Genvid CEO Jacob Navok was a enterprise director at Sq. Enix, and he seems like, since 20 years in the past, the corporate has identified one thing like generative AI would swallow the complete gaming business – nevertheless it’s nonetheless too late for the Closing Fantasy developer to adapt.
In a protracted Twitter threadNavok explains how former Sq. Enix CEO Yoichi Wada imagined that video video games would section out of being pure “content material” in order that they might spill out into one thing he known as the “Community.” However, whereas Navok feels Sq. Enix has tried as diligently as a chick breaking out of its egg to hitch the so-called Community, he additionally thinks its latest releases point out that it is failed.
Years in the past, Sq. Enix “made myriad content material: video games, manga, anime,” says Navok. However, “beginning in 2004, my boss, CEO Yoichi Wada, started writing in his annual letter to shareholders in regards to the ‘Community’ being the longer term quite than content material. Folks assumed on the time it was about MMOs.” It wasn’t.
Sq. Enix has spent 20 years slowly shifting away from being a content material enterprise. Not simply Sq. Enix, however each writer. Wada-san was proper. The way forward for video games was the Community (right here is web page 2 of his 2004 Annual Report!). However the Community enterprise he imagined isn’t… pic.twitter.com/mccly17ZLTJuly 8, 2025
“The Community enterprise he imagined is not about video games being on-line, it is in regards to the social community of video games (Metcalfe’s legislation) changing the content material enterprise,” says Navok.
The ’80s tech advertising rule Metcalfe’s legislation suggests a community’s affect is proportional to its sq. variety of gadgets, or customers – so, the worth of Nintendo Swap On-line is increased in a buddy group the place every particular person subscribes to the service, quite than in a crowd the place solely two folks subscribe and must play Mario Kart World with CPU Toadette. It is intuitive.
To Navok, each mega-popular and versatile gaming experiences like Fortnite and Roblox are wholesome examples of the Community. Sq. Enix – outdoors of on-line video games like Closing Fantasy 14which is an ant in comparison with Roblox’s omnipresence – cannot compete, particularly if Navok is true that huge on-line video games will begin counting on “one-in-a-generation change” AI with the intention to make “ceaselessly platforms.”
“The subsequent step is Roblox-like platforms constructed with AI prompts the place children simply enter the kind of leisure they need,” Navok says, warning once more of the tech singularity sci-fi paperbacks and Scarlett Johansson films have spent years punting at our foreheads. “They are going to (…) construct a Matrix-like world in 5 to 10 years. Epic will as properly.”
“Video games are not a content material enterprise,” Navok concludes. “Sq. Enix is aware of it too, however the solar set on their alternative to transition to a Community enterprise. There have been a couple of million gamers of Closing Fantasy 16.” Roblox’s farming sim Develop a Backyard, in which you’ll develop a pepper that appears like a plantar wart, has had over “21m+ peak CONCURRENTS” compared. The long run is, apparently, vegetative.
