CoreOnline is Square's way of coping with industry's "transformational period," says Wada

Square Enix president and CEO Yoichi Wada has a digital plan in place with CoreOnline should consoles become a thing of the past "in the next five years or so."

Speaking with MCV, Wada and European CEO Phil Rogers said CoreOnline is just the start of Square's new online strategy as it preps for the rise of cloud and server-based offerings.

"Previously when we used to think about how to make a game work, we only had to think about the game console, and now time has changed," said Wada. "But if you think about the previous 30 to 40 years in computing, we had host computers or a server, and the clients running on them. The pendulum has been swinging between them over time, from IBM on servers to Microsoft on PC and then back to servers with companies like Google and again back to host computers with Apples native apps.

"Currently, HTML 5 and Google Chrome has shifted back to servers again," he said which enables the firm to "cope with this transformational period," in the industry.

Square Enix Europe CEO Rogers added: "We see tremendous changes in the industry, exciting changes - people say the industry is in trouble but really the boundaries are being pushed further than ever," he said.

"The real power here is where those changes meet technical and engineering ideas - and that's what happened with CoreOnline."

CoreOnline allows players to experience “console quality games” through browsers, and the first titles released on the service were Hitman: Blood Money and Mini Ninjas, with Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light, Tomb Raider: Underworld, and others to follow at a later date.