Just a week ago, Square Enix offered players the chance to play Hitman: Blood Money for free. The only caveat was you had to sign up and play the game on your browser via the publisher's new cloud-based gaming medium, Core Online.
With cloud gaming gaining more and more steam, why does Square Enix want to enter the fray? Much less only offer their games? In an interview with GamesIndustry, Square Enix European president Phil Rogers commented that it was initially "a selfish move."
In some ways it was quite a selfish but quite an obvious move initially. We looked at some of our games – we work hard on these games, on the designs and the development – and we thought that not enough people were getting the opportunity to play them. We hear about the challenges in the traditional games market and the opportunities elsewhere so very much from the outset we were wondering how we actually get more people to play. Is it price, is it flexibility on console, or are there new ways that people are playing games?
Furthermore, Rogers states that he "believes in their games," and once they saw the emergence of cloud, they could see the reach for full potential.
One example Rogers gives is Mini-Ninjas. Rogers wants it to be played by "multiple of millions" of people and not just "single millions of people."
Take Mini-Ninjas, we think it should be played by multiple millions of people and actually it's not, it's played by single millions of people, so how can we expose it to a broader audience. Technically how can we do that, is it possible by re-working the code? What sort of service and delivery platforms can we build around it.
The only downside for playing through Core Online now is the mandatory video advertisments. Of course you can always skip the ads but then you'd have to pay. While some people might have a problem with this, some people are more responsive given that we, y'know, get to play the game for free.
If you want to try Core Online you can do so by checking here. Aside from Hitman: Blood Money, the service also has Mini-Ninjas and soon, Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light and a few games from the franchise as free games, too.
Are you fine with watching mandatory ads to play free games? More importantly, what do you think of cloud gaming being the videogame industry's future?
