Square Enix has outlined a new three-year plan for the company to ‘reboot’ itself. Don’t let the optimistic tone fool you, though – this new Square Enix will be making less games.
As you may remember, Square Enix decided over the past two years to shift direction to make their games for multiple platforms, after their newest Final Fantasy games sold under expectations as PlayStation 5 console exclusives. They brought Final Fantasy XIV to Xbox Series X|S, and recently revealed that Final Fantasy VII Remake: Intergrade is coming to the Switch 2.
We have also reported to some degree about intrigues and official announcements of game developers moving studios and positions across the company. Regarding how they make games, Square Enix explained this big change:
Based on the concept of integrated studio operations, we reviewed the entire process of title development progress management and changed to a system in which management and studios manage the development progress of all large-scale investment titles, promoting optimization of the development portfolio and schedule, as well as talent mobility and development cost optimization among in-house development personnel.
What’s unsaid in this quote is that right until recently, Square Enix’s projects have been global big budget efforts. This new direction amounts to some belt tightening within the company. That means they’ll do most of their work in-house moving forward, and they may limit or even eliminate their practice of outsourcing work for large scale development. They also alluded to using AI to come up with R&D projects to make development cheaper.
However, Square Enix also revealed they’re cancelling many of their games, to increase their focus and budgets on their most important projects. They just announced they’re cancelling Kingdom Hearts Missing Link, months after even this mobile game’s open beta was itself cancelled. Obviously, for this example, they’re going to put that money and transfer who they can from this project over to Kingdom Hearts 4.
To quote Square Enix in this account:
We will continue to control the scale of development investment in a disciplined manner.
So we should absolutely look forward to more Square Enix games coming to Xbox and Switch as much as on PlayStation and PC. But on the flip side, there’ll be considerably less games in the near future. Square Enix also outlined plans to expand their non-video game businesses, and these might surprise longtime fans.
That’s because the company best known for making Final Fantasy games is also a longtime manga publisher. This report actually had a slide showing off their current manga hits, including Rust Blaster, The Apothecary Diaries, Toilet-Bound Hanako-kun, and My Dress-Up Darling. Most fans also forget that Square Enix owns Taito, but because of that they also have a video game and pachinko arcade business in Japan.
Square Enix has some novel ideas for transmedia projects for their IPs, including a Final Fantasy x Magic The Gathering collaboration, a Nier: Automata anime, a Dragon Quest Island theme park attraction, and future Final Fantasy concerts. They will also be launching pop-up stores and merchandise stores in and out of Japan, using both the Square Enix and Taito branding.
The TLDR to all this is Square Enix has to make less games now. And certainly, they probably felt burned after not only their experience with the PlayStation 5-exclusive Final Fantasy games, but huge flops and disappointments like Balan Wonderworld, Babylon’s Fall, Outriders, and Forspoken. Square Enix is pulling back on those experiments for now, which also means we’re less likely to see bold projects that paid off like Stranger of Paradise: Final Fantasy Origin.
But maybe all of that will be OK, if it means that Square Enix doesn’t have to worry about sticking around. Hopefully, they can meet our expectations and make everyone happy with the big games we want them to make.
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