These don’t seem like something Avalanche would approve of
If you were so inclined, you could plonk down $160 (£134) for theCloud Strife action figure, which comes with an NFT to gawp at on your smartphone or computer. That’s the ‘Digital Plus Edition’ of the statue, but it’s $30 (£25) cheaper if you just buy the standard figure with no NFT attached. Not a good look, Square Enix.
It gets worse, as Square Enix have even drawn attention to the possibility of not being able to use the NFTs if Enjin’s service was to ever end. Under a section titled ‘Caution before Purchasing’ on the listing for the Cloud statue, Squeenix say “Warning: In case the Enjin services becomes unavailable in the future, you may lose access to the NFT digital certificate of authenticity and digital version of the figure”.
One tweet summed the whole NFTs situation up quite nicely:
I mean…pic.twitter.com/RtJIhLffUa
Squeenix’s presidentgreetedthe start of the year by setting a course towards a future of blockchain for the company. Yosuke Matsuda didn’t seem to know how that would work at the time, however, saying the company would “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 tokens in the future".
It’s not just Squeenix jumping on the blockchain bandwagon in shambolic fashion though.Konami,EAandTake Twohave all expressed their interest at entering crypto. Companies usually cite it as the future of gaming, in some appropriately intangible way.
Square Enix and others may have committed to NFTs and the blockchain, but some games companies are more wary of the controversial technologies. Only yesterday, Minecraft devs Mojang Studiosissued a statementsaying they wouldn’t allow either NFTs or blockchain to “create models of scarcity and exclusion that conflict with our Guidelines and the spirit of Minecraft”. Mojang did clarify that they’d keep an eye on how blockchain evolves to see if it could offer security or practical ways to improve the game in the future, though.
