Square Enix announces community-focused development initiative called Collective

Square Enix has announced a new community-focused initiative called Collective, in which the company plans to bring together both creators and the video game community to bring gaming concepts to market.

Collective will be used to showcase digital project ideas to the community, and if the ideas "resonate well."

"It’s our way of trying to help small teams get creative, innovative and fun ideas to market," Phil Elliott, head of the Collective community said in the announcement. "We’ll help them find funding and through all that, understand what we can add that’s actually, genuinely useful – and not just be a big publisher trying to muscle in on something that’s cool.

"We’ll use Collective to showcase digital project ideas to the community. If those ideas resonate we’ll look to take the development team through a due diligence process to provide reassurance that they have the expertise, tools and so on to be able to make the game they say they want to.

"Once that’s passed, we’ll support the team and game through a crowd-funding process via a special partnership with world-leading crowdfunding platform Indiegogo. If the project is fully funded, we’ll stay in touch throughout development and help distribute the game once it’s complete."

Elliot said Square wants to "help find the next big thing and then be a part of helping it become even bigger," and want the developers to walk off with the majority of sales revenue generated. The profits Square makes will be reinvested back into the platform.

"Most of all we want to help find new talent, and help cool, original ideas that might never have seen the light of day to find an audience, find support, and become reality," he said. "We’ll also be opening up some of our older Eidos IP for developers to use in the submission of ideas.

"We’re really excited about what we might discover. We know there’s a lot of talent out there, and how hard it is to find a spotlight."

More information on the Collective will be revealed at GDC Next which takes place November 5-7 at the LA Convention Center.

You can visit the official website for the initiative through here.