Square Enix: “Screw Phoenix Downs, We’ll Save Ourselves with Item Charges!”

With Square’s profits plummeting to an all-time low, CEO Yoichi Wada recently addressed the company’s worried investors through the possibility of increasing one of their old classic financial business models. One that would increase the company’s reliance on micro-transactions and charging for premium items in-game.

“I get the impression that ‘Dragon Quest’ type users and ‘item charge’ type users have quite different feelings [about a business model based on charging for items]. With the likes of Facebook, you can easily introduce friends and things spread quickly, so I feel it’s well suited to item charges, with the game being free.”

Through increasing their reliance on this model, Wada believes that the revenues accounted by them would increase from 30 to 40%. Although it remains to be seen whether or not Wada is planning to add things through some sort of DLC package in their traditional single-player games, it wouldn’t be out of the realm of possibilities for them to go and create a free-to-play MMORPG where they charge users for item transactions. Let’s just hope that they are able to fix their current FFXIV dilemma before this happens.

[source: Game Watch]