Have I ever told you the tragedy of the Squareverse?

 Do you really wanna fake it?

I can't help it; the curious conundrum of a studio called Square is keeping me up at night and I have to talk about them. Not just about where they currently are in their mission to assassinate their own reputation, future and profitability with what has to be organised strikes, but the world around them and how it's slowly moving to leave them behind even before this pivot is completed. But to summarise my last few blogs up until now I'll just say this: Recently the legendary Publisher has failed to put out a profitable new release (Their last was FF7R or something two whole years ago) and instead of trying to change up their development styles and truck away to hit their stride once again, Matsuda, their CEO, decided to take the mid-life crisis option and throw away half of their best assets in order to better chase a get-rich-quick pipe-dream, high as a kite on divorced-dad energy. Now most of Sqaure's Western studios are sold off, at a drastically undervalued rate, and Square explicitly declared in their own words that the now-free liquidity would be funnelled into NFT projects. My man Matsuda is going to be buying a Ferrari soon, he's chasing his youth.

Just to be clear, I'm not saying that the man has sold off Crystal Dynamics and Eidos Montreal in order to embezzle those funds into gambling on NFTs and investing in doomed Safe-Coin scam projects; (although he strikes me as the kind of guy who would do exactly that if he had a little less strict oversight) but rather that he's one of the self-hypnotised in the gaming community that has tricked himself into believing that the next big trend of the industry is a dead-end technology he doesn't understand. He's not alone in his belief, although thankfully recent events have made it so that he almost is. Yves Guillemot wheeled out his loyal lap dog from the Ubisoft 'Strategic Innovations lab', Nicholas Pouard to testify on the matter. (I imagine all the dust that must accumulate in a Ubisoft studio dedicated to 'innovation' must have flown up his nostrils and rotted his brain.) Nicky was adamant that it was the players that don't get it. NFTs are actually super beneficial to everyone and if players would just please invest in their NFTs and secure Ubisoft a recurrent revenue stream without any of the benefits of an actual investment; the gaming would be improved immeasurably! And of course the world mocked him for it. Wouldn't you? (Don't listen to them Nickster! The Mirror lies, the whole world's wrong but you!) 

And this disease of the brain has clearly set in on the Square CEO as well, because he's all aboard the speculative market train: choo choo! He is desperate to insist that the terms 'Metaverse' and 'NFT' are not fads like they are; and that there's a secret cabal of gamers that have gone famously underrepresented until now; those who play specifically to earn. Because that's the buzzword of this year isn't it? 'Play to Earn'. I think fellow Brit 'JoshStrifeHays' put it best when summarising this trend, and forgive as I bastardise his words: A game that you play to earn money in is a job. If it's fun then you're playing to have fun, if it's not then you're working to make money. If you are actively trying to make a game which players make an income from, then chances are you're shafting the elements of that game design process that would make the game a fun time investment, thus sacrificing the casual audience that would provide the income for the professionals to 'earn'.

Take Axie Infinity for example, I bet it's creators wish somebody would, with all the millions they lost from that hack! Even beyond the whole money messup, the core concept of the game was fuelled on an idea that seemed destined to dry up. Players were grinding and earning Axie NFTs that they squeak out a little bit of income from thorough gameplay and selling off assets. But the assets themselves had no actual value to them outside of a game which marketed itself almost exclusively as a platform to sell assets. So as people flocked to get these NFTs so that they could offload them, they found themselves wrapped up in an ecosystem full of other wannabe asset flippers, and no one on the otherend of this conga-line of speculation investors who just wanted that asset in order to play the game. That audience, who were only there to provide value to the game's economy and not earn from it, were actively discouraged from engaging, so the assets would never have their baseline value and the entire market would be destined to become a bubble. And those things tend to burst.

This is the sort of game that Matsuda sacrificed his entire western development branch in order to go to bat for; although he did also simp for the 'Metaverse' too; so how is that going? Well, did you know that Facebook (Yeah. I'll not calling them that other name.) already launched their version of the thing? Of course you didn't, nobody did. And that's because their embarrassing attempt to 'evolve' social media by expanding it into a real-world MMO without any of the fun, has been a catastrophe. Horizon Worlds, as it's called, averages such little engagement that Facebook can't even justify the usual Tech-startup routine of running at a loss until year 10 just to build up a captive audience. Mark and his Zuckers are swooping down asking for a 50% cut out of virtual assets sold; making it a better deal to become an indie game developer on Steam than to develop on the ground floor of Facebook's apparent 'upcoming front page of the Internet and WEB3!'

Matsuda is circling gutter fish, struggling to stay afloat, and admiring them for their vast successes. This isn't just being oblivious; this is being absolutely delusional. And it has come to the point where even loyal mainstayers of the Square Enix machine are voicing their confusion. Yes, I'm talking about Yoshi-P, the legendary game director who totally revamped the dying Final Fantasy XIV MMO and propelled it into becoming the biggest MMO in the world for a time (I think it just squeaked back ahead of Lost Ark recently, so it currently has the title.) He's also primed to produce the upcoming PS5 exclusive, Final Fantasy XVI; so this is a guy with a future in the company that he's not going to just piss away butting heads with management. But even a man in a position like that gets to the point where he has to call a spade a spade.

In a recent hubbub Yoshi-P was accidentally involved in wherein he was primed to do an interview where he could talk about NFTs (And use that as an excuse to promote FFXIV, because even at the top of his game this man is never off from the grind) and his fans freaked out over the impression this meant he was bringing NFTs to Final Fantasy. Yoshi-P came out to calm fears and ensure this wasn't the case, he was just curious about the potential of NFTs in the future. But the experience prompted him to speak a little further around the topic when he, largely unprompted, declared that the concept of the Metaverse was not entertainment; rather contrary to the cringe-ridden Christmas crumbs Matsuda left in his last state-of-the-company address. Even your visionaries can't envision the future in your nonsense, Matsuda; that hype train you're driving has failed to board a single passenger.

But if this man is anything like the Crypto Bros who jump from scam-to-scam, totally shocked to the core each time sizable chunks of their life savings are absconded with by the same techie ne'er-do-wells with their wardrobes of novelty moustaches, he'll learn nothing from the failings of others. Not even his own failings, when his NFT and Metaverse ideas are rejected by his customers and colleges, and his personal finances and job security start to suffer, nothing will shake him from this stupor. You think the curse of the Necronomicon is persistent, try the wrought-iron shackles of speculative investments on for size! Even as Crypto crashes, and NFTs fall further out of fashion, Matsuda and his yes-men will happily drag their careers down into the sinking abyss of failure all the while thinking that if they just whether the tempest for a nautical mile more, they'll reach the mythical land of the Squareverse. So I say leave them to their fanciful delusion, waltzing down their white-tile hospital wards with invisible partners, seeing a reality very different from ours. Close the door and leave them dancing with their blinkers on, throw that dog the invisible bone.