The creator of the Super Mario and Pokemon franchises is more concerned with providing a good experience for its players than with winning a console race.
After releasing its latest financial results report, Nintendo held a live Q&A where they reportedly expressed “interest” in the “potential” of the Metaverse when it comes to introducing blockchain and nonfungible token (NFT) technology into their video games.
David Gibson, senior analyst at MST Financial, asked in a tweet what the Japanese gaming giant thought about the Metaverse and NFTs, and they confirmed that they are not currently working on anything but are still defining what they could offer gamers.
Q) How think about the 98m versus next console?
A) Into 6th year of Switch and we are maintaining momentum, we are looking at how to expand and grow this 100m users, leading into next gen device (sounds like next device will be backward compatible!) 7/— David Gibson (@gibbogame) February 3, 2022
It is notable that Nintendo’s main concern is “what joy we can provide” to players and fans. They are clearly being cautious about any potential introduction of NFTs or integrations within metaverses. These words from the makers of the Pokemon and Zelda franchises come at at time when other major video game companies and consoles are experimenting with blockchain gaming.
Ubisoft has created an NFT platform called Ubisoft Quartz, and Konami, the creators of Castlevania, have released their own NFT collection. Meanwhile, Microsoft paid $69 billion for Activision Blizzard and confirmed that Xbox will work on metaverse platform development.
However, Ubisoft’s introduction of Quartz and Digits has been met with significant backlash from its community, and Ubisoft executive Nicolas Pouard recently suggested that gamers may not fully understand the benefits of NFTs.
During the financial briefing, Nintendo announced a 2.5% profit loss for the nine months through December as shortages of computer chips hurt production.
