Square Enix's Dungeon Siege acquisition was "opportunistic"

The unlikely conjunction of Sqaure Enix and Dungeon Siege came about after the publisher spotted a gap in the market and tackled it.

Square Enix US director of business development David Hoffman was quite open about the mercenary savvy of picking up the series, speaking to Siliconera.

"We wanted to take a franchise that had a rich history that wasn’t really being utilized right now and re-introduce it to the current consumers through the consoles, which Dungeon Siege hadn’t been on before so there was an untapped audience," he said.

"And, to be perfectly frank, I looked at a bunch of genres that were on the consoles. The dungeon crawlers were like whittled down to almost nothing or not even available [on consoles].

"It seemed like to me that I and ultimately Square had identified a genre and a market that like the rest of the industry just glossed over. It was a real opportunistic situation."

Dungeon Siege was originally developed by Gas Powered Games for Microsoft, and saw release on PC and Mac. RPG veteran Obsidian's take on the series, Dungeon Siege III, will release for PC, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360, in mid June.