Square Enix President Yosuke Matsuda issues a New Year's Letter indicating the company will pursue blockchain games and NFTs in 2022
Well, we couldn't get more than a few hours without another major company tossing a lit match into the crypto/blockchain/NFT tinderbox, and this time it's (throws dart) Square Enix!
Context & Ripple Effects
Square Enix joined a major-publisher NFT push soon after Ubisoft became the first major game company in the coverage to add NFT items to a game through its Ghost Recon Breakpoint NFT rollout. The significance is strategic: the company’s president placed blockchain games alongside its 2022 priorities.
The surrounding coverage shows why such declarations became contentious. Developers at EA, Zynga, Ubisoft and other publishers later described internal disapproval of crypto and NFT plans, while Sega ultimately kept its biggest games out of third-party blockchain projects.
First-order effects
- Square Enix’s leadership gives blockchain games and NFTs an explicit 2022 mandate, directing the company’s product planning toward a category already being tested by Ubisoft.
- Yosuke Matsuda becomes the named executive accountable for Square Enix’s blockchain-game direction, making the strategy a visible part of the company’s positioning.
Second-order effects
- Square Enix’s entry adds pressure on other large publishers to decide whether to pursue comparable NFT initiatives or distinguish their core-game strategies from them.
- Developer resistance documented across EA, Zynga and Ubisoft makes internal buy-in a practical constraint on executives seeking to turn blockchain plans into game releases.
Third-order effects
- The later Sega decision to withhold its biggest games from blockchain projects points toward a split between experiments using blockchain and publishers’ willingness to attach established franchises to them.
- If major publishers continue to treat blockchain as a peripheral rather than flagship strategy, the market will favor limited pilots over broad integration into core game portfolios.
The trend: Large game publishers are testing blockchain strategies while increasingly separating those experiments from the franchises and development teams that anchor their businesses.