Games industry New Year 2023 cards and messages
The yearly roundup.
It is 2023 in several parts of the world, and game publishers, developers, and creators have begun to share their New Year greeting cards.
Get the full roundup below. (Updated regularly.)
(Note: Content may take some time to load due to the amount of embedded tweets.)
Toys for Bob
Fragment’s Note
Fate/Grand Order
Acquire
Akiba’s Trip
Active Gaming Media
PLAYISM
Arc System Works America
Arc System Works Japan
Little Goody Two Shoes
Message: “In 2023, starting with the release of the Persona 3 Portable and Persona 4 Golden remasters, we’re also preparing several unannounced titles. Please look forward to them!”
Bandai Namco Entertainment
Ace Combat
Mobile Suit Gundam: Battle Operation 2
Katsuhiro Harada
Kenji Anabuki
Pac-Man
Sword Art Online
Tales of
Overwatch
Capcom
Capcom Artwork
Hideaki Itsuno
Mega Man
Street Fighter
Gothic wa Mahou Otome
CD Projekt RED Japan
Easy Come Easy Golf
Crypton Future Media Mobile Content Team
Crysis
PandaShojo
Cygames
CyDesignation
Granblue Fantasy
Granblue Fantasy: Relink
“Development is finally in its final stages. The entire development team is giving it their all to improve the quality and make this the best game possible. This month’s Granblue Fantasy Fes will be the first time it is publicly playable, and we will announce new information during the stage event on January 21. Please have a look back at the trailer released at last year’s Fes.”
Granblue Fantasy: Versus
“New information on Granblue Fantasy: Versus will be announced at the ‘Granblue Fantasy: Relink / Granblue Fantasy: Versus‘ stage at Granblue Fantasy Fes 2022 – 2023 on January 21. Stay tuned.”
Little Noah: Scion of Paradise
Princess Connect! Re:Dive
Uma Musume: Pretty Derby
D3 Publisher
“We’re planning to announce many exciting new titles this year as well!”
D3P Otome
“In 2023, we plan to announce a brand-new otome game for console! Please look forward to the new story, world, and characters. And please continue to give D3P Otome your support this year.”
Earth Defense Force
MoonGlass Games
Dragami Games
Lollipop Chainsaw Remake
Tokyo Stories
Crystal Story: Dawn of Dusk
Elden Ring
PureWish
Power Wash Simulator
CRYSTAR
Monark
“We’re working hard to make this a year in which we can finally give everyone a lot to talk about, so please stay tuned. Please continue to give us your support this year.”
GungHo Online Entertainment America
Game Arts
Koei Tecmo Europe
Atelier
Buddy Mission: BOND
Dynasty Warriors
“This year, we’re moving forward to be able to deliver the latest information on the [Dynasty Warriors] series, so please continue to give us your support!”
Fatal Frame
LINE: Monster Rancher
Monster Rancher
Nobunaga’s Ambition
“In 2023, the Nobunaga’s Ambition series will celebrate its 40th anniversary.”
Nobunaga’s Ambition: Hadou
WILD HEARTS
Winning Post 10
Wo along: Fallen Dynasty
Konami
Message: “This year is the year of the Rabbit, so we are planning power-ups and new developments for familiar series with the aiming of leaping even further. Additionally, we’re deeply and quietly progressing on new project(s) that we have yet to announce to you all. Konami is leaping forward, so by all means please stay tuned.”
Momotaro Dentetsu
“Thanks to all of you, Momotaro Dentetsu will celebrate its 35th anniversary this year! We hope to bring you all good news.”
Tokimeki Memorial: Girl’s Side
LEVEL-5
Akihiro Hino
Yo-kai Watch
Live Wire
Makoto Takada
“This year, we plan to release several titles!”
MAGES.
The Quintessential Quintuplets: Gotopazu Story
“The title logo of the Gotopazu console game has been reveal. The title is Gotopazu Story. It’s an adventure game that contains all of the original stories from the first year. Details will be announced on… January 25! Please look forward to more information.”
Shinobi Master: Senran Kagura NEW LINK
Genshin Impact
Goonya Monster
Natsume Atari
Tengo Project
DJMAX
DNF DUEL
Dungeon Fighter Online
Nintendo America
Nintendo Europe
Animal Crossing
Kirby
Monolith Soft
Splatoon
PAYDAY 3
Infinity Nikki
Black Desert (Console)
Little Witch Nobeta
Qureate
“Since 2023 is the year of the rabbit, we are planning to release and announce many titles to make it a year we can nimbly leap forward.”
