XBL, PSN, WiiWare the "true battle" says Square Enix boss

Square Enix president Yoichi Wada has again spoken of his attempts to pursue "globalisation and a transformation to become network-centric", as he discusses the company's continued attempts to diversify its portfolio.

Speaking in a new interview with website VentureBeat, Wada insisted that of rival Japanese and Western publishers, "nobody has succeeded at globalisation." He attributes this to a tendency for parent companies to maintain too much control over subsidiaries or third parties - a mistake Square Enix does not intend to repeat.

"We acquired Eidos. By doing this, we have incorporated them in our group. They have become part of our family. It was not like we acquired slaves," he said."What I wanted to do is create an environment where completely different ethnic groups can co-exist in the same company. It is important that what’s in America should be handled by Americans. The same goes in Europe and in Japan."

Discussing casual games, such as Zynga's FarmVille, Wada stated again that traditional game developers were largely incapable of making such products." We have to use people who have not been involved in traditional game making," he said. "We try to get people who have not been involved in game studios before. In Japan, we recruited dozens of people as a group from another entity."

Wada also repeated his view, expressed in a recent interview with GamesIndustry.biz, that network services were of far greater importance to the future of the industry than new hardware such as Kinect and the 3DS.

"Frankly, these are not the most essential parts of the console technology," he said. "The key parts of the console technology are Xbox Live, PlayStation Network and WiiWare. The true battle among these things is taking place very quietly. We will see the results of that battle two or three years from now."