Square Enix Wants to Make All of its Games Available Digitally

Square Enix is quite easily one of the oldest companies in the video game industry, with illustrious franchises like Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy under its wings. According to Game Informer, president and CEO of Square Enix, Yosuke Matsuda spoke about the company’s goals of making sure as many of its games are available digitally as possible.

“We’re working on that in a variety of ways,” Matsuda told 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. Certainly down the road, we would like to see that on a subscription or streaming service, so we’re exploring the possibility of creating a dedicated channel for ourselves.”

One of the bigger problems in Matusda’s goals of bringing the company’s history to modern systems is the ravages of time. Some of the company’s earliest games have, unfortunately, been lost as it becomes difficult to track where the code for which game was stored, especially of that by gone era.

According to Matsuda, “I’m embarrassed to admit it, but in some cases, we don’t know where the code is anymore. It’s very hard to find them sometimes, because back in the day you just made them and put them out there and you were done – you didn’t think of how you were going to sell them down the road. Sometimes customers ask, ‘Why haven’t you released that [game] yet?’ And the truth of the matter is it’s because we don’t know where it has gone.”

As long as this means Square Enix will some day bring one of my all time favourites of its catalogue, Final Fantasy Tactics, to a modern system, I can’t think of any