Square Enix has announced that it will be moving away from releasing games exclusively to select platforms, opting instead to pursue multiplatform launches in the near-future to amplify the sales of its flagging games. It’s all part of “aggressively pursuing” a new business strategy after a few years of bizarre decisions.
Square Enix has been going through a rough period of late, releasing a number of both high- and low-profile games that have failed to meet the company’s sometimes exorbitant sales forecasts. Though there are likely numerous reasons for this (increasing prices for premium games, live service titles sucking up money and time, etc.), Square Enix’s new president has been on a warpath, canceling projects behind-the-scenes, and reorganizing much of the management in place to best set up the company to get out of this slump it has found itself in.
To that end, it recently announced a three-year business plan dubbed, “Square Enix Reboots and Awakens,” that is upending significant portions of the business as we know it and introducing what some have felt constitutes long-needed changes, including an aggressive multiplatform strategy for its biggest games.
The biggest news out of the new business plan is that Square Enix plans to move away from exclusivity, in order to promote greater sales of its HD (read: AAA) titles. Both Final Fantasy VII Rebirth and Final Fantasy XVI have been the subject of headlines and controversy for the last few years due to their exclusivity on PS5—though the latter’s exclusivity is limited and already up—and their subsequent “poor” sales. The former has specifically been the crux of numerous recent conversations since it has been underperforming compared to its predecessor, Final Fantasy VII Remake, some years ago. As part of this new strategy, Square will now look to publish more of its AAA games on multiple platforms, which “includes Nintendo platforms, PlayStation, Xbox, and PCs.” It is also looking to publish more SD (mobile and browser games) titles on PC.
In more familiar news, this reboot of the business will move away from a “quantity” of releases, and double-down on establishing a regular cadence of “quality” games in Square’s key franchises. Square Enix president Takashi Kiryu has been very upfront about this change for a while now, canceling a number of projects and reorganizing staff recently to better execute on this notion.
Moreover, Square Enix seems to be overhauling its existing development structure, retiring its “business unit-based organizational design,” and consolidating the teams into an “operationally integrated organization.” In other words, say goodbye to your favorite developer, Creative Business Unit 3.
Outside of Japan, Square Enix will also be rebuilding its overseas operations after divesting much of its Western portfolio to the holding company formerly known as the Embracer Group in 2022. The company claims it has already been “optimizing costs” in its European and American offices, but is also looking to “strengthen the functions of its London development site” via this renewed effort.
Suffice to say, Square Enix has been on the precipice of a change like this for a long while now. Exclusivity has felt increasingly like a crutch to games and their publishers, and some companies, like Square Enix and even Microsoft, are waking up to the notion that these practices are best left in the past. Hell, even if PlayStation has faced its own issues as far as multiplatform releases, it also realized that exclusivity was only hurting its biggest games, and now regularly releases games on PC.
The exclusivity of some of Square Enix’s recent games has similarly made little to no sense, especially considering how much more expensive it has become to develop titles at the scale of the most recent Final Fantasy games. If any of these companies want to weather this otherwise turbulent time for the games industry, expect more adaptations like this from the biggest and smallest publishers and developers around the world.