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A Fresh Start - Part Two

Yoichi Wada and Phil Rogers on how Eidos staff will respond to change, and what's happening to the Japanese market

GamesIndustry.biz You've spoken about the importance of global appeal in the past - do you feel that the Eidos acquisition ticks all of the boxes, or can we expect more additions in the future?
Yoichi Wada

The priority of buying another company has gone down the list quite a lot - of course, if there's a good opportunity we may go for it, but it's a lower priority.

The reason I say that is because we already have a number of presences across the world, and I intend to utilise those bases. I look at those bases as windows to the market, and with this recent acquisition we've opened up so many windows in the world market. Those are the places we can absorb all the good talent, create new product, and then sell to the world market.

So in that sense I'd say we've already created the right platform to do that.

It's almost impossible to create that kind of a platform overnight, so strategically it was very important to join hands with Eidos. At the moment my priority is to focus on how we can cultivate this platform further to generate revenue and profits together with Eidos.

If there were to be any future acquisition of properties it would probably be in another region, like India or somewhere in Asia, but at the moment I'm not really thinking about it.

GamesIndustry.biz There seems to be a general feeling in Japan that the domestic games industry is struggling at the moment - what's causing the slow software sales at the moment, and what needs to happen to revitalise the market?
Yoichi Wada

From the developer side, the Japanese games industry became so successful that we didn't recruit new people. So today, if you look at the main creators of games, they're already in their late thirties.

When you look at the industry in the US, the industry has attracted some very talented people from, say, computer science and the film industries - so people from different sectors came into the industry and that kept the market vital, succeeding in creating new products.

But in Japan the old people are doing the same old job - and even the so-called new people... there are some people that you'd call 'game geeks' but it was a very closed world.

I'm the chairman of the industry association in Japan, CESA, and in that role I intend to do two things. One is to promote more international exchange, and then to promote exchange with different industries - such as TV and film.

But with the acquisition of Eidos we're now able to do both of those within one business entity.

GamesIndustry.biz Square Enix has been very successful with merchandising its brands - will you be looking to help Eidos monetise its franchises in that way more?
Yoichi Wada

Yes, that's precisely what I'm thinking of doing - but that's just my policy, because if I were to tell the existing staff to do that it means their workload would double, and they'd just run away... So of course I'll have the proper staff in place and then try to improve the merchandising output.

If you have the merchandising capability, as well as strong characters - which we do - then there's no way we shouldn't use it to generate profit.

Yoichi Wada is president and CEO of Square Enix, Phil Rogers is CEO of Eidos. Interview by Phil Elliott.