Square Enix President Thinks Games Need at Least Three Sequels

If there was ever a guy who would understand the value of a good sequel, it would be Square Enix boss Yosuke Matsuda. Final Fantasy obviously runs on sequels, even though most of them aren’t exactly what you might call a ‘standard’ sequel. But according to Mr. Matsuda, not only are sequels an important part of an IP, they might be the most important part of determining if a story is worth telling or not.

This comes to us from an interview with Famitsu the man recently completed, where he spoke briefly about the upcoming Project Setsuna, which was revealed at this year’s E3. While we still don’t know a dang thing about the game, outside the general idea of when it’ll be coming out (next year?) we did get a taste of his personal development philosophy… and a good idea of what’s in the future for Project Setsuna:
 

Cultivating a new IP is very important. This is my own personal view, but I believe that it is very difficult to immediately build up a big IP. Looking retrospectively at the gaming industry, many games take off or get their big break at their third title. There are cases where the opposite is true of course (Laugh).

But regardless, you need at least three games before you can tell whether an IP is going to be really successful or not. I call this my “Law of Third Titles (三作目の法則)” (Laugh). That’s why for the first and second games, you experiment to a degree where you can still be flexible, and if the series has grown enough to be able to expect a big hit for the third game, you expand the scale. If the third title is successful then all is well.

So we can safely assume he plans on making at least three games for this franchise, unless the first one really bombs. Interesting. Well, now we know that whatever this game is, we’ll be getting a lot of it.

Honestly, this reminds me of a less cynical version of a statement Ubisoft’s senior vice president of sales Tony Key said two years ago. Said he:
 

“That's what all our games are about; we won't even start if we don't think we can build a franchise out of it. There's no more fire and forget - it's too expensive.”

While the sentiment might be the same both ways, Square Enix’s whole "it takes a while for a story to develop far enough to know if it’s worth perusing”, is at least a bit more artistic and whimsical, which is nice. Granted, you might appreciate Ubisoft’s bluntness, but that’s not really my call.

Either way, if there’s ever been a better indicator of the direction of today’s gaming market, that would be it. Assuming you haven’t figured it out by now.