Gaming subscription services are being considered by many companies these days including Square Enix. At E3 2019, company president Yosuke Matsuda shared his thoughts and the possibilities of it happening.
Speaking with Gameindustry, Matsuda said the “We are exploring at present both poswhen asked about the possibilities of Square Enix doing some sort of gaming subscription now that they’ve become familiar with it working on the Xbox’s Game Pass “And we do already provide games for Microsoft’s Game Pass. But at the end of the day, the direction that we’re thinking about is having a channel of our own.”
Matsuda continued, “But at the same time that would require significant preparations and investment. We’d also have to consider whether or not it will work well solely including our own catalogue titles. At present, as I say, we are offering our games on multiple subscription services, including Microsoft’s. But eventually I do think that we need to get to the point where we have enough insight that we can build our own service.”
At E3 2019 we saw all kinds of games from Square Enix, everything from brand-new titles like Oninaki to a large-scale remake project in Final Fantasy VII Remake, a remaster for Final Fantasy VIII and a number of ports such as Final Fantasy: Crystal Chronicles and The Last Remnant.
When asked in an interview with GameInformer about making Square Enix’s complete library of games available digitally and how they would plan to do it, Matsuda said:
“We’re working on that in a variety of way. That is a request that we hear often. As far as our major titles go, most of those, we still have variations out that you can play now. The more classic titles that you might have played on NES, we are still working hard to make it so you can play those. We actually have launched a dedicated project internally to port those, so we are working to make them available on a variety of platforms. Certainly down the road, we would like to see that on a subscription or streaming service, so we’re exploring the possibility of creating a dedicated channel for ourselves.”
Matsuda talked about other publishers doing something similar:
“I think everyone is going in that direction, so we do want to be proactive in considering those options. We still don’t know if it would be a subscription service or an exclusive downloading service or what form it might take, but we do want to leverage our catalog.”
However, unfortunately there’s one major issue about getting a complete catalog of Square Enix’s classic titles, according to Matsuda:
“I’m embarrassed to admit it, but in some cases, we don’t know where the code is anymore. It’s very hard to find them sometimes, because back in the day you just made them and put them out there and you were done – you didn’t think of how you were going to sell them down the road. Sometimes customers ask, ‘Why haven’t you released that [game] yet?’ And the truth of the matter is it’s because we don’t know where it has gone.”
