Square Enix On The Tough US Mobile Game Market

Kosei Ito, head of Square-Enix’s mobile division, has said that the US is a much tougher market than Japan for a number of reasons, including a smaller game market in the US, less promoting by the carriers and the fact that US consumers “won’t accept “good enough” content; it has to be “wow” content that they have never seen before”.
“The two countries are definitely different. In Japan, a wide range of high-end titles and causal games coexist in the market–unlike here, where a mobile game automatically means “casual game”…In addition, mobile games in the US are clearly separated–there are hardcore games and there are casual games. In Japan, the casual gamer and hardcore gamer overlap…there is no clear separation.”
I wasn’t really that curious as to why Square Enix decided to attack the US market with a high-end game based on its Final Fantasy series rather than casual games. True, the casual market is bigger but there’s also a lot more competition. I was curious as to why Square Enix decided to go with Amp’d as an exclusive launch partner: According to Kosei, “The image of Amp’d was what we were looking for: such as “cool” and “cutting edge.” He went on to say (in answer to a different question) “let’s say we are preparing for next and the following year. We want to be number one when more hardcore titles start to appear on mobile platforms”. So both this game and the Amp’d deployment seem to be the first steps in a long term strategy to get games to think of Square Enix when they think of “hardcore” mobile games. It teamed up with Ideaworks to handle the Brew platform.
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