GamerEscape

During a test broadcast for Final Fantasy XIV’s Letter from the Producer Live, Producer and Director Naoki Yoshida made a comment about discussions regarding the metaverse. The chat was instantly flooded with cries from players not to include NFTs into Final Fantasy XIV. Seeing this, Yoshida told everyone “We’re not going to be including NFTs in Final Fantasy XIV.” He then further elaborated on the subject, mentioning the letter from Square Enix CEO that made Square Enix fans worried about future, and current games having NFTs introduced to them.

We’ve summarized his statement below.

I understand our CEO Matsuda commented on the concept of NFTs in his new years messaging and there may be some sensitivity or nervousness happening around the topic.

I did mention it earlier, but based on how FFXIV is designed, we don’t intend on incorporating NFT elements in the game at this point, so if anyone is worried or concerned, I can state at this time that we don’t have any intentions in putting that in the game.

But looking at how people are reacting to the subject matter, there also seems to be a good amount of people that may have it misconstrued as something that you’re mining and what exactly an NFT is, so I’d love to, if there is an opportunity, speak to the subject of NFTs because it is an opportunity for a new business model and I believe the vehicle itself is a concept that could make a video game more interesting, but we would need a specific game design that would accommodate the concept of NFTs. If there was an opportunity to go into it in deeper detail in an interview unrelated to FFXIV, I would be interested to talk about it. I think there’s a potential to utilize it without going in a wrong direction. For any game, before we talk about the financials or monetary discussion, we need to make sure the game is fun, and that there are fans of the game. That’s an important piece that we still need to keep in mind.

But yes, again, no NFTs in Final Fantasy XIV, so don’t worry.

Naoki Yoshida