Square Enix’s president says it will be ‘aggressive in applying’ AI

Square Enix president Takashi Kiryu says the company will be “aggressive in applying” AI in its development and publishing efforts in the future.

Kiryu, who was appointed as the Final Fantasy firm’s new boss in June 2023, made the comments in its traditional New Year’s Letter from the president.

In the letter, the exec explains the new initiatives he has put in place since his appointment, including vetting games in development and accelerating a plan to provide more resources to its internal teams.

Kiryu also said Square Enix was expanding knowledge sharing with the goal of standardizing its processes and “enhancing our efficiency”, as well as encouraging closer collaboration between its content and publishing teams.

Perhaps the most eye-catching section of the letter, however, mentions the president’s ambitions in the area of artificial intelligence.

“We also intend to be aggressive in applying AI and other cutting-edge technologies to both our content development and our publishing functions,” the exec wrote.

“In the short term, our goal will be to enhance our development productivity and achieve greater sophistication in our marketing efforts. In the longer term, we hope to leverage those technologies to create new forms of content for consumers, as we believe that technological innovation represents business opportunities.”

Earlier in the letter, Kiryu spoke about the impact of generative AIs such as ChatGPT, which he noted had quickly expanded to cover images, video, and music.

“I believe that generative AI has the potential not only to reshape what we create, but also to fundamentally change the processes by which we create, including programming,” he said.

The president did not share any specifics about how it would use AI for game development, but Final Fantasy 7 Remake’s co-director has previously discussed how it built an AI tool for character facial animation and lip-syncing.

Square Enix’s previous president, Yosuke Matsuda, used last year’s letter to express the company’s commitment to blockchain technology. In the latest letter, Kiryu said the company would continue to support these efforts.

In November, Xbox announced a multi-year deal with Inworld to build AI dialogue and narrative tools at scale, which it said would enable it to deliver “an accessible, responsibly designed multi-platform AI toolset to assist and empower creators in dialogue, story & quest design.”

Xbox’s chief financial officer, Tim Stuart later elaborated at the Wells Fargo TMT Summit: “On the developer side, you think about the millions and millions of dollars in a game spent on localisation, script, how you think about players moving from point A to point B and you have non-player characters have dialogue.

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“AI can take care of all that. You now say, ‘I need the player to get from A to B’ and instead of having to write thousands of lines of scripting or code, you just have the AI get you from A to B. Things like localisation and putting things in new languages.

“When we think about game testing, a million AI bots can run through a level of Minecraft and find where players get stuck, where they spend money, how they think about the level. So, this is—pun intended—game-changing for the developer.”