Sega’s CEO Haruki Satomi has said that the company may ‘experiment’ with NFTs (non fungible tokens) within video games but they are fully aware of the negative reaction from gamers. “If it is perceived as simple money-making, I would like to make a decision not to proceed,” he concludes.
Here is the full statement taken from a recent management meeting:
In terms of NFT, we would like to try out various experiments and we have already started many different studies and considerations but nothing is decided at this point regarding P2E (*Play-to-Earn: Mean to earn while playing).
There have been many announcement about this already including at overseas but there are users who shows negative reactions at this point. We need to carefully assess many things such as how we can mitigate the negative elements, how much we can introduce this within the Japanese regulation, what will be accepted and what will not be by the users.
Then, we will consider this further if this leads to our mission “Constantly Creating, Forever Captivating”, but if it is perceived as simple money-making, I would like to make a decision not to proceed.
The statement is almost the exact opposite of fellow Japanese publisher Square Enix. Square Enix President Yosuke Matsuda spent a fair chunk of his New Year message explaining that they were ploughing ahead with NFT’s despite gamers clearly stating they don’t want them.
“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,” he said. “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.”
So far every attempt to add NFT’s to games has failed miserably. Ubisoft launched Quartz to try and sell 3,000 NFTs in Ghost Recon Breakpoint but a recent check revealed that despite the NFT’s costing thousands of dollars the company has only sold fifteen with a total value of the sales is about $1800.
Other publishers such as Wired have firmly stated that they will not support NFT’s in games and Steam currently bans any games that use them.
Source: https://www.thesixthaxis.com/2022/01/10/sega-nft-will-not-add-if-gamers-do-not-want/
