Shinra Technologies

Shinra Technologies
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Information
Type	Private
Industry	Cloud Computing, Technology, Gaming
Founded	2014
Founder	Yoichi Wada
Headquarters	New York, New York, U.S.
Notable Personnel	Yoichi Wada (President), Jacob Navok (Senior Vice President), Tetsuji Iwasaki (Senior Vice President of Technology)
Products	Cloud game platform (beta), Cloud Development Kit
Parent	Square Enix
Website	https://www.shinra.com/us

Shinra Technologies was a cloud computing and gaming company founded by former-CEO of Square Enix, Yoichi Wada, in 2014. Based in New York City, Shinra planned to build a supercomputer in the cloud. This cloud platform was intended to allow developers to spawn colossal worlds with tens of thousands of unique characters with individual A.I. Shinra's technology was designed to efficiently render the game's assets and perform any computations in the cloud then stream the resulting images to the users. Instead of performing the process for each user, Shinra was able to synchronize the data across multiple users by saving all of the content in the supercomputer's RAM. Shinra aimed to allow developers to create massive, multiplayer games and bring them to players with modest computing setups.

The company was a wholly-owned subsidiary of Square Enix Holdings, incorporated on 18 March 2014, and it grew out of Square Enix's cloud gaming project code-named Project Flare. Shinra ran public technical beta tests of its streaming service in Japan and the United States during 2015, but it did not find outside investors. Square Enix Holdings announced the dissolution of Shinra Technologies and its Japanese subsidiary on 6 January 2016 and booked an extraordinary loss of approximately 2 billion yen. Shinra never shipped a virtual reality product. Its link to VR is Wada's argument, made in an October 2015 talk, that persistent cloud-run game worlds were the kind of experience VR could make use of.

Reviewed 27 September 2026. Checked all history, closure, technology and VR claims against the Square Enix 2013 and 2016 notices, GamesBeat, Game Developer, Engadget, Fortune and Famitsu sources cited. About review dates.

History

Project Flare

On 4 November 2013, Square Enix announced "Project FLARE", which it called "a technological breakthrough in cloud game architecture". The company said the patented architecture would run real-time animation, uncapped AI and physics processing, and video streams of existing games, and that it needed fiber or broadband connections for the best quality and low latency. Ubisoft was named as an early partner, with its Quebec studio working on streaming methods and applications for the platform. Wada, then chairman of Square Enix, said in the announcement that the project "will open the door for a new era in gaming."

Formation

Square Enix spun the Project Flare technology out into Shinra Technologies, which was presented to press and developers at an event in Tokyo in September 2014. GamesBeat reported at the time that the separate company would find it easier to partner with outside game makers, and that Square Enix could later decide whether to spin it off with external funding. Wada, who was no longer involved in Square Enix management, said that game makers might not want to rely on another publisher for their core technology. Shinra was then 100 percent owned by Square Enix, had 20 employees, and planned beta tests in the United States and Japan in early 2015. Its senior staff included Jacob Navok, senior vice president of business development, and Tetsuji Iwasaki, senior vice president of technology. Ubisoft chief executive Yves Guillemot said in a statement that his company was "intrigued by the direction Shinra Technologies is taking".

According to Square Enix's 2016 filing, Shinra Technologies, Inc. was incorporated on 18 March 2014 with its office at 225 W. 34th Street in New York, and Wada served as its director, president and secretary. A subsidiary, Shinra Technologies Japan Co., Ltd., was incorporated in Tokyo on 20 August 2014, also with Wada as president. Shinra also had a studio in Montreal, which built the technology demo the company showed in March 2015.

Beta tests and developer programs

Shinra's first public test ran in Japan in early 2015, using the fiber networks of NTT East and Techorus and streaming existing titles such as Final Fantasy VII. On 2 February 2015 the company announced a "prototype accelerator" for studios with a record of quality game production, starting with Camouflaj, the developer of République. Human Head and Hardsuit Labs also worked with Shinra on early prototypes. In a March 2015 interview, Wada said developers on the platform would not need to build their own networking technology, and gave the example of a tsunami that could happen through simulation rather than a scripted trigger. In the same interview, Navok said the company expected closed availability of its Cloud Development Kit in April 2015 and was aiming for open availability in the summer. Game Developer later reported that the kit was released in July 2015.

