Square Enix wants to revolutionize cloud gaming with Project Flare (interview)

Posted byby Dean Takahashi
November 11, 2013
Updated June 17, 2025
18 min

When Square Enix announced Project Flare last week, the Japanese company said it would revolutionize gaming through smart use of the cloud.

Call it “cloud gaming 2.0.” It certainly isn’t what OnLive and Gaikai tried to do by streaming games from the Internet to a person’s compatible machine. Rather, Square Enix calls Project Flare a new way to create cloud games, replacing consoles with virtual supercomputers. As such, it is much more of a technological breakthrough than other cloud-gaming systems, said Jacob Navok, director of business development at Square Enix.

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Written by

Dean Takahashi

Dean Takahashi is editorial director for GamesBeat. He has been a tech journalist since 1988, and he has covered games as a beat since 1996. He was lead writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat from 2008 to April 2025. Prior to that, he wrote for the San Jose Mercury News, the Red Herring, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and the Dallas Times-Herald. He is the author of two books, "Opening the Xbox" and "The Xbox 360 Uncloaked." He organizes the annual GamesBeat Next, GamesBeat Summit and GamesBeat Insider Series: Hollywood and Games conferences and is a frequent speaker at gaming and tech events. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.