The 1st of January 2022 means a ton of welcome messages from various video game companies. We’ll be sure to compile the best ones in a separate article, but this one from Square Enix is attention-grabbing for the wrong reasons.

In a New Year’s open letter, Square Enix president Yosuke Matsuda expresses personal enthusiasm for blockchain tokens. The letter didn’t state that Square Enix will add NFTs in its games, but he said that the company is keeping a close eye on the technology. Here’s a quote from the entire letter:

“[Square Enix will] ramp up [its] efforts to develop a business accordingly, with an eye to potentially issuing our own tokens in the future. 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 goodwill and volunteer spirit. This fact is not unrelated to the limitations of existing UGC (user-generated content). UGC has been brought into being solely because of individuals’ desire for self-expression and not because any explicit incentive existed to reward them for their creative efforts. I see this as one reason that there haven’t been as many major game-changing content that were user-generated as one would expect.

We do observe examples here and there of overheated trading in NFT-based digital goods with somewhat speculative overtones, regardless of the observed value of the content provided This, obviously, is not an ideal situation.”

The Twitter conversation about Square Enix’s thoughts on NFTs has been heated, to say the least.

Square Enix President saying they're going all in on NFTs in the same month their most successful game of all time is backed up with 20k queues and has to halt sales due to a hardware shortage caused by.. NFTs pic.twitter.com/2CeorCImgV

— Sam Thorne (@Strippin) January 1, 2022

https://twitter.com/BestJonRobEver/status/1477328233209032705

2021: Wow this year sucked but 2022 will be an invigorating fresh start

Hour 1 of 2022: The president of Square Enix declares the end of fun https://t.co/3kJP1nkQgt

— Quinns ? (@Quinns108) January 1, 2022

https://twitter.com/RedMakuzawa/status/1477289215427694595

pic.twitter.com/kjo0g6mEXm

— Brandon (@Glowing_Coffee) January 1, 2022