No kidding
Having taken over the shambled house that Yoichi Wada left, Square Enix’s new CEO Yosuke Matsuda is looking to make big strides to turn around the publisher’s financial woes. Speaking with Infospeak, Matsuda talked of a new direction that aims to lower the barrier between development and sales.
“Up until now, the profit of home-console games have been decided by price x number [sold],” said Matsuda. “Development and sales were divided, and the game developers only needed to concentrate on their work. That’s where the strengths of our company laid within.
“At the very beginning, the game business started out with ‘How can we get people to insert coins?’ Presently, online games are prosperous, which again, has the theme of ‘How can we charge the people?’ as developers and sales have become inseparable, and the devices they can be played on has spread vastly. It’s truly a paradigm shift.”
Hopefully this doesn’t mean Square Enix is about to dip into Capcom levels of microtransactions and DLC shadiness, but I can’t help but hear that the more I read it over. Piece of advice, Mr. Matsuda: that model hasn’t been working in the long run.
Square Enix President: “We Must Reform With Urgency” [Siliconera]