Japanese triple-A game publisher Square Enix rang in the New Year with an open letter from President Takashi Kiryu emphasizing that the 20-year-old firm intends to reinforce its core business of content development and game publishing while aggressively exploring new areas like artificial intelligence and extended reality. In the short term, AI will be used “to enhance our development productivity and achieve greater sophistication in our marketing efforts,” Kiryu wrote in his letter, explaining that “in the longer term, we hope to leverage those technologies to create new forms of content.”

The company behind hits such as “Final Fantasy” and “Dragon Quest” intends to build immersive AR and VR experiences, homing in on “new forms of content that fuse the real world and virtual worlds,” wrote Kiryu in his first mission statement since being named president in June. “We also intend to be aggressive in applying AI and other cutting-edge technologies to both our content development and our publishing functions,” he added.

“Kiryu name-checked ChatGPT, despite the fact that its creator OpenAI was recently sued by The New York Times for copyright infringement,” Engadget reports, adding that other companies, including Valve, have expressed concerns about working with OpenAI and other AI firms.

While COVID-19 subsided in 2023, “the world saw an intensification of geopolitical risks and sharp inflation. That added to the uncertainty and change underway in digital entertainment,” writes VentureBeat. Kiryu “said he saw extended reality (XR) technologies moved forward during the year and the future will see more application of XR to fuse the real world and virtual worlds like never before.”

VentureBeat writes that he Kiryu said “generative AI was by no means limited to text, and the subsequent months saw a quick succession of launches of new services and content that expanded generative AI into a variety of domains with close ties to digital entertainment, including images, video and music.”

Kiryu also touted the benefits of brand extensions into comics and arcade businesses “and their value in drawing attention to Square Enix franchises across multiple media,” per VentureBeat.

In terms of new business areas, “we previously identified three focus investment fields, namely blockchain entertainment/Web 3.0, AI, and the cloud,” Kiryu detailed in his missive, explaining that “we are currently working to modify our organizational structure and optimize our resource allocations to support these efforts.”