Square Enix Closes Shinra
Square Enix has shut down its cloud-based Shinra Technologies.
In a corporate notice from Square Enix spotted by Eurogamer, Square Enix announced the closure, which will end up costing the company 2.2 billion yen (about $16.8 million).
Founded in 2014, Shinra — named for the corporation in Final Fantasy VII — was going to be a platform that would allow developers to design games that wouldn’t be limited by the player’s hardware. Using the cloud, remote processing would allow for games to run various modules across different servers, giving the games better performance in graphics rendering, physics, etc. So… better explosions, water, hair, and the like.
The service was in beta in Japan over the last six months, but Square Enix said that it failed to raise new capital from outside investors, forcing them to shutter the offices in Montreal, New York, and Tokyo.
No word on the fate of Shinra’s project lead, former Square Enix president Yoichi Wada.
