Square Enix president Yosuke Matsuda has confirmed that the Japanese publisher will be placing renewed emphasis on the company’s core JRPG market, a shift from the company’s recent focus on titles with wider expected global appeal.
“In the past, when we developed console games with a worldwide premise, we lost our focus, and not only did they end up being games that weren’t for the Japanese, but they ended up being incomplete titles that weren’t even fit for a global audience,” said Matsuda. “On the other hand, there are games like the JRPG we made for the Japanese audience with the proper elements, Bravely Default, which ended up selling well all around the world.”
Titles like Hitman: Absolution from Square Enix studio IO Interactive, released overseas in 2012 and in Japan in 2013, failed to find an audience at home or abroad. By contrast Bravely Default, a traditional JRPG first launched in Japan in 2012, sold 200,000 units in North America during the title’s first three weeks on sale. The critically-acclaimed JRPG was released in Europe in late 2012 and North America earlier this year.
“Regardless of whether they’re for smartphone or console, there’s a difficult element to developing global titles,” added Matsuda. “So we’ll be making them without focusing too much on the ‘global’ aspect.”
