Square Enix tries cloud gaming with Project Flare

Square Enix has launched a new cloud gaming initiative called Project Flare. Square Enix's director of business development Jacob Navok showed Polygon what the company plans to do with the new program.

"So up until now when we've talked about cloud gaming, we've mostly talking about streaming games," Navok said. "Gaikai, OnLive and the other companies were just putting a console in the data center. They weren't actually changing anything about it. There was a shift in the distribution model, there was a shift in the business, but there wasn't a shift in the game design."

Project Flare will use cloud servers to handle things like incremental physics, taking the weight off a system's chipset. One demo shown had boxes flying everywhere in Deus Ex: Human Revolution, with the physics of each box being handled on the cloud server. Another demo of Final Fantasy XI allowed one player to see the viewpoints of everybody else in their party.

"When you have a virtual supercomputer, you have new ways of interacting with content, you have new ways of distributing that content and that should result in new experiences," said Novak. "What we really want to get across today is that even utilizing our existing titles, we can come up with new concepts. We could possibly achieve real-time battles that look like battles in the Lord of the Rings movies."

Square Enix is currently looking for Project Flare partners, including developers and publishers. The company has already announced that it is collaborating with Ubisoft on the project and it's looking to launch in 2 to 3 years.