BODY: When a publisher built on Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest announces a ¥1 billion ($6.6 million) game contest, the obvious assumption is that it wants more of the same. Its two organizers want to kill that assumption immediately.
"We're not asking for work that feels like Square Enix," producer Yosuke Saito told AUTOMATON. "What we want is something that makes us think, 'They actually went and did that.'"
Saito, best known for the NieR series and Dragon Quest X, is running the SQUARE ENIX GAME CONTEST 2026 alongside Takashi Tokita, the director behind Live A Live and a key figure on Final Fantasy IV and Chrono Trigger. Between them they represent a strain of Square Enix that was always weirder than the company's blockbuster reputation suggests.
The money is unusually concrete. One grand prize winner receives ¥300 million (roughly $2 million) plus a guaranteed commercial release. Four Excellence Awards pay ¥100 million each, and ten Outstanding Awards pay ¥30 million. Applications open December 15, 2026 and close March 15, 2027, with results announced June 30, 2027.
The terms matter more than the headline figure. Entrants must hold the copyright to their own work, and Square Enix says it will not take IP ownership — it intends to partner on publishing instead. Developers who received funding elsewhere can still enter if rights are cleared, and previous contest entrants are welcome back. Submissions need to be complete enough to communicate their core appeal, not finished, though applicants are asked to state honestly how much work remains.
Judging rests on four pillars: novelty, originality, entertainment value, and degree of completion. Saito weights fun most heavily, arguing that genuine enjoyment is what makes a game commercially viable at all. Tokita leans toward originality, and is blunt about the market: in a fragmented landscape, he says, a spread of small excellent games matters more than chasing mass appeal.
The insider take
Read this from Tokyo and the timing is impossible to miss. Square Enix has spent the past two years in visible repair mode — cancelled projects, write-downs, a restructured HD development arm, and a corporate mantra about quality over volume. A contest that explicitly refuses to claim IP is also an admission that the old model of absorbing studios wholesale stopped working. Meanwhile ¥300 million is life-changing money in a domestic indie scene where BitSummit-circuit teams routinely ship on budgets a fraction of that size. Putting Saito and Tokita out front, rather than a corporate development executive, is the clearest signal of intent: this is a bid to re-stock the pipeline with the mid-budget oddities Square Enix used to be famous for, before it decided everything had to be enormous.
Originally reported by AUTOMATON (Japanese).