Square Enix New Year’s Thoughts: “Working on blockchain, Web3, AI and cloud”

10 months ago 48

Initiatives in three new business fields

Takashi Kiryu, president of Square Enix Holdings Co., Ltd., announced his New Year’s thoughts on the 1st. He said he is working on three new business areas: Blockchain Entertainment, Web3, and AI/Cloud.

The company has set new comprehensive goals for these three areas in 2023, but as of early 2024, the company is reviewing its organizational structure and optimizing resource allocation in order to respond to the three areas. .

Looking back on 2023, President Kiryu noted that eye-catching products and services were released in the field of emerging technology, drawing attention to their potential.

For example, the architecture sector is increasingly adopting augmented reality (XR) technology, which can convert real-world architectural structures into data, and digital entertainment is increasingly using virtual reality (VR) to create immersive He points to the emergence of devices that make this experience possible.

He continued that the next step is to apply XR and VR technology to new forms of content that blend the real and virtual worlds.

Furthermore, with the introduction of ChatGPT, generative AI has rapidly spread, and efforts are being made to extend generative AI to areas that are closely related to digital entertainment, such as images, videos, and music. He also said that there is a possibility that it could change to

Furthermore, President Kiryu stated that he would like to take advantage of emerging technologies as opportunities, and continued as follows:

We will proactively utilize cutting-edge technologies such as AI in both content development and publishing, and in the short term, improve the productivity of the development process and improve the sophistication of marketing activities, and in the medium to long term, we will use technological innovation as a business opportunity. We would like to use this information to create new content.

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Square Enix’s first NFT game

On December 21st, Square Enix officially launched its first NFT (non-fungible token) collectible art project, “SYMBIOGENESIS”.

Symbiogenesis is a fantasy adventure game where users exchange information with each other to advance the story and search for hidden items. The content is that the user solves puzzles in order to fight against a dragon that suddenly attacks the floating continent where the story takes place.

It supports the blockchains of crypto assets (virtual currencies) Ethereum (ETH) and Polygon (MATIC).

connection: Square Enix’s NFT project “Symbiogenesis” officially starts on the 21st

Last September, Square Enix invested in Highphen Pte, a Singaporean company that provides DMTP, a message sending and receiving tool based on Web3 wallet addresses.

At this time, Square Enix’s Business Development Director Hideaki Uehara said, “We decided to invest in DMTP because we believe it is a service that can provide innovative solutions in Web3 marketing,” and the company is also planning to utilize this tool. He showed a positive attitude.

connection: Square Enix and others invest in funding for Web3 communication protocol “DMTP”

What is Web3?

The current centralized web is defined as Web2, and refers to an attempt to realize a decentralized network using blockchain, etc. Typical features include use cases for decentralized networks such as blockchain, such as accessing dApps using virtual currency wallets.

Virtual currency glossary