Square Enix Japan developing new browser games

Square Enix president Yoichi Wada has underlined the importance of social and browser games for his company going forward – and revealed to Develop that a team in Tokyo is now working on such games for the Japanese market.

Asked by Develop if there were any genres that Square Enix would like to play a bigger part in during an in-depth interview, Wada’s response was fixated on the emerging medium of network-based games.

“Social and browser games, which is now a very big genre, is something we have started development into,” he said. “It is an important area to address because it isn’t related to any consoles and doesn’t need specific hardware to run it, just applications on the client side.

“I believe that these types of games are going to be spreading and growing dramatically – especially in areas like Asia which does not have much penetration of consoles. The penetration power and destruction capability [of social games] mean it’s an area we must tap into.”

Wada added that “the potential size of the market is enormous”, bringing his vision in line with a growing number of industry executives.

EA CEO John Riccitiello recently claimed that online, subscription and microtransaction based games will likely have a larger share in the entire industry, – “bigger than all the console games put together” – from 2010 onwards.

Click here to rad the first part of our in-depth interview with Wada