They won’t hold all release date announcement for E3 either.

Their latest financial report has been released, and in it, Square Enix‘ CEO, Yosuke Matsuda said the following: „Development efforts for major titles are underway at both our overseas and domestic studios. We will be making announcements about the release dates of those titles between the end of FY2018/3 [end of March] and E3. We have built a pipeline of major titles, so we are currently exploring how to market and run those to maximize their potential. For starters, we want to achieve operating income of ¥40 billion.

I believe you will be able to tell how long our development lead times are based on the launch dates we will be announcing for our games going forward. I will say that we are facing less risk of having to engage in re-work thanks to the precision with which we are approaching our designs in the initial phase of each development project. I believe that the development efforts for the new titles we will be launching starting in FY2019/3 are proceeding in line with our plans.”

He’s quite hopeful of the Nintendo Switch as well: „Nintendo Switch sees rapid uptake, and we welcome the arrival of such a platform. We intend to be proactive in our development efforts given that it’s a platform that is well suited to the mid-sized titles at which we excel. We base our development resource allocations on the unique attributes of each platform. In particular, Nintendo Switch makes it easier for us to leverage our back catalog of assets and expertise, so we want to be proactive in creating new IP and rebooting past titles for that platform.”

Matsuda expects digital sales go from 50% to 70-80%, and the company also plans to enter the augmented reality (Pokémon Go) market as well. Regarding Left Alive, the survival-action mecha-shooter, he said the following: „We want to make it into an AAA brand, but that does not mean that we intend to devote massive development costs to it. Content-wise, the game will be satisfying in a hardcore way, and that’s how we want to market it to players.” Sounds good.

Source: Square Enix