Square Enix in 2024 Doubling Down on Blockchain, AI, and Metaverse Technologies

cryptonews.com:

The Japanese gaming giant Square Enix reaffirmed its plans to utilize blockchain, artificial intelligence (AI), and metaverse in creating novel content for consumers.

The Final Fantasy publisher’s Representative Director and President, Takashi Kiryu, has written a New Year’s letter outlining the 2024 plans.

He noted that a change was occurring in the realm of digital entertainment – the realm of the company’s core business – throughout 2023.

Kiryu wrote that “we saw the release of eye-catching products and services in multiple domains where the commercialization and adoption of emerging technologies had seemed a more distant eventuality.”

The company identified three focus investment fields for new business domains in 2023. This year, it redefined the mission and goals for these areas: blockchain, AI, and the metaverse.

Last year’s letter spent many more lines discussing blockchain than this year’s.

The then-President Yosuke Matsuda said that, among the three investment fields, the company was the most focused on blockchain entertainment. Square Enix “devoted aggressive investment and business development efforts” to it.

He stated,

“If we consider traditional gaming to have been centralized, then blockchain gaming must operate based on a self-sustaining decentralized model. It is that concept, that philosophy that I see to be key.”

He further opined that blockchain gained “significant recognition as a field” in 2022. The proof for this, he said, is that the term ‘Web3’ became “a firmly established buzzword” in business circles.

Matsuda also noted the Japanese government’s support for the development of the blockchain and Web3 ecosystem.

The latest letter simply added that the company is working to modify its organizational