Yoichi Wada - Part One

As an entertainment company the business won't be viable if we don't continue to nurture new IPs - but we don't need to come up with something that's dramatically new for the existing franchises, because we already have fans for those. If we carefully evolve them, that should be sufficient.

In nurturing new IP, the exchange of culture and technology becomes very important. In the past both Eidos and Square Enix have made investments in new IPs, but sometimes it's proved to be quite challenging.

This is probably because we didn't do enough work before the actual production - our priority was to come up with new IPs, so we rushed ourselves and had too many projects coming along at the same time.

The lesson we learned is that we have to be very selective in that area.

Looking at the titles we have in our portfolio, I think what we offer are games in which people can genuinely enjoy the game experience. When you watch a movie, you enjoy the movie experience, and I think we do something similar, bringing a game experience to our players.

As long as they're enjoying the games, the genre isn't so significant - be it action, adventure or RPG - as long as we have a compelling storyline and appealing characters... as long as the gamers enjoy the game experience, that's what we offer and what we'll continue to work on.

So it's not really different genres we're looking at, but by leveraging all the resources we have within the group I think that we can achieve our objectives.

For new things such as social games - I don't know if I should call this a genre or a new service - there's a communication between players which is interesting. It's something we're already trying to offer, and going forward we'd like to have a more solidified business place with these social games.

Social games are played so that people can socialise with each other, so in that sense it's going to be very geographically specific - we might want to release a new game in France, Germany, Japan, the US and Canada, but the design structure will be specifically catering to these different markets.

So we are a global company, but for social games I think they're deeply rooted to the different cultures and lifestyles of the people there, and you have to look at the local market.

But we do have an advantage being a global corporation, because we can share the network engines - but the surface designs will be specifically made for local markets.

Yes, I believe so. Just to give you an example, we now have an office in Paris - but prior to the acquisition we only had a footprint in the UK. Of course, we were going to France and Germany on business trips, but if you have an office in Paris you can talk to people who grew up in France and discover things which never came up before from the business trips alone.