In its 2016 Annual Report, Square Enix has said that it’s looking to expand into emerging markets, “especially India, the Middle East, and Latin America.” Calling it a “key focus” of its growth strategy, the company said that it’s also particularly interested in the Chinese market, which it termed a “leading country” in terms of online and mobile gaming, and gaming in general.
Speaking of mobile, Square Enix has said that making premium apps for mobiles is going to be a “pillar” of its business. “In so doing, we believe that we can enrich the portable game market in the broader sense in order to respond to a variety of customer needs,” read the report. The company believes that smart devices have an edge over consoles due to the latter’s backward compatibility issues.
Premium games naturally need to be modified to keep pace with frequent OS updates and require ongoing marketing spending to generate user awareness. However, smart devices still provide a better platform for playing greatly loved games for many years than dedicated game consoles do because of the latter’s issues with backward compatibility.
Continuing the comparison with dedicated handheld game machines, we note that significant advances have been made in both the specs and operability of smart devices and that this evolution is likely to continue unabated. Moreover, smart devices have a much greater installed base globally than dedicated handheld game machines. The smartphone-native generation already sees smart devices as all-in-one game consoles. For these reasons, it makes sense for game manufacturers such as ourselves to supply games that we have traditionally developed for dedicated handheld game machines not only for such consoles but also for multipurpose smart devices.
You can read the full annual report by following the source link below.
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[Source: Square Enix]
