GC: It was interesting because it talked about the success of NieR: Automata, and yet in the same document it also talked about the rise of games as a service and the idea that single-player games were no longer as popular as they used to be. And we've heard a lot of similar things from other publishers recently as well. What exactly is your approach to games as a service and how do you contrast that to a game like NieR? Which is the exact opposite but has been an unexpected success.

CEO Yosuke Matsuda: 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.

GC: You're right that games as a service can mean almost anything, a lot of it positive. But I think what worried people was the idea that single-player games were becoming no longer tenable, at least on a large budget. And many publishers seem to be stating that fairly unambiguously too. With Square Enix having so many great single-player-orientated franchises, can you reassure people that, as a company, you have not lost any interest in the concept?

CEO Yosuke Matsuda: We will definitely be making more single-player games, don't worry about that! 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!

https://wccftech.com/matsuda-gaas-more-than-microtransactions/

I think a lot of the time, when people hear the phrase "games as a service", they always focus on the problem of microtransactions – they really close out the meaning to just being that. We look at it in a much broader sense. If you look at the idea of adding things to a game after release to keep it fresh and exciting, to keep people playing over a long time, and all the different ways you can do that, it comes to express a lot more. People are too focused on the problems.

We have been thinking about it. The downside of that is that if we had one unified development platform, it would make it a lot harder to express the different characters, the different proclivities of our titles – we make a very broad range of games, and it might affect the variation we can get in there. I think a much better way of improving the efficiency of our development that is more fitting to the way we work is, rather than unifying everything on the same platform, to take all the different approaches the individual studios use and are very familiar with, and have them exchange information about the tools and methods they use. In that process of unification, consolidation there is obviously the trade-off in terms of individuality, and I would rather value that than the efficiency gains to be had from consolidation.

https://www.digitaltrends.com/gaming/square-enix-no-microtransactions-console-games/

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