Square Enix has rejected a report that the Final Fantasy publisher is exploring a move to take itself private, saying that no such plan is under consideration inside the company.
The report originated with Sentaku, a Japanese business magazine, whose September issue said Square Enix was looking into going private. The report drove Square Enix Holdings' stock price up by nearly 12% on the Tokyo Stock Exchange, IGN reported on September 2.
The company answered the magazine directly in a statement. "The September issue of the monthly magazine Sentaku carried a report regarding the possibility of Square Enix Holdings Co., LTD. (the 'Company') going private," it said. "However, this information was not announced by the Company."
No consideration is currently being given within the Company to taking the Company private.
The Sentaku report arrived during a period of consolidation across the games industry. IGN noted that EA was recently acquired by a Saudi Arabian investment group and taken private, a deal that has drawn questions from players and from EA staff about how the new owners will treat the publisher's single-player output from BioWare and catalogue properties such as Dead Space, and about how far they will push microtransactions and live-service development.
IGN noted that Square Enix has made a great many changes of its own this decade, and called the biggest of them the 2022 sale of a group of western studios, among them Crystal Dynamics and Eidos Montreal, to Embracer Group. That sale carried away the rights to franchises including Tomb Raider and Deus Ex. The company has also carried out multiple rounds of layoffs over the past several years, IGN said.