Fresh from resurrecting Suikoden 1 and 2 (and earning some amount of public goodwill in the process), Konami has seen fit to remind us that, yes, it's still the company that made over $150,000 off its Castlevania NFT sale back in January. A news release on the company's website states that Konami is on the hunt for people who can help it build the systems and services it needs to "provide new experiences such as WEB3 and Metaverse".
Konami has been hard at work "conducting research and development to incorporate the latest technology into games and contents," says the release, and plans to launch a service where "players can trade their in-game NFTs (digital items) through a unique distribution platform using blockchain".
In other words, Konami wants to build its own NFT trading platform. The company says that the NFTs players will be trading (or that it hopes they will be) "can be used in-game as items," to "interact with other services and communities," and to "participate in fan communities and events".
The first pledge is clear enough: players will be able to trade in-game gear on Konami's platform, but the next two are a little fuzzy. I'm guessing the second is another way of saying you'll be trading with other Konami fans, not just fans of whichever game you're into, and the third could refer to an NFT-based event ticketing system? We'll have to wait, breath bated, to find out.
It's not exactly an auspicious time to get on board the NFT train: last month it was reported that NFT transactions on OpenSea—the most popular online marketplace for non-fungible gewgaws—had fallen by 90% since the start of the year. This is in addition to a wider crypto crash that occurred in the middle of this year.
But crypto is a volatile market at the best of times, and it could be that Konami simply expects it to bounce back like it's done before. Or, perhaps, the company has just built up enough inertia around its "WEB3 and Metaverse" projects that there's just no stopping them at this point. Either way, who wants to bet which we'll see first: Metal Gear remasters, or Metal Gear NFTs?
