Square Enix wants to speed up game development and is 'exploring various ideas' on remasters

Square Enix President and Representative Director Takashi Kiryu had some interesting comments about the Japanese publisher's new game plan.

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In 2019, Square Enix consolidated its 11 game development teams into 4 groups called "Creative Business Units". The hierarchy sees each individual team handling specific projects like:

• Creative Business Unit I (Yoshinori Kitase) - Final Fantasy singleplayer mainline games, Kingdom Hearts
• Creative Business Unit II (Yuu Miyake) - Dragon Quest, NieR, Octopath, Bravely games
• Creative Business Unit III (Naoki Yoshida) - MMORPGs, Final Fantasy XIV (also developer Final Fantasy XVI with the assistance of PlatinumGames and CBU1)
• Creative Business Unit IV (Hirokazu Nishikado) - Remasters and ports, assistance studio, Mana series

On the heels of releasing Final Fantasy XVI, Square Enix currently has a number of new games in production including Kingdom Hearts IV, Dragon Quest XII, and more Final Fantasy XIV content. These games take a while to make, and are quite expensive to produce...but the company wants to double-down on team expansion in an effort to release games more quickly.

In a recent Q&A with investors, Square Enix President Takashi Kiryu asserted that the publisher was looking into new internal studios investments in an effort to boost the lead time for its AAA games.

Q In the Company's existing businesses, it has longer gaps between game releases than its peers do. Even if the quality of its titles is high, these long gaps seem to impact sales. What are your thoughts on the release schedule for major future titles?

I will refrain from speaking in specifics, but I will say that we believe that the strengthening of our internal development organization will be of benefit as the difficulty of developing major titles is becoming extremely high, which also has implications for development lead times. We hope that this reinforcement of our organization will promote the development not only of major titles but also new IPs under the new management team.

Kiryu also mentioned that Square Enix is "considering various ideas" for new remasters of older games, but wouldn't talk about specifics.

It's believed that Final Fantasy IX is the next game in line to receive a major overhaul for modern consoles.