Matsuda's Massive Mistake

 How to ruin the holidays with one letter.

There's a virus going around. A plague on society that permeates the steel walls of any edifice you might construct, violates any quarantine you think to establish and erodes every preliminary precaution you decide to take. And it's name is- hmm? Oh no not that virus. God no. No, unfortunately there's no vaccine for dealing with the virus known as 'NFT mania', or at least I've decided to know it as that right now which means it's now known as that. Known by me. And now you too. It's a term used to denote those who have become so blinded by the idea of Non Fungible Tokens that they can no longer see beyond the bridge of their self-fart-sniffing noses and have convinced themselves that the world is, or already has, changed solely from the introduction of these new minimally regulated scam markets. These gibbering fools think themselves the chosen promethean class granted to earth, grasping in their sweaty little paws the flame that will dawn a new understanding of life upon society. (And a stupid amount of profits upon their heads.)

You don't really need me to tell you this, and honestly I'm only really saying it because it's just so gosh darn cathartic, but they are so utterly blind to the nowhere train they've all jumped on that it's honestly shocking. You'd have to be an actual delusional person to not see how in their current state the NFT movement is good for nothing more than parting idiots with their money, and none of these 'visionaries' posses a modicum of the talent and/or creativity required to forge something real and valuable from that twisted base which the NFT system currently represents. Sure, maybe a magical genius will pop out of the sky and suddenly figure out how NFTs can revolutionise the human/machine interfacing relationship forever more, but I'd rate that as about the same probability of a Russian satellite falling out of the sky and crushing you in a meteoric divebomb. It's not really worth going to the bookies over. But there's no telling these executives and greedy hopefuls that- they're gearing up to start mortgaging their third summer houses in order to ride this highway right off the cliff to nowhere, and some of them want to drag their customers along for the ride.

Yosuke Matsuda has been the CEO of Square Enix since 2013, which means he has been in charge of one of the biggest games companies in all the world, so this guy ain't no idiot. Typically. He typically isn't an idiot. To be honest the only knowledge I had of Matsuda was the Final Fantasy XV live stream event where he showed up as a special boss enemy, as well as Nier Automata in which he played the same role. And can I just say, what a weird way to be part of your employees work! I mean when you saw it in FFXV it was kinda cute, a send up to the big man in charge, they probably had some fun with it. But then he's a boss in Nier as well? At that point it starts to feel like he's asking to be put into these games, which reeks of a little narcissism, wouldn't you say?  And then there's the fact that his own employees seem to envision him as this energy bar firing, death beam using, enemy boss- what does it say about the relationship within the walls if that's what you employees paint you as? Maybe it says that Matsuda is a near unassailable obstacle between the development team and making great games, which is a total supposition on my part, but would appear to be supported given the recent holiday message our Matsuda-san gifted to the Internet.

Bringing the disparate parts of this blog together, our man could hardly go 2 paragraphs into his New Year address to the company, fans and investors before immediately shooting into a diatribe about NFTs and practically drooling over his digital letter with how much he simps for those badboys. Oh yeah, Matsuda isn't just an NFT hopeful, he's fullblown, robe-wearing, juice drinking, sacrificing virgins, delusional over the NFT trend. As evidenced by the insistence, and reiterations, to the effect that the most gimmicky dividends of 2021, Metaverse and NFTs, are "here to stay" and not just "Buzzwords." (Because if anyone is going to know the difference between 'buzzwords' and 'tangible ideas', it's going to be the man who lives on an all-buzzword diet seven days a week.) Oh, and he did in fact write the line "NFTs were met with a great deal of enthusiasm by a rapidly expanding user base", which is either a serious onset sign of senility, or an example of some galactic-level self delusions. 

Let us be clear, NFTs have certainly inspired excitable whispers and prematurely ruined undergarments by bottom feeder crypto bros who offer no value to society beyond the admittedly extremely charitable act of sectioning themselves away from the rest of us most of the time, but as for the other %99.99 of the breathing world: we could care less. (Or are actively hostile to a trend built to benefit only the overly rich minority) The kinds of people who are foaming at the mouth over NFTs are the same breed of leech that has lived off the jittering rise and fall of meme cryptocurrency stocks for the past 3 years. Speculative investors on crack. Rich kid chumps with more digits in their pin numbers than working neurons in their cerebral cortexes. They love NFTs, and the bulk of these crazy big sales you see every other week is just them selling worthless digital junk back and forth with one another- because everyone smart in this equation are the unscrupulous people handing out these ticking economic-crash timebombs and making their fortunes in backend kickbacks. Which is to say, no one in this entire formula crosses-over with regular loyal Square Enix consumers.

I say this because inevitably, obviously, Matsuda is looking to tie NFTs into his company in order to satiate those mutant money signs that have grown out of his eyeballs- but just like with Ubisoft, this is just setting Square up for a messy future. Even in the best case scenario where the roving Crypto-bro cabal takes to whatever low effort NFT trash that Matsuda's personal team is cooking up, the short-term cash infusion is going to be a tad offset by the genuine disgust drummed up from the actual people who are buying the games in your video game company. No one is falling for the 'grand ethereal dream' of the NFT future, no one except moron CEOs like Yves Guillemot and Matsuda, it would seem. So what's the point of a little extra windfall to your already rich company if huge swathes of your reputation is the cost? And why do I think it's at least likely that at some point Matsuda has had someone sit down and mathematically work out that equation for him so that he knows precisely how much potential revenue his naked greed is going to cost him?

The most telling part of his letter, I think, is the part where he identifies that a lot of people 'play to have fun', and that these people might have some 'reservations' (as he conservatively puts it) regarding the coming age of cringe. Ah, but he worries not because Matsuda believes in the coming of those that " 'play to contribute' ", which he clarifies to mean those who play to "make the game more exciting." This is fuelled by a belief that only a truly soulless CEO could have, that people who contribute to a game (he's talking User Generated Content, not just contributing to his bank account. Which all player do, by the way.) are driven by petty rewards such as "goodwill" and "volunteer spirit",  but they will be finally catered for and driven towards greatness once monetary incentives are introduced into the picture. Incentives that he will obviously get a kick back on, because our man is using the heavily derided ideal of 'paid mods' to hide his lazy shot for an easy payday. I try not to say this about too many people, but Matsuda sounds like a bit of a scumbag right here.

What a gift it is to the employees of Square Enix, to go on holiday after a hard year that has demanded tough concessions for every one of them, only for their CEO to wave his dong on the internet and turn the company into a clownshow over the break. There's no hiding from the sheer and unrelenting backlash this letter has received universally, and to recycle the words of Bobo the CEO himself; "Understandably so." I felt no prouder in the community then when I spied the sales records for Ubisoft's ill fated Ghost Recon NFTs and spotted that no only had the team likely not broken even with sales, but that no one was selling the 600 hour helmets. Whatever sad attempt at NFTs Matsuda manages to cook up over 2021, I can only hope an equal amount of success upon them too. What a shame Matsuda, what a crying shame.