Square Enix released a New Years Letter from their president, Takashi Kiryu, talking up the company and their ambitions for the future.
Chief among their future and goals seems to be new technology, specifically that Square Enix will be “aggressive in applying AI,” according to Kiryu’s message.
Kiryu’s message said while artificial intelligence (AI) like ChatGPT have stirred academic debate, he believes AI “has the potential not only to reshape what we create, but also to fundamentally change the processes by which we create, including programming.”
The Square Enix president went on to say their company will be “aggressive in applying AI and other cutting-edge technologies” to both their “content development” and publishing.
“In the short term, our goal will be to enhance our development productivity and achieve greater sophistication in our marketing efforts,” Kiryu said. “In the longer term, we hope to leverage those technologies to create new forms of content for consumers, as we believe that technological innovation represents business opportunities.”
With publishing, Square Enix hopes to “enable greater global collaboration and to promote the shift to digital.” The company also wants to “maximize sale of new titles” while also delivering their “rich back catalog to more customers and in turn to expand the fan base for our Group’s intellectual properties (IPs).”
Square Enix also has plans to put structures in place to “enable closer collaboration between our content development and publishing functions” with the goal of making their customers “even happier than ever before.”
Kiryu went on to list the new business opporunities that Square Enix is looking to invest in, namely: blockchain entertainment/Web 3.0, AI, and the cloud.
“Last year we redefined our overarching mission and goals for these three fields,” Kiryu said. “We are currently working to modify our organizational structure and optimize our resource allocations to support these efforts.”
Former leadership at Square Enix pledged to pursue similar efforts, from AI to blockchain-based gaming, though they haven’t put out many blockchain games yet.
