In a brief and recently translated Q&A following its financial results briefing earlier this month, Square Enix president Yosuke Matsuda touched on the company’s future plans for the Switch and drive to up its digital sales.
Speaking briefly about the company’s development plans for the Switch, Matsuda noted that the rising platform is the perfect system to house the kind of mid-size titles that seem to perform best for Square, saying that the company intends to be “proactive” in its development efforts as a result.
As for PC, it looks like even publishers like Square Enix feel the effects of Steam’s infamous discoverability issues. Nearing the end of the year, Steam has seen as many as 6,000 games released on the platform. Matsuda says that, while Steam has a fair amount of users, Square’s games tend to get buried on the platform. Instead, he says, Square considers directing players from a game’s website to Steam as the better method.
In the West, Square currently owes roughly 50 percent of its HD game sales to digital downloads, but the company hopes to see that number rise. Matsuda says that Square’s own development plans have changed to help that growth along by increasing the focus it places on post-launch updates and add-on services for its existing games. Thanks to this, and the market’s own shift toward digital, he expects Western digital sales to reach 70 to 80 percent in the long term.