Square Enix (SQNNY  ) President Yosuke Matsuda rang in the New Year with a message broadcasting his company's intent to make "blockchain gaming" a major strategic theme headed into 2022.

These blockchain games will be powered by "token economies" that "will enable self-sustaining growth," the tokens being non-fungible tokens, ie NFTs.

Under Matsuda's vision, players would create in-game content, be it skins, in-game weapons, or bonus items, which they could then sell as NFTs in exchange for cryptocurrencies.

In a sense, players would develop these games by themselves through the NFTs they create, the sale of which would incentivize them to make more, resulting in a cycle of "self-sustaining growth," according to Matsuda.

The "goodwill" and the "volunteer spirit" that today leads thousands of players to create mods and new content for games can only take the in-game universe of user-generated content so far, Matsuda implies.

"Those who play to earn" and "those who play to contribute" need to be incentivized alongside "those who play to have fun," wrote Matsuda, omitting any other incentive besides payment in cryptocurrencies.

In the final paragraphs, Matsuda signaled the possible release of Enix NFTs "in the future," but the letter was scant as far as which titles would be impacted or how the developer would implement this scheme.

Unfortunately for Matsuda, the letter has been met with considerable backlash, not least of all due to the demonstrable harms caused by the proof-of-work system used to facilitate the trade of many NFTs.

By one estimate, a single transaction in Ethereum, one of the official currencies of OpenSea, the world's largest NFT marketplace, consumes 48.14 kWh of energy, equivalent to a day and a half's energy use by an average American household.

Due to the resultant harms of the blockchain, Steam, one of the world's largest gaming marketplaces, has banned any game that incorporates the technology or allows for the exchange of cryptocurrencies or NFTs.

Valve, the owner of Steam, has been operating the Steam Workshop Marketplace since 2011. The marketplace allows players to create, buy and sell their content, all without the excesses of cryptocurrencies.

"Square Enix rly developed a game centered around eco-terrorists trying to save the planet/environment from corporate greed only to have the company's higher-ups make the decision to embrace NFTs in the name of profit lmao," wrote one Twitter (TWTR  ) user, referring to the plot "Final Fantasy VII", a remake of which Enix released in 2020.

Matsuda may have expected such a reception, given the backlash last month surrounding UbiSoft's (UBSFY  ) launch of its Quartz NFT platform.

The blockchain is "a useless, costly, ecologically mortifying tech," said the trade union representing the developer's Paris office staff.

Players of "Ghost Recon Breakpoint's" response to the launch has been similarly chilling. UbiSoft issued 3,000 NFTs in the form of in-game weapons skins and gear, many of which they gave away for free.

At the time of writing, 2,410 of these NFTs are owned, according to a third-party marketplace Objkt, which also reports daily transaction volumes that barely stray into the hundreds of dollars.