Square Enix To Focus On Smartphone Games As Part Of Future Strategy

Square Enix’s last fiscal year, ended March 31st, 2013, didn’t go well, with the publisher reporting that most of its games had underperformed relative to expectations and that the company had lost a significant amount of money due to restructuring and re-evaluating its products.

All of these issues together amounted to a net loss of 13,714 million yen, Square Enix reported in a set of financial slides published today. Additionally, the number of the company’s employees has increased from 3,424 to 3,782 over the past one year. In order to combat their losses, Square have three major strategies in mind:

1. Overhaul large-scale, long-term development

2. Target smart devices as a game platform.

3. Construct a product portfolio tailored to consumer tastes in respective served regions.

The slide below shows what Square Enix expect the mix of gaming platforms to look like for the next couple of years. Blue bars represent smart phone games, light blue bars represent tablets, and finally, the green bars represent console games.

Update: Slight edit. The slide above represents the mix of gaming platforms. We've edited our wording to convey this more clearly. Thanks to Operation Suzaku for bringing it to our attention.

Read more stories about Final Fantasy V & Final Fantasy: All The Bravest & Square Enix on Siliconera.