The blockchain is still a "focus" for Square Enix in 2024, along with "aggressive" use of AI in gamedev

rockpapershotgun.com:

Square Enix representative director and president Takashi Kiryu has written a new year's letter outlining the Final Fantasy publisher's plans for 2024, while offering a few reflections on the year that was. The topline: they want to do more with generative "AI" machine learning tools, and they're still dead keen on metaversy VR/AR stuff. The blockchain remains a "focus", too, though it gets much less of a billing than in 2023's new year letter from Square Enix’s previous president Yosuke Matsuda.

In the letter, Kiryu made passing allusion to last year's widespread mass layoffs and other corporate reductions, describing 2023 as "a year of tumult exemplified by an intensification in geopolitical risks and sharp inflation stemming partly from monetary policy moves made by central banks grappling with the pandemic". He added that "regions, countries, and even we as individuals found ourselves in a time of transition as the world struggled to establish what the "new normal" would look like following the pandemic." As ever with "post-pandemic" talk, it's important to interject here that Covid 19 is still an active threat - according to the World Health Organisation, there were over 850,000 new cases during the period 20th November to 17th December 2023.

Kiryu also characterised 2023 as distinguished by faster-than-anticipated uptake of new kinds of technology, including the latest VR or AR tech and generative machine learning or "AI" tools in game development. "We saw the release of eye-catching products and services in multiple domains where the commercialization and adoption of emerging technologies had seemed a more distant eventuality," he wrote. "The potential of these offerings also garnered greater attention than