Square Enix and Crypto

[Brennus]

Honestly I've not spent a lot of time reading about and trying to understand all the nuances and intricacies of crypto-currencies, blockchain, or NFTs. But I do understand what they are and represent, and I do not like reading what the SE president wrote in his latest letter.

Why? Because IMO games should entertain without including overly obvious hooks for profitability, such as excessive commercialization of its various shiny blings and/or services. I'm fine with many things that do exist in current games that require real monies to purchase, such as WoW tokens, costumes, mounts, minions, FFXIV equivalent buys, fantasias, retainer journeys, character and MSQ boosts, etc. I think those are fine because they essentially help players attain certain goals that maybe their skills or available game time will not allow them to get to. In addition they do not affect my own ability to enjoy the game, as they do not compete with me and other players directly in the game.

Introducing NFTs into the game, however, opens up a whole new can of worms. Making the game pay participants to produce content is, again IMO, changing its dynamics drastically. You'll have "players who just want to have fun" and then entrepreneurs who want to make an income "playing" the game. I can already envision sweat farms of hapless "players" strapped to their PCs all over the world slaving away 12-16 hours a day for greedy business entities wishing to benefit from such game payouts, producing all kinds of NFTs that SE would then resell to us the players who just want to have fun.

If that was the goal of game producers, why have they tried to ban gold farmers, and power leveling services, and other types of schemes requiring real money to purchase? I still remember when WoW would threaten to ban accounts that players would sell to one another once they'd leveled their characters to max levels. Some level of real-money products and services, as what the Mogstation has now, is OK - even as many players don't care for them and are against them. Making the game even more focused on hard cash revenue tightly connected to blings and additional services would eventually turn off many current players, myself included.

I hope this will not come to pass. FFXIV is a very nice, popular, and well-loved game, cherished by many of its legacy and new players. I hope it will stay that way, and don't think that NFTs will be beneficial to it staying that way. It will become a different kind of game, and will cater to a different genre of players if that's where SE will take it.