Square starts 2023 strong!

Or is it hopelessly weakly? Depends on what you want out of them, I guess. 

So it was something of a mixed year for Square Enix in 2022. They folded their cards and ended up selling off most of their western studios, announcing as they did it that the company was too backwards to figure out how to make money building and selling products for western gamers. They fell back hard on the practice of creating live service games with recurrent revenue schemes in the vague and vain hope of maybe landing a single profit leading mega hit like GTA Online or the Fifa franchise; only to end up having to pull the plug on every single such service they had announced. And even the games they did end up releasing had their regularly criticized flaws. The otherwise well-likes remaster/remake of Crisis Core, entitled Reunion, found heavy derision for their decision to recast the entire English vocal cast. Okay, actually most of the recasting was just bringing the voices in line with the recent FF7 franchise, but the Zach voice- wow, could they have picked a more off-kilter replacement, I do not know.

So the general consensus around the company has been that they've been something of a lost lamb, incapable of finding it's way back to the flock and the heights that other large scale AAA games are reaching nowadays for better or for worse. Final Fantasy XVI is perhaps their only real hail-mary waiting in the wing, especially as their next game, Forspoken, seems to have done everything it can to douse potential expectations. Firstly, the very presentation of the thing seemed pandering to the Millennial generation when it came to the protagonist and her characterisation, then there was the infamous trailer which doubled down on that feeling with gusto. ("So let me get this straight...") Then even more recently, Square released a demo (which was Playstation only for some asinine reason) in which the quest design was said to be rather generic with it's prototypical 'collect X and deliver' layout. Only for the developer to come rushing forward to insist "Oh, we only laid it out like that in the demo. The actual game is nothing like that at all." What? Then why would you put it in the demo, the product that is supposed to give people an idea of what to expect? Cherry on the cake? Forspoken only comes out two weeks before Hogwarts Mysteries. Good luck there, Square; you're literally sharing your target audience with a franchise that is their catnip.

But Square have been around since the conjunction of the Spheres, so I'm sure they can weather this storm out just fine as long as they don't do anything wildly stupid and start putting their new year's weight behind- um, what now? Square Enix used it's new years letter to promote their "aggressive investment" into blockchain games? Okay, it might be time to start pulling Square stock; they are literally trying to kill themselves now. In what world- after everything that the last year has brought to the Crypto world, including the life and death of NFTs, the overwhelming mockery of every single prospective 'blockchain game' with the downturn of the most successful entry of their type and more recently the utter collapse of one of the two actual 'safe' coins, FTX... you'd think Square would at the very least cool their jets. Nope, their 'pioneering attitude' from last year is now nothing more than a desperate gamblers attempt to 'buy the dip' and fool the very real reality in front of their green-stricken eyes. It's honestly sad.

Like a genuine blind man, Matsuda described the utter public revulsion thrown at NFTs and the Metaverse in 2021 as "excitement and exhilaration", and through pig-headed delusion seems unable to rectify that fantastical take, itself at odds with his following admittance that "2022 was a year of great volatility in the blockchain related space." (Interesting use of the word 'Great'. I would have tried something along the lines of 'horrific' or 'apocalyptic'.) Matsuda maintains his absolute blind optimism despite all evidence to the contrary. He maintains the belief that all of this stumbling about has just increased discussion around the blockchain, will probably lead to regulation, (Which is literally antithetical to the entire premise of Web3) and ultimately will create an environment more 'appetising' to the regular consumer. Which all and all is... delusional, to say the least.

Now Matsuda is convinced that every hardship that Crypto has suffered, the utter turmoil the market has been largely toppled over by the course of 2022, is ultimately a good thing for the consumer. Because nothing in this man's mind can ever be bad if he just spins it around hard enough, a true sales man through and through. He believes that discussion (he specifically highlights 'overseas' discussions in a way of distancing himself from the responsibility of facing the local disdain towards crypto) have produced active ideas on how fun it can be to financially tie down the consumer base into being unwitting pawns in a grinding machine that is set to develop money streams for players out of, seemingly, thin air? Seriously, Matsuda has offered nothing new to the idea of WEB3 crypto games himself, meaning he is very much still lauding the model of crypto game designed to operate off ponzi-nomics, where old players are only paid thanks to a, hopefully endless, stream of new players. Do you think he's even considered that? 

All the chaos of Crypto is going to springboard 2023's crypto year in the eyes of Matsuda; and that purely unfounded speculation somehow earned itself a dedicated section in his yearly address, after a year that saw perhaps the biggest fundamental shift in the general business model that any establish big name publisher has ever undergone. Is this his way of slyly sliding onto the offering table the possibility that all those sold-off studios can be replaced by new crypto-focused studios? Because if so then I have to be frank with the man- if he can't figure out how to sell traditional games born out of beloved and storied franchises to players, just wait until he's on that street-corner trying to sell products that people actively hate. He's going to really have to burn the loop button on his copy of Wolf of Wall Street in order to convince himself of the wisdom behind that suicidal business proposition. 

This comes, of course, after a year in which anyone with a brain-cell that hadn't already abandoned Crypto like the plague had themselves several consecutive awakening moments as to why this 'wave' wasn't actually going anywhere. Ubisoft had their failed 'Ubisoft Quartz' venture, which managed to launch so pathetically that the head of that department tried to save face by pretending the whole idea was a experimental soft-launch and they weren't really dedicated to it or anything. (Yeah, because you build marketing material and make big announcement videos for beta soft-launches. That's definitely how that works!) Paradox Metaverse had themselves a reality check when the world realised their 'crypto game' looked like trash. Konami had themselves railed by the community for flogging Castlevania NFTs. (Although, admittedly, they did inexplicably make money off that grift.) The writing very much appears to be on the wall for this industry.

But still dinosaurs like Matsuda remained glued to it like it's the second coming, and doesn't that just tell you something all on it's own? Executives of Matsuda's calibre, class and upbringing have a tendency to be diametrically opposed to any and all new-wave trends of the modern world. Influencers who want to love your game out to the public? Sue them. Modders who want to expand how much fun they can have out of your game? Sue them. Heck, Nintendo have a well documented track record of actively trying to kill off any attempt for a natural community around their games to form in any manner except just buying them. If someone from that class of Business is so taken by this new idea that he's ready and eager to place the weight of his company behind lauding it, that's the exact thing we all need to be sceptical of.