Former Square Enix exec says the developer "has spent two decades slowly moving away from being a content business" after accidentally predicting the rise of AI: "But the sun set on their opportunity to transition"

Genvid CEO Jacob Navok used to be a business director at Square Enix, and he feels like, since 20 years ago, the company has known something like generative AI would swallow the entire gaming industry – but it's still too late for the Final Fantasy developer to adapt.

In a long Twitter thread, Navok explains how former Square Enix CEO Yoichi Wada imagined that video games would phase out of being pure "content" so that they could spill out into something he called the "Network." But, while Navok feels Square Enix has tried as diligently as a chick breaking out of its egg to join the so-called Network, he also thinks its recent releases indicate that it's failed.

Years ago, Square Enix "made myriad content: games, manga, anime," says Navok. But, "starting in 2004, my boss, CEO Yoichi Wada, began writing in his annual letter to shareholders about the 'Network' being the future rather than content. People assumed at the time it was about MMOs." It wasn't.

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"The Network business he imagined isn't about games being online, it's about the social network of games (Metcalfe's law) replacing the content business," says Navok.

The '80s tech marketing rule Metcalfe's law suggests a network's influence is proportional to its square number of devices, or users – so, the value of Nintendo Switch Online is higher in a friend group where each person subscribes to the service, rather than in a crowd where only two people subscribe and have to play Mario Kart World with CPU Toadette. It's intuitive.

To Navok, both mega-popular and flexible gaming experiences like Fortnite and Roblox are healthy examples of the Network. Square Enix – outside of online games like Final Fantasy 14, which is an ant compared to Roblox's omnipresence – can't compete, especially if Navok is right that massive online games will start relying on "one-in-a-generation change" AI in order to make "forever platforms."

"The next step is Roblox-like platforms built with AI prompts where kids just enter the type of entertainment they want," Navok says, warning again of the tech singularity sci-fi paperbacks and Scarlett Johansson movies have spent years punting at our foreheads. "They will [...] build a Matrix-like world in five to ten years. Epic will as well."

"Games are no longer a content business," Navok concludes. "Square Enix knows it too, but the sun set on their opportunity to transition to a Network business. There were a few million players of Final Fantasy 16." Roblox's farming sim Grow a Garden, in which you can grow a pepper that looks like a plantar wart, has had over "21m+ peak CONCURRENTS" in comparison. The future is, apparently, vegetative.

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