Square Enix Announces "Collective" - A Community Focused Initiative

Square Enix announced its latest community-focused initiative, Collective, where it plans to bring gaming concepts to market by pooling together both creators and the video game community.

Square Enix Head of the Collective Community, Phil Elliott, said in the announcement,

“It’s our way of trying to help small teams get creative, innovative and fun ideas to market. We’ll help them find funding and through all that, understand what we can add that’s actually, genuinely useful – and not just be a big publisher trying to muscle in on something that’s cool.”

“We’ll use Collective to showcase digital project ideas to the community. If those ideas resonate we’ll look to take the development team through a due diligence process to provide reassurance that they have the expertise, tools and so on to be able to make the game they say they want to.”

“Once that’s passed, we’ll support the team and game through a crowd-funding process via a special partnership with world-leading crowdfunding platform Indiegogo. If the project is fully funded, we’ll stay in touch throughout development and help distribute the game once it’s complete.”

Elliot added that Square Enix would like to “help find the next big thing and then be a part of helping it become even bigger,” and wants the developers to walk off with the majority of sales revenue generated. The profits Square makes will be reinvested back into the platform.

“Most of all we want to help find new talent, and help cool, original ideas that might never have seen the light of day to find an audience, find support, and become reality,” he said. “We’ll also be opening up some of our older Eidos IP for developers to use in the submission of ideas.”