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| Peter Triezenberg |
The company has a renewed focus on bringing its legacy titles to new consumers.
06.14.19 - 1:53 PM
Square Enix has been on a roll when it comes to porting their legacy titles to new hardware. This past E3 alone saw the release of Collection of Mana on Nintendo Switch, the announcement of Final Fantasy VIII coming to modern consoles, and more. The company's President and CEO Yosuke Matsuda recently stated that he has "heard the demand" for Square Enix's extensive back catalog of games to be made available digitally, and the company is working on this in "a variety of ways".
According to Masuda (via Game Informer): "That is a request that we hear often. As far as our major titles go, most of those, we still have variations out that you can play now. The more classic titles that you might have played on NES, we are still working hard to make it so you can play those. We actually have launched a dedicated project internally to port those, so we are working to make them available on a variety of platforms." One issue the company has run into, which is sadly all-too-common in the games industry, is that the original code for a lot of these games has gone missing. Famously, the original Kingdom Hearts was largely reconstructed from scratch for its HD remaster, and there are more examples of this within Square Enix's history. "Sometimes customers ask, 'Why haven't you released that yet?' And the truth of the matter is it's because we don't know where it has gone."
Square Enix also seems to be exploring avenues for a streaming or subscription-based service for their back catalog of games, citing Bethesda's proprietary storefront as an example. "I think everyone is going in that direction, so we do want to be proactive in considering those options. We still don't know... what form it might take, but we do want to leverage our catalog."
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