Sam Lake
“In the not too distant future, we’ll announce the new game in the middle [of this picture].”
SEGA
Like a Dragon: Ishin!
Phantasy Star Online 2
Puyo Puyo
Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio
Sin Chronicle
Sonic the Hedgehog
Space Channel 5
Super Monkey Ball
Virtua Fighter
Sony Interactive Entertainment America
Sony Interactive Entertainment Japan Asia
Masahiro Sakurai
Message: “Additionally, we’re preparing unannounced large-scale title(s). We will likely be able to make an announcement in the not-so-distant future.”
Square Enix
Letter from the President
A New Year’s Letter from the President
I would like to begin by wishing everyone a Happy New Year.
Countries around the world experienced soaring inflation in 2022. The US Fed accelerated the pace of its tapering effort at the outset of the year, and Russia’s subsequent invasion of Ukraine resulted in heightened geopolitical risk that drove up resource prices and caused supply chain disruptions. The Fed and other central banks then embarked on a round of rapid policy rate hikes that spurred a substantial rise in long-term interest rates. Stock prices plunged, especially in the tech sector, and IPOs stalled. This chain of events continues to cast a major shadow over global capital markets. The impact on our lives in Japan also mounts with each passing day as the dramatic depreciation of the yen has ballooned prices on imported raw materials, triggering further inflation.
Coming just as we were seeing promising signs of the world moving beyond the three years of the COVID-19 pandemic, these tremendous changes in the macroeconomic environment also pose a variety of risks to the digital entertainment industry. In particular, the semiconductor shortage has constricted hardware supplies, which has had more than a minor impact on the operation of our Group’s businesses. Steering our businesses amidst this uncertainty remains challenging. However, we expect these conditions to ameliorate in the early spring, which we hope will provide a tailwind to the achievement of our Group’s medium-term business plan, which can be found here.
Based on this understanding of our environment, we ascribed two purposes to the year 2022. The first was to lay the groundwork for our fiscal year running from April 2023 through March 2024, which is the final year of our current medium-term business plan. The second was to implement structural reforms that looked even farther out. For these reasons, we undertook a major overhaul of both our development and publishing organizations, with a focus on our core existing Digital Entertainment business.
On the development side, we sold three studios—Crystal Dynamics, Eidos-Montréal, and Square Enix Montréal—as well as associated IP to Embracer Group in August of last year. The objective of this divestment was to further concentrate our resources as the increasing sophistication and complexity of game development have made such endeavors more costly to pursue. This divestment represents part of the aforementioned structural reforms and was designed to effect fundamental change in our portfolio of studios.
We will also start to reconfigure our Group’s portfolio of titles for the medium to long term. To that end, we will accelerate our efforts to strengthen our internal development capabilities by further expanding our internal talent pool, while also more quickly concentrating our resources on the development of titles that are competitive globally. The remarkable growth in the scale of modern game development has made elevating the skill sets and focusing the efforts of our development teams more important than ever.
Divesting studios and strengthening our internal development capabilities may on the surface appear to be moves that are at odds with one another. However, we must flexibly and constantly revisit our medium/long-term title portfolio and the development studios that create it in light of the environment in which we find ourselves. As such, both of these moves are essential if our Group is to continue to provide entertainment that meets the needs of an evolving world. We will continue to review our development organization and use M&A and other methods to optimize our studio portfolio by both organic and inorganic means, thereby ensuring that we continue to strengthen our internal development capabilities.
On the publishing side, we are moving away from the previous geography- and function-based model under which our Japanese and Western publishing organizations operated independently of one another. Instead, we are creating an end-to-end global publishing organization based on the concept of “One Square Enix.” We launched this new structure late last year with close cooperation between our two Chief Publishing Officers (CPOs), a newly created role. We undertook especially thorough changes to the organizational structure of our Western operations, adopting a sales and marketing structure optimized to match the new studio portfolio created by the divestment of our three overseas studios. We are expanding our functions so that we can capture as much of the upside as possible from the digital shift that has been gaining momentum since the outbreak of the pandemic.
By simultaneously strengthening our development and publishing organizations, we will further enhance our Group’s presence as a global publisher and achieve new growth for our core existing Digital Entertainment business.
