In an interview with GameCentral, Square Enix’s president and CEO Yosuke Matsuda reassured fans that Square Enix will keep investing in single-player games. Matsuda has also explained what the term ‘Games as a service’ means to Square Enix.
As Matsuda said when asked about Games as a Service:
“Games as a service has a very wide meaning, it can mean a lot of things! [laughs] Recently people have been discussing loot boxes and people not using that properly, I think that’s all linked to this bad perception people have to the words ‘games as a service’. But really, the way we’re looking at it, what it boils down to is… that idea of keeping people engaged with our games and enjoying them for longer periods of time. That’s the way we really look at the problem. The way we use that expression, really… the whole idea, for a single-player game particularly, is the idea that you have the game released and you keep adding more content to keep the players engaged and enjoying the game. And that helps to make it more of a full experience, and that brings in more players to the original game. That’s the rough approach we take to the idea, and that’s why we described games as a service in that sense.”
In other words, Square Enix will keep releasing new content to its games in order to support them. And as for loot boxes, Matsuda believes that they should not detract players from their game experience in any way.
“It is obviously very bad to have loot boxes that get in the way of the player experience, or detract from it in some way. That’s clearly not a good thing. You have to really think about what they do to add to the overall gameplay experience, and how they fit in with that and the overall design of the game. I think that’s the way we should look at these things.”
Later on, Matsuda reconfirmed that Square Enix will keep making single-player games.
“We will definitely be making more single-player games, definitely. I think the environment now, that we have, there’s even more platforms, there’s even more opportunities to get single-player games out to people. So, for example, mobile phone games, we’re not just making free-to-play games for that, we’re making proper single-player games, re-releases of old titles, new titles as well. So mobile phones don’t just have to be about that kind of thing. The Switch is another great platform to come out for single-player games, so we’ve got a lot of opportunities and we really do want to continue making single-player games”
John is the founder and Editor in Chief at DSOGaming. He is a PC gaming fan and highly supports the modding and indie communities. Before creating DSOGaming, John worked on numerous gaming websites. While he is a die-hard PC gamer, his gaming roots can be found on consoles. John loved – and still does – the 16-bit consoles, and considers SNES to be one of the best consoles. Still, the PC platform won him over consoles. That was mainly due to 3DFX and its iconic dedicated 3D accelerator graphics card, Voodoo 2. John has also written a higher degree thesis on the “The Evolution of PC graphics cards.”
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