The image is called "WiiU Super Smash Bros" and it is a picture of a screen.
What would a Final Fantasy, Tomb Raider, or Deus Ex look like if it were powered by the blockchain? Yosuke Matsuda, president of Square Enix, has revealed that the company will release games that are distributed centrally in the year 2022.
Masuda wrote a letter about the company's strategy for the new year, but he didn't give any details, but he did give a good sense of his cautious-but-optimistic stance.
The most relevant section comes near the end.
A wide variety of motives will inspire people to engage with games and connect with one another. This will be enabled by a token based on the blockchain. We will be able to self-sustaining game growth by designing viable token economies into our games. I hope that this becomes a major trend in gaming going forward, because it is precisely this sort of ecosystems that lies at the heart of what I refer to as "decentralized gaming." If we refer to the one-way relationship where game players and game providers are linked by games that are finished products as "centralized gaming", then incorporating games that are not finished products as "decentralized gaming" will be a major strategic theme for us starting in 2022. There is an increase in societal literacy and acceptance of cryptocurrencies in the past few years. We will keep a close eye on societal shifts in this space while listening to the many groups of users that populate it, and ramp up our efforts to develop a business accordingly, with an eye to potentially issuing our own token in the future.
It also helps that there aren't any specific communities of fans ready to come out bearing pitchforks yet, unlike with GSG's S announcement or the Ghost Recon NFT announcement.
When huge gaming companies are faced with the realization that a lot of cash is locked up in the words "Metaverse" and "NFTs", they are usually happy to say they have been there, done-that. Square Enix could have brought up how it merged Final Fantasy with Disney lands in its Kingdom Hearts series of games, or how it brought Final Fantasy items, stages, and music to Super Smash Bros. Ultimate.
Instead, the company is dipping a philosophical toe in the water, strongly signaling its intent, and waiting to see how its passionate fanbases react to the idea of Square Enix issuing its own token, and designing more economies into its games, and those games becoming somewhat more about
It is not clear if the company is talking about cloud gaming. Matsuda writes that they are exploring the potential of using cloud technologies to distribute content and develop content that offers customers new forms of excitement enabled by the cloud.
