Technology Squared

There's a lot obviously, but there are a few things that are probably more difficult for them to do than others. This is probably what I would insist on today, one of the cool things about cloud storage and cloud computing is these platforms are open. Because when you store information out there, it's cool to be using it within the community of that platform. But if you can open it so that it can actually be shared out there with other devices, other platforms, actually you really enable the many platform and many devices approach.

And you also allow things that are pretty difficult to do these days on PS3 and 360, like community management. If you make a game on PC you can manage your community. You know who they are, you have a lot of information, you can have websites, you drive your community, you understand a lot of things, when you release a game on PS3 and 360 it's way more complex to manage your community.

Most of the time you basically release your game on PS3 and 360 and then it's not fire and forget, because obviously there's DLC, there's a lot of things the you can do federate players around your game, but having an interaction with your community is definitely complex and one thing I would really like them to think about is indicate they are going with some of these cloud computing and cloud storage services, they should try to think about how to enable community management, bi-directional interaction, and how it could also enable the many device, many platform aspect because that could be really great next time around.

No, it's very important. Home consoles are today, obviously, extremely important. There's a very strong digital business on PC and on smartphones and tablet devices, but there's also a strong digital market on home consoles. The home consoles are very hybrid devices. They could do more, they could push very unique and new business models, and that's definitely something they don't do right now, so we don't see it. We see the 360 and the PS3 as platform that are very retail-centric with a bit of digital, you can't really have the wide variety of business models you would find on a PC platform for example.

That said, I think this is going to change, and I think home consoles will again prove, next time around, that not only are they crucial to the business, but that they have really thought through the digital approach, and they are going to come back with more way of delivering content and more opportunities for a wide audience to find, basically, something that is suited to them.

So I think they will play a very important role moving forward. Obviously everything that is mobile is going to explode because I think mobility is probably something that old generations don't care too much about, but I think that to all the new generations of gamers mobility is something that is essential for them.

And sometimes it takes four years to make a game for home console, and actually the funny thing is that if your game ends up being a Mature [title] only, for whatever reason, when you start making your game the public that will be 18 years old when the game ships is actually 14 years old when you're starting. So when you think about a mature game and you know it's kind of going to take you four years to make the game, you have to actually think about how 14 year old people are playing today. What are these guys doing? Where are they spending their time? And I think most of the time we think about 18 years old people when we start developing the game and that's actually very wrong.

The other thing I would say is that consoles will always be very, very good for that type of Hollywood, interactive experience. The home console will always be very good at this, and I think that's what we're going to see moving forward, that there will be platforms that will better for certain types of games than others.

So a lot of the platforms are complimentary and coming back to your question on Square Enix, we look at platforms that way. We look at our franchises, the type of game we are making, and we actually select the platforms that are the best for delivering that type of experience. So I think this is one of the reasons why we end up with different games on different platforms.

Yes. 2012 will be extremely busy. As you know we are developing a lot of technology, we have a lot of recruitment to do internally, people to spearhead some of the new initiatives for this world of tomorrow and many people to take part of all these initiatives, so a lot of recruitment is going to happen. We're obviously consolidating our tech base on current home console, because we still have many games that are developed for 360 and PS3, both in Tokyo and in the Western studios, this tech base will be really important moving forward as well, because you know smartphones and tablets their specifications evolve very rapidly.

In less than two years from now we'll have the power of a 360 on a smartphone, definitely. So these things evolve very rapidly, so these current gen technology bases will be extremely important for us moving forward. Then we're obviously continuing expanding our technologies to the different software platforms on smartphone, Android, iOS and continuing our work there. On the web browser we are running on native client now and looking at things like HTML5, because for us it's always very important to be able to run on the different devices, different platforms that are out there.

Then we have a lot of research starting in what could happen moving forward in artificial intelligence, in animation, in rendering, in physics, in tools, development, pipeline, work flow, how to be efficient in content creation moving forward, as production values are going to ramp up so that's also something that we will continue tackling this year and then we are still working all the knowledge management and sharing initiatives within the group to make sure that the right people are collaborating and making sure that we can move faster through the life cycles of the consoles.

The platform explosion started to be really impactful two years ago when some really important stand outs started to emerge on smartphone, etcetera. We found out that web browser would actually explode the same way, and so we started working on native client etcetera, about a year ago. And so obviously 2012, it's just more platforms, more initiatives, thinking about things a little bit further.

So it's not like we are starting this year looking at new platforms, I mean, outside of 360 and PS3 and PC, this is something we kind of started in 2010 with smartphone and tablet and web browser last year, and now moving towards the world of Direct X 11 and all the cool things that we could do when it comes down to RPG which is a genre that Square Enix develops a lot, but also thinking about some of the other types of games that we are working on, so thinking horizontally with platforms and thinking vertically with genre of games and actually where we want to be with that type of game on what platform, and when in the future.

So a lot of recruitment, a lot of new platforms to support, a lot of very interesting initiatives, and it's both great on the technology side but also very much on the creative side in the company and the business also, it's becoming very creative these days as well with all the new things you can do in terms of business models and structure. So I think it's very exciting time for the development teams in the industry.