In terms of new business domains, we named three focus investment fields under our medium-term business plan. Among those, we are most focused on blockchain entertainment, to which we have devoted aggressive investment and business development efforts. Looking externally, I think it is fair to say that blockchain gained significant recognition as a field in 2022, as evidenced by “Web 3.0” becoming a firmly established buzzword among businesspeople. However, the year also saw volatility in the cryptocurrency and NFT (non-fungible token) markets that tracked the dramatic shifts in the macroeconomy described above. The latter half of the year in particular produced a somber string of news stories with blockchain connections, including the scandalous bankruptcy filing of FTX in November.
In the wake of these developments, we hear rumblings from some countries of early moves to regulate such businesses more strictly. In Japan, meanwhile, the drive to encourage such businesses has gained momentum, led by the government. In June 2022, the Japanese cabinet signed off on a plan called the “Priority Policy Program for Realizing a Digital Society,” which includes wording regarding the creation of an environment for promoting the Web 3.0 concept, including the use of NFTs based on blockchain technology. Japan’s Digital Agency also launched a Web 3.0 study group.
New technologies and frameworks lead to innovation, but they also create considerable confusion. Having ridden out such societal tides, some such technologies and frameworks gradually become part of people’s lives, eventually giving rise to new businesses and growth. Following the excitement and exhilaration that surrounded NFTs and the metaverse in 2021, 2022 was a year of great volatility in the blockchain-related space. However, if this proves to have been a step in a process that leads to the creation of rules and a more transparent business environment, it will definitely have been for the good of the growth of blockchain entertainment.
Keeping a steady eye on these environmental changes while considering from a higher-level perspective what Web 3.0 and blockchain entertainment are actually all about presents a different vista than if we focus on them solely in technological or speculative investment terms. As I said in last year’s New Year’s letter, if we consider traditional gaming to have been centralized, then blockchain gaming must operate based on a self-sustaining decentralized model. It is that concept, that philosophy that I see to be key.
That is to say that what sort of new experiences and new excitement our Digital Entertainment business can deliver to our customers through its game development efforts and other endeavors under the self-sustaining, decentralized concept is extremely important.
Multiple blockchain gaming events held overseas recently produced more active discussion than ever before about what makes the games exciting and what their user community looks like. The market was driven more by speculative investors than by gamers though 2021. In other words, the content that was at the forefront was created based on the premise that blockchain and NFTs should result in monetization. However, in the wake of the aforementioned turbulence in the cryptocurrency industry, there is now a trend to view blockchain technology as a mere means to an end and to discuss what needs to happen to achieve the end of delivering new experiences and excitement to customers. I see this as a very beneficial development for the future growth of the industry.
Our Group has multiple blockchain games based on original IPs under development, some of which we announced last year, and we are undertaking preparations that will enable us to unveil even more titles this year. We are also engaged in global sourcing from an investment perspective and will continue to take stakes in promising businesses whether we find them in Japan or abroad. Blockchain has been an object of exhilaration and a source of turmoil, but with that in the rearview mirror, we hope that blockchain games will transition to a new stage of growth in 2023.
Lastly, I would like to note that 2023 is a milestone year for us in that it marks the 20th anniversary of the merger of Enix and Square. Against a backdrop of dizzying change in our business environment, we have achieved significant growth fueled by the myriad opportunities that arose over the past two decades. Our Group intends to achieve further growth by continuing our self-sustaining evolution and transformation as we remain watchful for the changes that will occur in the next decade and beyond. We will drive our businesses forward with the goal of making 2023 a year of major evolution and transformation.
I wish you all the best for the new year.
Yosuke Matsuda
President and Representative Director,
Square Enix Holdings Co., Ltd.
Bravely
Dragon Quest
Dragon Quest X Online
Dragon Quest Treasures
Final Fantasy
Yoshinori Kitase, Producer of Final Fantasy VII Rebirth: “Also! Development is picking up speed on the title I’m producing, Final Fantasy VII Rebirth. I’m sure many of your collective imaginations are running wild trying to picture how we’ll recreate some of the game’s most iconic scenes, and we’ll have more to share about that when the time is right. There’s also another big announcement unrelated to Final Fantasy VII that I can’t say anything about just yet. Rest assured we’re working hard to make sure 2023 is the most exciting year yet.”
Final Fantasy VII Remake
Final Fantasy XIV
Final Fantasy XVI
Luminous Productions
NieR
Project Grimms
The Dark Pictures
Dynopunk
TYPE-MOON studio bb
Hidetaka “SWERY65” Suehiro