juega.tv - Interview with Yasuhiro Fukushima (Square Enix)

Our vision for Latin America at the moment is that it is still a relatively small market, but that within five years it will grow a lot. I see the situation very similar to the Japanese video game market when we held the contest there, so I imagine we have all possibilities to collaborate and make the industry in Mexico and Latin America grow and become a big market. It's difficult; the original idea of the contest was when I realized that video games would be a great opportunity. I started thinking about the best way to develop them, since I am not a developer. Then I read an article in a newspaper that said that in the United States there were video game developers who were considered stars. I thought that would be a good idea, and I came up with the slogan: 'Don't you want to be a star developing video games?'

My original interest was in personal computers. I imagined they would become very popular in companies and that corporate software would emerge, packages like those that exist today, but at the time there wasn't enough processing and storage capacity to use them professionally. So I imagined starting with video games, since they were already possible on personal computers, starting the business with them and later moving to corporate software, but that didn't happen. First, there are no rivals in the video game industry. If one company has great success, the entire industry benefits because the market grows. If another has another success, the market grows a bit more. In that way, we are all partners. Before the merger, there were several initiatives from Square to get together. At the time, I didn't approve them, but later came the time when we had to address not only the Japanese market but the global market. There was the need to grow to expand internationally more quickly, so finally the merger occurred. I left the company 8 years ago and didn't take a position again until recently in August 2011. I don't know the details well, but President Yoichi Wada made a correct decision to keep our international expansion stronger. Currently, I imagine that mobiles and tablets are the devices with the most potential, which can already be seen in Japan. Sales of mobile games are almost half of console game sales. That has grown a lot in the last three years, and I believe it has great potential in Latin America. Regarding the game format on consoles, a few years ago they were titles that could be played by one person, individuals, but today there are many more games that allow multiple people to participate. I imagine that will be a trend for the future. The reason we started the manga division was something strange. There was a video game producer who told me that his dream was to publish manga. Years later, I spoke with him and said, 'Okay, let's publish it.' Curiously, this business went very well, and in the last 10 years, not much had happened in the market, so we managed to become the fourth largest publisher in Japan, and this continues to go very well. Regarding the crossover between manga and video games, it's not a constant. We decide based on the characteristics of each title, and we consider if they have potential; we do it, but it's not that all the manga we publish will become video games. Our sales for mobiles in Latin America are almost zero, and we acknowledge that the market in the region today is very small, 100 million dollars, perhaps a bit more, but it is 20 times less than what we have in Japan, although we think that in the future the market will grow a lot and become a big market.

The emotion of finally achieving your objective after finishing the 3 is great. The most important thing is your idea, your plan. But if you have trouble coming up with an original idea, you can get inspired from other entertainment media: movies, books. Try to see what makes that content fun, and try to bring that point to a video game, and think about what type of video game you could make, a title with that concept. Another point is to analyze an existing video game, find out what is most fun about it, and aim to make something five or ten times more fun. What mechanics do you need for that? The only thing I don't recommend is that if you have a video game you like, don't try to make a similar version. In that way, you will never create something new and original. What's fun is if you are programmers, it's also recommended to see the technology that exists and imagine how to create something new with that hardware, for example, to surpass what already exists. I would like to see that many participate and show us their talent.