Electronic Arts CEO Andrew Wilson has backpedaled on the developer’s commitment to NFTs. Three months ago, he called them “the future of our industry,” now he says they’re something the company isn’t “driving on.”
These comments about non-fungible tokens (which tend to refer to in-game assets linked to a blockchain that supposedly confer absolute ownership) are a relatively fast-backtrack for Wilson. On today’s conference call for EA’s third-quarter financial results, the CEO did not go so far as to rebuke the technology–which has a number of environmental and fraud-adjacent flaws–saying that whether EA will implement them “remains to be seen.”
Still, Wilson’s remarks probably come as good news to readers who took intense displeasure to his comments last year (our Twitter mentions took a pounding when we published that news).
EA and Sega are now the two major publishers who first indicated their intent to get into NFTs, only to reverse course shortly thereafter. Their combined hesitancy might be a major indicator for where Blockchain tech and games are going–it becomes a PR boondoggle for bigger companies, but other niche publishers and developers can keep working on games tailored for the crypto-gambling crowd.
Square Enix and Ubisoft though? For all intents and purposes, they seem to believe in the blockchain future. It would be nice if they could actually tell us what was so great about it.