Square Enix pledges to grow development capacty

Japanese games giant Square Enix will apparently be growing its development capacity.

That’s according to a New Year’s Letter from the company’s president and director Yosuke Matsuda, who wrote that he wanted the firm to “quickly” focus on making games that will have an audience around the world. This news comes in the wake of Square Enix selling its Western studios – and associated IP – to Embracer in 2022 for $300 million.

“We will also start to reconfigure our Group’s portfolio of titles for the medium to long term,” he wrote.

“To that end, we will accelerate our efforts to strengthen our internal development capabilities by further expanding our internal talent pool, while also more quickly concentrating our resources on the development of titles that are competitive globally. The remarkable growth in the scale of modern game development has made elevating the skill sets and focusing the efforts of our development teams more important than ever.

“Divesting studios and strengthening our internal development capabilities may on the surface appear to be moves that are at odds with one another. However, we must flexibly and constantly revisit our medium/long-term title portfolio and the development studios that create it in light of the environment in which we find ourselves. As such, both of these moves are essential if our Group is to continue to provide entertainment that meets the needs of an evolving world. We will continue to review our development organisation and use M&A and other methods to optimise our studio portfolio by both organic and inorganic means, thereby ensuring that we continue to strengthen our internal development capabilities.”

Matsuda also said that the company’s publishing arm would stop operating as Eastern and Western, instead working together as “One Square Enix”.

“We launched this new structure late last year with close cooperation between our two Chief Publishing Officers (CPOs), a newly created role,” Matsuda explained.

“We undertook especially thorough changes to the organizational structure of our Western operations, adopting a sales and marketing structure optimized to match the new studio portfolio created by the divestment of our three overseas studios. We are expanding our functions so that we can capture as much of the upside as possible from the digital shift that has been gaining momentum since the outbreak of the pandemic.”