Square Enix Wants to Move Video Games to the Cloud So They Can All Be Enormous

Back in the old days, you could spot a SquareSoft game a mile away. Actually, with your eyes, sitting on the store shelf. In the JRPG heyday of PlayStation, a Final Fantasy or Parasite Eve or Chrono Cross or Brave Fencer Musashi jewel case would be double the size of an average game, sometimes to hold quadruple the amount of discs.

To say the least, the company, now known as Square Enix, has a history of having to cram its longwinded games on whatever medium is available at the time. That explains a lot about a project Square Enix announced during this year's Tokyo Gaming Show.

Introduced with more logo wipes than a 1998 employee training video, Square Enix is now entering the great cloud gaming race with Shinra Technologies, a name, yes, lifted from Final Fantasy VII. Centralized in New York City, with offices in Tokyo and Montreal, the effort joins a wave of others competing in real time stream gaming.

To say the least, Square Enix is proposing a cloud gaming service that makes a lot of sense… for games released by Square Enix. A game that could inhabit this service would still have to be made in the first place. Budgets for current blockbusters, ones that don't even blow the gasket of the machines they are on, are already dangerously inflating, and Square Enix is saying they want to open the door for things that are even bigger.

Even Destiny, the current massive thing, exists on both current and last gen consoles, and the bulk of the complaints about it aren't that Mars has too few dunes and ruins to see—and that game had half a billion invested into it.

Many offerings on the way, like PlayStation Now, aim to defeat a problem we can see heading towards us like an oncoming train. Downloading games directly to your console is an increasingly popular model, but at the same time many AAA releases are becoming bigger and huger, a trend that could put each platform into a never-ending game of hard-drive catch-up. Streaming games, the argument goes, could kill off discs and hard drive storage in one fell swoop.

Shinra, however, seems to have something a little different in mind. The company isn't talking about cloud gaming as a solution to memory space grievances; it's talking about making dedicated servers to individual games as a solution to platforms not being worthy to house more powerful games. It's speaking on behalf of future games that, as far as we can tell, don't exactly exist.

"I believe the game industry will continue to grow," said former Square Enix president Yoichi Wada. "However, something is missing. Henceforth, will there be further innovations? We have decided not to wait for change; in order to stimulate change, we have decided to establish a cloud gaming venture."

Shinra seems to be the finalized version of Project Flare, which also flaunted the potential for worlds multiples times larger than even Elder Scrolls offers. While changes in distribution of games have always changed the games themselves, Wada cuts to his point about how Shinra will lead to grander software.

He talked about new "game experiences," and a "creation of a new game industry ecosystem." The video points out that other cloud gaming projects are simply about streaming games you can play otherwise.

And that's part of the point. Many cloud gaming services don't specifically cater to the most massive games. Even PlayStation Now's beta offers smaller titles like Critter Crunch and Knytt. Shinra's pitch seems simultaneously ambitious and narrow with what it suggests game makers should do. It seems designed for a later date, something contemporary games may take a rain-cheque on.

"My dream is, using Shinra Technology, to allow developers to create completely different games than have ever been made before," said Tetsuji Iwasaki, development director for new technologies, "and bring that to our users."

It's probably by no coincidence then that Square Enix also silenced rooms with the new trailer for Final Fantasy XV, which goes literally off the path as a handful of sassy fantasy men cruise the monster riddled countryside in a luxury convertible. The scale they're setting is huge, epic, and given that Final Fantasy XIII was already dozens of hours long without an open world, the company is indirectly suggesting you should clear a few months on your calendar sometime in the future.

Shinra is a blessing and a curse. Less load time and smoother performance is nice and all, but proposing developers jump on this opportunity seems a little self-absorbed. The only company making games like Final Fantasy XV is Square Enix.

Shinra could, hypothetically, be a viable tool to games too big for their britches. But it also talks about launching the service next year, a span of time that doesn't allow for many hypothetical incredibly massive games to just happen. Other than Final Fantasy XV, which, who are we kidding, we aren't going to see any time soon either.