In a letter to the workforce, Square Enix president Takashi Kiryu outlined some of his goals for the next year, including the business’s intention to “be aggressive in applying AI and other cutting-edge technologies to both our content development and our publishing functions.” Lately, these New Year’s Letters have become an annual tradition on New Year’s Day; past letters have covered topics such as the want to investigate NFTs, blockchain games, the metaverse, and more. AI gained some attention this year.
Furthermore, Kiryu stated that Square Enix was promoting greater cooperation between its publishing and content teams and was broadening information exchange to standardize procedures and “improve our efficiency.”
Kiryu started by discussing the “academic debate” that has long surrounded artificial intelligence (AI) and its “potential implications.” But the emergence of ChatGPT and related generative AI systems, he claims, has the “potential not only to reshape what we create but also to fundamentally change the methods by which we create, including programming.”
Kiryu says,
“In the short term, our goal will be to enhance our development productivity and achieve greater sophistication in our marketing efforts. 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.”
President Kiryu vision
Kiryu states that the company’s goals in publishing are to “enable greater global collaboration and to promote the shift to digital.” In addition to “maximizing our sales of new titles, but also delivering our rich back catalog to more customers and in turn expanding the fan base for our Group’s intellectual properties (IPs),” the team expects that this will enable them to do so.
To make Square Enix’s “customers even happier than ever before,” efforts are also being made to facilitate simpler and more effective communication between the publishing and development teams.
The co-director of Final Fantasy 7 Remake has already talked about how the company created an AI tool for character lip-syncing and facial animation, but the president did not provide any information regarding how AI will be used in-game production. Yosuke Matsuda, the former president of Square Enix, emphasized the company’s dedication to blockchain technology in a letter from the previous year. Kiryu stated in the most recent letter that the business will keep up its support for these initiatives.
XBOX AI tool assist
Xbox said that it will be able to provide “an accessible, responsibly designed multi-platform AI toolset to assist and empower creators in dialogue, story & quest design” as a result of a multi-year agreement it had struck with Inworld in November. In a later statement at the Wells Fargo TMT Summit, Xbox’s chief financial officer, Tim Stuart, said, “On the developer side, you think about the millions and millions of dollars in a game spent on localization, script, how you think about players moving from point A to point B and you have non-player characters have dialogue.”
With Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, Final Fantasy XVI’s second DLC, Final Fantasy 14: Dawntrail, Foamstars, SaGa: Emerald Beyond, and Visions of Mana about to be released, Square Enix has a busy year ahead of them. Kingdom Hearts 4, Dragon Quest XII, and Dragon Quest III HD-2D Remake are also coming in 2024 or later, albeit they don’t have release dates.