At SXSW in March 2015, Shinra announced that its United States technical beta would start with Google Fiber customers in Kansas City, and it showed a flying dragon demo at the Google Fiber Space in Austin. Fortune reported in May 2015 that, according to Navok, Shinra needed only 10 Mbps of bandwidth but the connection had to be persistent, and that the company was testing in Kansas City because of its Google Fiber network.

Test	Start	Network partners	Content
Japan beta	Early 2015	NTT East, Techorus	Titles including Final Fantasy VII
Kansas City technical beta	11 August 2015	Google Fiber	Tomb Raider (2013), Deus Ex: Human Revolution, Final Fantasy VII International, Shinra's own MMO shooter Space Sweeper and the tech demo The Living World; free for Google Fiber users in Kansas City
Texas beta	15 September 2015	Verizon FiOS	Tomb Raider, Deus Ex: Human Revolution, Final Fantasy VII

When the Texas test began, Navok said that bandwidth in the United States was improving but that "latency and stability are still a problem for that last mile to the home", and that fiber to the home helped the service.

Closure

Shinra Technologies was shut down by its parent company Square Enix, which announced the dissolution on 6 January 2016. The Square Enix Holdings notice said that Shinra, "as a cloud platform operator", had been trying to raise funds from third party investors but had "found no prospective investors at this point", and so had to discontinue its business. The parent company booked an extraordinary loss of approximately 2 billion yen for the fiscal year ending 31 March 2016, of which about 1.1 billion yen had already been posted in the first half of that year. The notice listed the paid-in capital of Shinra Technologies, Inc. as US$15 million and that of Shinra Technologies Japan as 80 million yen, and estimated that liquidation would be complete by 31 March 2019 for the American company and by 30 June 2016 for the Japanese one. Square Enix said it would continue to develop its business using cloud technologies.

Engadget, which reported the loss as 2.2 billion yen, noted that the closure left Square Enix free to concentrate on Final Fantasy XV, Kingdom Hearts 3 and the Final Fantasy VII remake.

Technology

In Shinra's design, one copy of a game and its assets was stored in the cloud and the game was streamed to the player as video, so players did not need expensive hardware. Rather than processing the same asset separately for every user, the system created it once and shared it, and it loaded the whole game world into the supercomputer's random access memory to avoid loading screens. Shinra said its worlds could measure up to 20 miles by 20 miles and hold as many as 16,000 characters with individual artificial intelligence at the same time. At the Game Developers Conference in March 2015 it showed a demo on NVIDIA graphics hardware that supported 64 players on a single graphics card.

The Montreal studio built its demo on an engine written from scratch, using middleware including Shinra Remote Rendering, the open-source Bullet physics engine and SpeedTree. Shinra called the overall architecture for its virtual supercomputers "1:N", and planned to bring it to market through partners and licensees. Navok described the economics this way: "We aggregate users, share calculations and data between users, and we generate economies of scale across many users. Our cost per user goes down as we add more users." Colin Williamson, Shinra's head of developer relations, described the model as one game running in one place with a "viewport" added for each player.

Earlier demos included a world of 620,000 simultaneously rendered trees and a herd of 500 animals, each with its own flocking AI. Square Enix calculated the entire multiplayer map at once, then encoded and sent each player only the part of the world that player's character could see.

Relation to virtual reality

Shinra did not announce VR hardware or VR titles. At an AMD symposium reported by Famitsu on 23 October 2015, in which Sony's Shuhei Yoshida also spoke on PlayStation VR, Wada said a new game market might form from the combination of content services, VR, e-sports and cloud gaming. He argued that game data held on servers and updated daily would make a game world alive and change how immersed players were, and said that VR was what would make use of this new kind of experience. He described Shinra's goal as letting players enter another world that was itself alive, rather than replaying a story written by the developers. Reporting on the closure in January 2016, GamesBeat called it "a big blow to cloud gaming" and wrote that virtual reality seemed "to attract all of the buzz these days".

Trivia

Shinra Technologies is named after the fictional Shinra Electric Power Company from Final Fantasy VII.