Square Enix is planning to change its president. Yosuke Matsuda will step down from the company and will be replaced by Takashi Kiryu, Square Enix announced this morning.
The transition will take effect when it’s approved at the 43rd Annual Shareholders’ Meeting, which is scheduled for June 2023, then it must be approved by the Board of Directors after that. As long as approval is granted by the governing bodies, Kiryu will officially take the helm shortly after.
Square Enix fans are hoping that this means all of the NFT talk the company has been making with Matsuda holding the reins will either stop completely or lessen significantly. The NFT talk came to a head at the beginning of 2022 when Matsuda released a letter that immediately went into talk about the metaverse and NFTs.
In that letter, Matsuda said that “the medium-term business strategy that we unveiled in May 2020 identified AI, the cloud, and blockchain games as new domains on which we should focus our investments.” Gamers were not pleased with the direction Matsuda was taking the company, and now it seems that Square Enix isn’t either.
While the reason the company gave for the change in power is fairly vague, it’s leading many fans to believe that the direction Matsuda was leading the company is indeed the reason it wants a new president for the company.
“Under the rapid change of business environment surrounding the entertainment industry, the proposed change is intended to reshape the management team with the goal of adopting ever-evolving technological innovations and maximizing on the creativity of the Company’s group in order to deliver even greater entertainment to its customers around the world,” the document reads.
Kiryu comes to the position with a few years of Square Enix experience behind him. He started with the company in 2020 as the general manager in the corporate planning division and worked his way up to the director of Square Enix Holdings Co.
Fans are hoping that this president will be less reliant on NFTs and blockchain games and will focus more on the actual games themselves to bring in more revenue for the company.
