Square Enix regrets making too many games that fall between AAA and indie, plans to “narrow down” lineup
In a recent shareholders’ briefing, Square Enix CEO Takashi Kiryu commented that the company has produced too many titles that “fall somewhere between” AAA and indie games. He disclosed that Square Enix plans to narrow down their lineup in the future, while focusing on making a clear distinction between AAA and indie titles.
Square Enix recently released a summary of a shareholders’ briefing held on November 7, 2023. On this occasion, Kiryu spoke of the current issues Square Enix is facing, as well as the measures they plan to take in response. Answering a shareholder’s question about achieving sustainable growth, Kiryu commented that, due to the strength of IPs such as Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy, Square Enix has been “too dependent” on specific types of games and genres, causing a lack of diversity in their portfolio.
Kiryu explains that consumer preferences have been growing increasingly diverse in terms of genres, and that it’s not just major/AAA titles that are popular. As an example, he cites Square Enix’ 2021 casual indie release PowerWash Simulator, which has “accumulated steady revenue” even though it is an outlier. To tackle the issue of diversity, Square Enix will focus on strengthening their in-house development system, even considering inorganic growth options such as mergers/acquisitions.
Another tendency of the market that Kiryu notes is the “polarization” occurring between major and indie titles. AAA titles are becoming increasingly competitive (which he describes as a “survival of the fittest situation”), but indie games are also growing in significance in their own way. On the other hand, as Kiryu comments, Square Enix has been making too many titles that are neither AAA nor indie. Working on an overly wide lineup of titles has caused their “resources to become scattered,” which is why they plan to narrow it down, focusing on major and indie titles in a distinct manner.
Besides concentrating their resources on fewer titles of higher quality, Kiryu also mentions Square Enix’s plans to allocate more resources towards marketing. Marketing had apparently not been prioritized enough due to the strength of core IPs such as Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy.
I can’t wait for more high quality AAA titles like Forspoken.
Very much a powerplay for Kiryu in regards to admitting that they have been spreading themselves thin in Genre diversity, AAA quality, and the need to grow Indies into AAA over time. I think why he mentions this is because FF7 Remake release on Steam had issues with Dynamic Resolution not being able to be disabled in the options which was for PS4 consoles, users had to edit their INI files to get rid of it for PC, it felt lost in the shuffle due to 7 other releases in the year and had a lack of features. This pales in comparison to FFXV which took 5 months but had everything ready, features, optimizations, and even benchmarking software and they had more time to get things done than to just shove it out there. This goes down to mismanagement and quality control issues overall. Kiryu seems to be understanding this and also acknowledging the importance of PC with Steam by his actions.