Square Enix is considering launching a subscription service for its games
Square Enix could be the next game company to launch its own game subscription service. A top executive of the company has said it is considering introducing such a service. Nintendo ‘evaluates’ such services.
Yosuke Matsuda, the director of Square Enix, indicates in a conversation with Game Informer that his company is aware of the demand to make the library of games available digitally. “We’re working on it in different ways. I think everyone is moving in that direction, so we want to be proactive in considering these options. We don’t know yet if it’s going to be a subscription service or an exclusive download service, but we want to leverage our catalog.” .”
Matsuda also says that Square Enix is working hard to make its older NES games playable and available for various platforms today. For that, the company has started an internal project to make ports of those old games. These could also appear via any future subscription service.
In order to also make those old games available via such a service and thus to be able to offer the entire catalog, Square Enix still needs a lot of work, Matsuda says. “I’m ashamed to admit it, but in some cases we don’t remember where the code is. Sometimes it’s really hard to find it, because at the time you just made the code, released the game and were done. You thought I’m not sure how you were going to sell them over a longer period of time.”
Nintendo keeps a little more on the plain with questions about a possible subscription service. In an interview with TechCrunch, Charlie Scibetta, the president of Nintendo’s US division, says that “streaming is certainly interesting technology.” “Nintendo is monitoring it closely and we are evaluating it. We don’t have anything to announce right now as to whether we’re going to deploy that technology. For us, it’s still physical sales and the digital downloads through the eShop,” said Scibetta.
Should Nintendo and Square Enix eventually come up with their own subscription service for their game catalogs, they will join an ever-growing list of game companies that already offer such services. Publishers such as Microsoft, Sony and EA have had their own subscription service for games for some time now, in the form of the Xbox Game Pass, PlayStation Now and Origin Access. It recently became clear that Ubisoft will also be joining, with its own service called Uplay+.