Sony caught some flak a few weeks ago when it announced PlayStation Stars, a digital collectible program that sounded suspiciously like NFTs. However, the company confirmed that it wouldn’t be using any blockchain tech with Stars and that they wouldn’t be tradable. However, a survey question at EVO 2022 makes it seem like Sony (or someone else) has NFT ambitions elsewhere.
Sony has explicitly stated that PS Stars won’t use NFTs or blockchain and that the digital collectibles won’t be tradable or sellable. However, despite the NFT market imploding over the last few months, they’re too lucrative a concept for companies to ignore.
PS Stars might be safe. However, a survey at EVO 2022 given as part of a “quest” to win a free shirt may mean the company is looking elsewhere to implement NFTs. It reads:
What Do You Collect Most:
Which of the following NFT/Digital Collectibles would you most be interested in purchasing?
Evo-branded
Favorite music artists
Favorite Esports players/teams
PlayStation Items
Favorite Game Characters
Notably, there’s no ability to decline to answer here. To proceed further, you must choose one of the five possible answers. (You can see the quest for yourself here.)
The survey was posted on Twitter by @snorlaxownz and picked up by several prominent gaming industry insiders. Unfortunately, however, none of them knew what was going on and threw some random guesses in the air, which confused things further.
What we know right now is:
We can’t draw any conclusions from this information. Sony and/or Endeavor could be planning a massive line of NFTs. Alternatively, it could just be a random marketing question, and the results could be filed away and never looked at again.
NFTs are absolutely anathema amongst game enthusiasts, but they’re also potentially huge profit drivers. We’ll likely see companies taking a new approach to selling them in the near future, so it’s good to remain vigilant.
In other news, Square Enix is looking ripe for acquisition, and Beyond Good and Evil 2 gets yet another lead writer 15 years into production.
