More and more companies in the games industry have been turning their attention to NFTs and blockchain, and the inherent skepticism that most have to that in general has been compounded by the fact that many developers and publishers have spoken about their plans to use NFTs in games for monetization purposes. One of several companies to have spoken about such plans is Sega- though it seems like things might not be set in stone there.
During a recent management meeting Q&A, Sega acknowledged the widespread criticisms and backlash against NFTs in games from, and said that that, and several other factors, will have to be carefully considered before the company makes any final decisions. Interestingly, Sega says that if its NFT plans are “perceived as simple money-making”, the company might even make the decision to drop those plans entirely.
“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,” Sega said. “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.”
Not all companies have had similar stances on NFT-related monetization in games. Ubisoft is all-in on it, and it looks like Square Enix is going to follow suit. That said, it doesn’t look like Xbox is too keen on the idea, while Steam has banned games with cryptocurrencies and NFTs entirely. Recently, GSC Game World also cancelled its NFT-related plans for the upcoming S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 following widespread backlash.