EA's CEO has said that he believes that NFTs will be an important part of the games industry in the future.
In an earnings call this week, EA CEO Andrew Wilson was asked about the company's stance on "play-to-earn" games and NFTs. "I think the play to earn or the NFT conversation is still really, really early," he said. But he went on to note "I do think it will be an important part of the future of our industry."
"As a company, we have been leaders in the creation of digital content that has real collectible value in the embedding of that content as part of live services," he continued. "What we know about collection over time is the collectibility is far more valuable to the collector where the collected item has utility. And I think that in the context of the games that we create and the live services that we offer, collectible digital content is going to play a meaningful part in our future."
He concluded by telling those on the call that they "should expect us to kind of think more innovatively and creatively about that on a go-forward basis."
Those collections to which Wilson refers can easily include FIFA Ultimate Team, the game mode in which players collect cards from loot box-style systems. But it could easily be envisioned as working across games, such as NFTs for cosmetics in Apex Legends.
NFTs and cryptocurrencies are currently a largely unregulated entity often exploited for scam purposes, and have been accused as having a huge negative impact on the environment due to the energy consumed during the electronic mining of currency. Steam has already banned blockchain games, but Ubisoft already has plans to create blockchain games with play-to-earn features. Reactions to NFT and crypto elements in games has been mixed; while the systems are popular in some areas of internet culture, a recent Dead by Daylight NFT experiment did not go down well with fans.
Matt Purslow is IGN's UK News and Entertainment Writer.