Square Enix 2004 Annual Report Download - page 8

06 SQUARE ENIX 2004
software tended to overshadow their efforts on the
online games front.
What is Square Enix’s strategy in this challenging but
exciting business environment? We think the following
three actions are critical: enhance community manage-
ment; deploy polymorphic content; and define new
platforms.
Network content is comprised of two elements,
namely software and communities. Communities are a
previously nonexistent service category, and managing
the quality of these communities is an area where we
can add the most value going forward. Communities
provide the most value to users, and managing them is
the most difficult business area for providers to enter.
For these very reasons, Square Enix plans to concen-
trate on enhancing community management skills.
Our next strategy is the development of polymor-
phic content. This entails the creation of original
content with the intent of deployment across various
platforms while leveraging the unique features of each
platform and media type. Recently, there has been an
industry trend toward creating games based on preex-
isting content such as sports and movies. In other
words, many games are created as a secondary usage of
the original content for which others hold the intellec-
tual property (IP) rights. We are focusing on
capitalizing on our own IPs. As the “Everything Plays
Games” trend continues, we expect profits will con-
verge on the industry players, such as Square Enix, who
possess the IP rights to original content.
Our third strategy is to define new platforms, yet
this does not mean we intend to become a hardware
manufacturer. As the industry shifts to a horizontally
Access from anywhere
Access to everything
Everything plays Games.
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