Square Enix’s Yoichi Wada steps down as chairman

Square Enix chairman Yoichi Wada has stepped down from his post to focus entirely on the cloud-gaming startup Shinra Technologies.

Square Enix representatives have confirmed that Wada has relinquished that position. He previously had stepped down from the chief executive position in 2013 after starting Shinra Technologies. He wanted to build out that company’s plan to make massive simulated worlds possible using supercomputing resources in the cloud.

Wada joined Square in April of 2000 and was named CEO of that company later that year. After the company merged with Enix in 2003, Wada ran the combined company for a decade. Wada was succeeded by Yosuke Masuda, who was appointed CEO of Square Enix.

Asked about Shinra, Masuda said in an interview with GamesBeat, “With Shinra in particular, in addition to cloud-gaming research generally, they hope to create a platform for cloud gaming. With Square Enix being a content developer primarily, that positions us in a different area compared to a platform company. We felt it would be best to separate the two companies because of that. It’s also important to get other third parties to provide content for this platform, not just Square Enix. In order to grow the company moving forward, and also in terms of getting financing from third parties, the possibilities become greater with Shinra as a separate company.”

Wada has some very fantastic goals for Shinra, and if he succeeds, the accomplishment will be a much bigger deal than selling more than 100 million Final Fantasy games over the years.

New York-based Shinra is focused on its dream to create a supercomputer in the cloud that can deliver huge games to online gamers. By tapping the power of cloud computers in an efficient way, Shinra wants to offer gaming without limits, allowing developers to create huge worlds that can measure as much as 20 miles by 20 miles of virtual space and can host as many as 16,000 unique characters with individual artificial intelligence operating at the same time.

Shinra renders a game’s graphics, physics, and artificial intelligence in the cloud, and then it streams the appropriate images to the player in real time. Shinra tries to create an asset once and share it over and over again rather than processing the same asset for every single user in a very inefficient way.

It loads the entire world into the supercomputer’s random access memory so that it is responsive and users don’t experience loading times.