The Square Enix Collection - How It Works

Square Enix has asked developers to pitch ideas based on the Fear Effect, Anachronox and Gex properties.

News comes from The Square Enix Collection; a platform started in 2013 to help developers find an audience for their current projects. As of today, developers can not only pitch original works but also neglected Square properties. Quoted from Phill Elliott, Collective Project Lead:

"I'm excited to see what talented teams might do with any one of Fear Effect, Gex or Anachronox IPs. We'll monitor the response carefully before deciding which IPs to release next. And it goes without saying that we're delighted for the whole Goetia team, as they become the latest member of the Collective family alongside Moon Hunters and Black the Fall in hitting their funding targets." 

- Phill Elliot, Collective Project Lead

The Goetia that Elliot is speaking about is the recently funded point & click game from the french developers Sushee. Goetia took to the famed Kickstarter with the intention of raising $30,000 to fund development.

To explain how the pitching process works, the Collective says that Square Enix will need to pre-approve anything published to Square's feedback platform internally. That said, if something isn't approved, the developer will be notified and an explanation will be given; so that changes can be made. The reason for the internal vetting comes down to "making sure ideas are relevant to the franchise.", thus ensuring brand quality and relevancy.

The Collective is not looking for sequels to their existing IPs; they want to see what ideas developers can come up with that are relevant to the properties.

Once it has been approved, the idea will then go public to the Square Enix community where users vote and offer feedback on the idea. After 28 days, voting closes and The Collective then makes a decision regarding whether to move forward with the project or cancel it.

"If the response is good, then it's into crowd-funding, which no doubt begs an important question; why ask gamers to pay for a game to be made if it's using our IP? Well, because it will still be the responsibility of the independent developer to build the game - and the developer will still be the key beneficiary of it's success."

- The Collective

It may not come as a surprise that Square will take a decent cut of varying things. First of all, Square will take five percent (5%) provided that the crowd-funding goal has been met. Square also possesses the rights to distribute said project. Square takes a fee of ten percent (10%) of the net sales revenue, and if you've used a Square IP, the company will also charge another 10 percent (10%) license fee. To put it in short and make it easy to read, if a developer created and released a new Anachronox game, for example, they'd receive eighty percent (80%) of the net revenue.

So basically, Square will publish the game and help find an audience to build the game too; whilst a developer gets the funding from crowd-funding and develops the game. In return, Square takes a cut for it's services. However they own the games that are developed like this.