Square Enix to reduce games lineup, will now focus on quality over quantity

Following numerous commercial sales misses, Final Fantasy publisher Square Enix will now practice Seneca's wisdom of quality over quantity.

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In a recent Q&A with investors, Square Enix's new CEO Takashi Kiryu confirms that the company will produce fewer games with the aim of delivering higher quality titles.

In the report, Kiryu says that Square Enix's multi-faceted approach to content was too fragmented, and that he wants to better centralize and structure games development teams to focus more on quality experiences. Kiryu goes on to say that he feels that Square Enix's games have fallen "somewhere in the middle" between blockbuster AAA games and indies like Palworld, for instance.

The games that Kiryu is referencing includes Deus Ex Mankind Divided, Marvel's Avengers, and the Guardians of the Galaxy title--all of which missed Square Enix's internal targets.

Forspoken, which released in 2023, also did not meet sales expectations.

These three passages outline Square Enix's business trajectory moving forward:

Q: What is required to execute the productivity-enhancing initiatives that will bolster the profitability of your HD Games subsegment, and how will you go about executing those?

A: At present, some of our development efforts are carried out primarily by internal resources, while others are conducted

primarily by external development firms. Over the long term, we need to strengthen the internal portion of our development

function. More specifically, I mean that we want to concentrate our development resources on carefully selected new titles

that we will develop to a high level of quality. At the same time, rather than focusing solely on major titles, we want to also take on new challenges, partly because we want to add to the diversity of our portfolio of titles, as I noted earlier, while also enabling our developers to expand their skill sets. Through this approach, we hope to strengthen our internal development capabilities, gain greater development proficiency, and establish a development function that enables us to consistently produce high quality games, thereby bolstering our profitability.

Q: Has the way that your development function has spread to cover so many bases made controlling your development

efforts more difficult?

A: It has less to do with our development function and more to do with the numerous entries in our lineup. I want to structure our development function so that we are able to ensure higher quality from each title by slimming down our lineup.

Q: Why have you been unable to slim down your lineup until now?

A: As our customers' needs and the types of devices available have diversified, we have tried to produce hits by developing a wide variety of titles rather than by focusing only on certain ones. I believe that this has resulted in the splintering of our

resource pool. Meanwhile, there have been clear winners and losers among the major titles released recently in the gaming

market, and it has become possible for even indies titles to make their presence felt. The market is increasingly polarized

between blockbuster and indies titles, but I feel that we have developed many titles that fell somewhere in the middle. I want to make clearer distinctions going forward.