Yosuke Matsuda, The CEO and President of Square Enix, spoke in quite catastrophic terms of the impact of the COVID-19 on development of new video games. According to his words, it basically blocked him, as if time had been frozen. The threat to the industry is enormous, despite the excellent results achieved with the lockdowns.
Matsuda touched on the subject in an interview with the Financial Times, explaining that while the industry has drawn big benefits from the most time available to users during lockdown, social distancing has hit the development of new games hard.
Matsuda: “There was also a major impact on production, the effects of which will be seen in the future. There have certainly been positive effects for what we are already selling, but at the price of freezing time for production. We couldn’t develop anything. Here you will have the greatest impact.“
Matsuda on his own was quite catastrophic, as not all video games were blocked due to the pandemic. However, it must be said that a general slowdown is already perceptible, for example in the numerous postponements to 2021 of titles scheduled for 2020, as well as a greater scarcity of releases in these and in the coming months.
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