Handy Games' Chris Kassulke remains focused on making games, not selling NFTs

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I enjoyed meeting familiar game leaders at Gamescom and Devcom in Germany. One of them was Chris Kassulke, who started mobile game publisher HandyGames with his brother Markus and Udo Bausewein in 2000.

Kassulke has always been a fan of trying new things, from the very first smartphones before the iPhone to virtual reality. He believed very early in the Nintendo Switch and in free games.

Some of these things worked well, and some didn't. But HandyGames found a way to last for decades and get hundreds of millions of downloads. So it was interesting to hear Kassulke say he wasn't interested in non-fungible tokens (NFTs) after studying it closely.

Kassulke doesn't see a good reason for game developers to adopt NFTs, nor does he see how it's good for consumers. Instead, it focuses on making indie games that offer good gameplay, like the recently launched Endling: Extinction is forever, which is a moving play on the last of the foxes.

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Handy Games has over 100 staff and is hiring. It is now part of the Embracer group, as THQ Nordic acquired Handy Games in 2018.

Here is an edited transcript of our interview.

GamesBeat: Did you realize early enough that you weren't an NFT guy?

Chris Kassulke: As I mentioned, it's really about the value we don't see for the consumer. I see him trying to fund something for the next product, stuff like that. But I don't know if a character from game A, you can easily switch to game B, because I can't tell the exact story. It might be interesting for guns or something like that in specific games. Also, when you move it from one platform to another, it's already very complex, if it's in the mobile space, from iOS to Google Play and to a Samsung device. It's quite complex. If you're doing this from PlayStation to Xbox to Switch and then to PC - or say you're trying to switch from an Epic game to one you downloaded on Steam, that's another big topic. The problem is real.

If someone can show me a good example of where it brings value to the consumer, and not just telling you that you can sell it for me...