We’re way past the point of major companies diving up Japanese and Western markets as separate entities and targets, and though publishers like Sega and Square Enix once used to have separate focuses for those audiences, more and more the companies are looking to target audiences on a much more global scale with their games.
In its recently published annual overview Square Enix spoke about the same, explaining that it no longer deems the Japanese market alone to be sufficient to drive growth, recoup consistently increasing investments in the development of games, and turn healthy profits.
“Achieving major growth in the game industry is difficult now for companies that compete primarily in the Japanese market, given its graying demographics,” the publisher wrote. “As such, it is critical for our business that we produce hit titles that speak to the global market, which offers greater scale in terms of both customers and sales volumes. Furthermore, game development efforts are becoming more sizable and sophisticated as the result of technological advancements in the devices on which they are played, such as consoles or smart devices. The investment required to develop game titles is therefore an order of magnitude greater than in the past. In other words, the Japanese market is no longer sufficient for achieving a level of earnings that enables us to recoup our development investment and generate a profit, and we therefore need to approach our development efforts based on the assumption that we have to succeed in the global market.”
The company, as such, is looking to improve and streamline its internal development pipelines to be able to create higher-quality games that demand larger investments, which in turn will ideally have much larger audiences around the world.
“For our Group to better focus on developing titles for the global market in this changing environment, we need to concentrate our limited resources on the development of strong and robust titles.” Square Enix says. “We need to enhance our presence in the global market by quickly establishing an organizational structure that enables us to consistently roll out high-quality content produced through selective and focused resource allocation, which requires the revamping of our title and studio portfolio.”
Square Enix currently has a number of upcoming AAA titles in the works, including the likes of Final Fantasy 16, Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth, Forspoken, and Dragon Quest 12: The Flames of Fate, while the company is also working on several relatively smaller scale that are still likely to attract sizeable audiences, such as Octopath Traveler 2 and Dragon Quest 3 HD-2D Remake.