Despite being one of the first companies to ride the blockchain fever of the last few years, Sega now wants its major franchises to get off the crypto roller coaster, Bloomberg reported yesterday. Shuji Utsumi, co-chief operating officer of Sega Japan, told Bloomberg that Sega's blockbuster franchises Yakuza and Sonic the Hedgehog will be kept away from the blockchain project to avoid "devaluing" them.

This follows an entire industry's shattered dreams of a blockchain future. Even when the game was "going well," there were stumbles, like Axie Infinity, which suffered a $600 million hack last year.

Other titles, like Square Enix's unpolished NFT Symbiogenesis, haven't exactly set the world on fire; NFTs, unfortunately, have been the subject of community backlash from companies like Discord, which quickly withdrew its NFT plans. For the most part, it was bullied out of the mainstream game.

However, Sega intends to continue "letting outside partners use lesser-known Sangokushi and Virtua Fighter characters for their non-fungible tokens," Bloomberg reports.

Utsumi also expressed a negative view of the concept of play-to-earn games, which for some reason keeps trying to turn our hobby into a day job: "Play-to-earn" game action is boring. If the game is not fun, what is the point?"

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He was also cool to the idea of incorporating Web 3.0 (a bizarre attempt to decentralize the Internet through blockchain mysticism) into an upcoming title: "After all, we're still looking into whether this technology will really catch on in this industry." [Despite Square Enix's second-guessing of its plans, it is a relief to hear a more sober approach from the upper echelons of a major gaming company. Utsumi is still open to using this technology once it is more developed.

"For the majority of the gaming industry, what blockchain advocates say may sound a bit extreme, but the first penguins always did." Don't underestimate them," said Utsumi, who believes the technology is still "useful."