Brand Strategy

Square Enix · Life is Strange 2 / True Colors / Remastered Collection

Life is Strange

After Life is Strange 2, the franchise faced a declining and increasingly narrow audience. I worked on efforts to identify why the original had connected so strongly across age and gender, and how the series could return to those foundations without simply repeating the past. The goal was to restore its emotional accessibility, character focus and broader relevance.

That work helped steer the franchise back towards the characters and qualities most closely associated with the original game. Earlier, I wrote the public demo specification for Life is Strange 2, shaping its content and pacing for Gamescom 2018 and every major Square Enix trade event that followed.

I also challenged the generic let's-play approach being used for influencer marketing. For a narrative game, passive coverage could reveal much of the experience without encouraging people to play it. I helped lead a shift towards specialist agencies and title-specific strategies that better supported the design, audience and long-term value of each release.

Square Enix · Just Cause 4 / DLC / Reloaded

Just Cause 4

Just Cause sells a feeling before it sells a story: freedom, spectacle and systems colliding in ways the player can claim as their own. The challenge was turning that emergent sandbox appeal into demonstrations and messaging that were immediately understandable outside the development team.

Following a launch affected by technical issues and significant staff turnover, I became part of the core team responsible for improving the game and reshaping its post-launch roadmap around player feedback. Patches and DLC addressed core criticisms, rebuilt goodwill and substantially improved the game's long-term outlook.

That recovery culminated in the Danger Rising DLC and Just Cause 4: Reloaded, allowing the game to end its lifecycle on much stronger footing. After its release cycle, I joined the franchise management team and led several internal pitches for future Just Cause projects, developing new concepts and mechanics around the series' distinctive appeal.

Square Enix · Outriders / Worldslayer

Outriders

Outriders arrived in 2021 as a new IP in an already crowded looter-shooter market, just as enthusiasm for new games-as-a-service commitments was fading. I pushed for a clear counter-position: an all-in-one, no-GaaS proposition, with a complete campaign and endgame at launch rather than seasons and an open-ended service commitment.

On the product side, I authored the public demo specification and worked directly on level design, encounter flow and balancing. The demo generated more than 300,000 pre-orders, making Outriders the most pre-ordered Square Enix title on Steam at the time. In campaign sections where pacing was losing players, my encounter-by-encounter recommendations contributed to a 30% reduction in sessions ending during those sequences and higher satisfaction scores.

I also led plans for the dual Warsaw and Los Angeles reveal and capture event. More than 300 press and influencers played the game across the two locations, making it the largest game capture event in Square Enix history.

When the pandemic made in-person events impossible, I designed a remote hands-on pilot with NJLive using Discord and Parsec. We hosted the game from our offices while press and influencers played remotely, allowing Outriders activity to continue when conventional events had stopped. The process was adopted across Square Enix and developed by NJLive into a commercial service for other publishers and developers.