Square Enix CEO talks Final Fantasy VII, global games, and trusting their creators

Posted byby Dean Takahashi
June 17, 2015
Updated June 18, 2025
5 min

LOS ANGELES — Square Enix is one of the few video game companies that does a good job straddling East and West. It makes Japanese role-playing games as well as big Western titles such as Tomb Raider and Deus Ex.

We talked about this unique position of Square Enix with Yosuke Matsuda, who became chief executive of the Japanese company after longtime CEO Yoichi Wada stepped down to run Shinra Technologies, a supercomputing cloud games startup. Matsuda held a rare press briefing at E3 yesterday, where the company unveiled new titles such as Nier and a new studio — Tokyo RPG Factory.

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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.