Generative AI took center stage last year with innovations like ChatGPT and Nvidia ACE. One company that’s looking to aggressively integrate this new emerging technology, along with NFTs and blockchain games, is Square Enix.
In his New Year’s Letter, Square Enix president Takashi Kiryu talks about what is in store for the company in 2024. The newly appointed president talks about the plans he has set in place to bolster the company’s capabilities in content development and publishing. Kiryu talked about changes in the way video games are made and the technologies that the company will be using including cloud gaming and NFTs.
Perhaps the most striking part of Kiryu’s letter was the mention of AI technologies. According to the exec, Square Enix plans “to be aggressive in applying AI and other cutting-edge technologies to both our content development and our publishing functions” for its upcoming projects.
“In the short term, our goal will be to enhance our development productivity and achieve greater sophistication in our marketing efforts,” Kiryu wrote. “In the longer term, we hope to leverage those technologies to create new forms of content for consumers, as we believe that technological innovation represents business opportunities.”
Kiryu talked about the rise of generative AI technologies such as ChatGPT and how the innovation has worked its way into other fields including images, video, and music. The exec believes that this technology will “reshape what we create, but also to fundamentally change the processes by which we create, including programming.”
Square Enix has been adopting generative AI in some of its games. For example, Final Fantasy 7 Remake utilized AI tools to enhance facial animations of its beloved characters and improve lip-syncing in dialogues and cut scenes.
In terms of publishing, Kiryu plans to shift more to digital releases which the company hopes would allow them to “maximize our sales of new titles, but also to deliver our rich back catalog to more customers and in turn to expand the fan base for our Group’s intellectual properties (IPs).” Kiryu hopes that greater collaboration between the development and publishing units at Square Enix will make its “customers even happier than ever before.”
The exec shared that Blockchain entertainment/Web 3.0, AI, and cloud gaming are the three “focus investment fields.” Kiryu said that the company is “currently working to modify our organizational structure and optimize our resource allocations to support these efforts.”
Blockchain was also a focus point of former Square Enix president Yosuke Matsuda. It seems the company still wants to continue supporting this initiative for the foreseeable future. While the company has yet to find success in its blockchain titles, Square Enix is willing to commit its resources to the endeavor.
