Gaming giant Square Enix, the long-running publisher behind such franchises as Final Fantasy and Kingdom Hearts, announced Tuesday that it has invested in HyperPlay, a crypto-native game launcher. And Square Enix will bring its Symbiogenesis game to the store.
Billed as “strategic fundraising” for the platform, HyperPlay declined to disclose the amount of the investment. But pseudonymous founder JacobC.eth exclusively told Decrypt’s GG that he sees the Japanese publisher as “the most forward thinking of all the major game studios, and has always been on the forefront of innovation.”
Square Enix has been playing in the blockchain space for a few years now, including investing in metaverse game platform The Sandbox back in 2020, experimenting with NFT stickers in Japan and later NFTs tied to premium Final Fantasy VII physical toys. And that exploration culminated in the debut of Symbiogenesis last year.
First launched in December, Symbiogenesis is a narrative role-playing adventure built around characters minted as Ethereum NFTs, plus the game has a number of tokenized in-game items minted on Ethereum scaling network Polygon. Symbiogenesis will join HyperPlay as part of the collaboration with Square Enix, alongside others teased in Tuesday’s announcement.
JacobC, previously an operations lead for Ethereum wallet MetaMask, further told Decrypt that the reason that many traditional gaming platforms and marketplaces don’t support blockchain games at present often comes down to “policies that are in conflict with composable smart contracts with Web3, and with all of the kinds of innovation that's happening today.”
He said that the connection with Square Enix came around a desire to explore new kinds of distribution options, and to move things “away from monopolistic platforms that don't have the best interests of either the players or the developers at heart.”
“Square Enix is very excited to be investing and partnering with HyperPlay,” said Hideaki Uehara, General Manager of Investment & Business Development Dept. at Square Enix, in a release. “We believe the HyperPlay team has built an extraordinary product for improving the distribution of games and creating new business models that are more beneficial for game developers.”
HyperPlay previously raised a $12 million Series A round last June. The platform now lists more than 70 blockchain games and also aggregates titles from the Epic Games Store and GOG.com.