.”

Despite the community largely opposing the adoption, a number of game companies are already working on integrating blockchain technology into their games, with some already having launched their first products. According to a recent report, Sega Sammy Holdings Inc. SGAMY Producer Masayoshi Kikuchi recently said “it is a natural extension for the future of gaming that it will expand to involve new areas such as cloud gaming and NFTs.”

Photo: Courtesy of JR Salazar on Flickr