Square Enix appears to have cancelled or at least rescoped the size of multiple unannounced games as a result of an internal review into its development process, with a "content disposal" loss totalling 22.1 billion yen, or $141 million. As a result of the investigation, the publisher shall "revise the Group’s approach to the development of high-definition (HD) games with the intention of being more selective and focused in the allocation of development resources".
The internal study of Square Enix's development processes was revealed earlier this year when president Takashi Kiryu said: "We are reviewing from scratch what the organisational structure is to materialise the contents of the pipeline and what is best." The result, as shared today, suggests the publisher has streamlined its future content output as it records a $141 million loss due to work on titles that'll no longer see the light of day. The unannounced games in question have not been confirmed.
According to VGC, Square Enix is eager to "reduce the amount of development it outsources to external studios, and wants to focus on in-house development for its more high-profile titles, with the aim being to increase both quality and profit margins".
The news follows the release of Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, which hasn't set sales charts on fire. While from the outset it would seem like a surefire mainstream success — like Final Fantasy VII Remake was in 2020 — the PS5 exclusive doesn't seem to have returned on the investment quite as much as the first entry. Square Enix now appears to be looking for more of a guaranteed mainstream success with its biggest games, meaning smaller projects may be cut.
[source videogameschronicle.com]
Comments 101
Seems like the smaller niche titles from them won't be a thing anymore, shame as I enjoyed games like Harvestella, Bravely Default, Star Ocean and Diofield Chronicle etc
I don't understand why you implicate rebirth when they announced a structure change that would double down on their strategy for Remake and Rebirth.
I will say though that I think Rebirth's marketing strategy wasn't that good.
Don't be surprised if you don't see them acquired soon. Hopefully not tencent or Saudi Arabia.
They were talking about doing this last year weren't they? I don't think it has anything to do with the sales of Rebirth.
I was wondering what the outcome of this process would be. Hopefully it doesn't mean the end of Octopath Traveller and the likes on console and PC.
We are due for another crash in the video game market. I wonder who will survive.
I get it with FF7. The limitations you had in the game, not being able to play as Vincent, pain in the butt mini games, same story as original. Not much to explore, pseudo open world, if anything I’d say it’s just getting old. Same story overall of the original, it doesn’t really add any mystery to the plate.
A better approach would be to change things up, perhaps start over with what worked. Summons especially.
So selling over 2million copies is counted as a failure ?
Maybe some people will wait 5 more years a d buy it all at the same time 🤣
Maybe Sony should pounce before they're lost forever
@Americansamurai1 if people eat meat or use products made in poor countries they shouldn't worry about terrible governments with lots of money to waste. Either of them buying SE would be the best option because they don't usually interfere with business, they let it happen.
This is tragic news. From the earlier Nvidia leaks we saw that Final Fantasy 9 was getting a remake or remaster. Now it may never come, and that is truly my favorite in the series
Maybe a Stranger of Paradise sequel can save Square Enix after the Rebirth fiasco.
@GymratAmarillo big difference is that with entertainment the content will be altered to not offend the owners country or beliefs. Whereas a cheeseburger would be not be altered lol pretty big difference and easy to comprehend.
Squenix gonna' be the Warner Bros of the videogame world.
Seems to be the only games this publisher can put out thats successful is Final Fantasy, and those arent even selling that well (Rebirth). All the live service side projects they do look terrible and most all have failed. What I hear from this is you'll probably get nothing but a slew of FF games going forward. Which I'm sure makes that fan base happy.
Square's been making silly decisions for awhile now. Harvestella, Diofield, Valkyrie Elysium, TWEWY sequel and whatnot would release with barely any marketing, no budget and in real close proximity to each other. Octopath 1 is STILL not on Playstation, Harvestella and Triangle Strategy was PC/Switch only.
They're lucky FF14 is such a hit, honestly.
@Americansamurai1
Saudi is a minority owner of Nintendo. I haven't seen any changes in Nintendo games, have you?
Tencent is owner of Riot, Minority owner of Epic and most importantly owner of Grinding Gear Games, everything the chinese government DON'T want in games Path of Exile has it.
Pretty easy to comprehend right?
@Shepherd_Tallon Every time I read HD I assumed they were talking about big expensive AAA titles and excluding the 2D-HD Switch games, even though I realize HD is in their actual genre description. Switch having a 100 million larger install base than PS5 probably helps too.
Squenix canceling the last part of the FFVII Remake trilogy would be the most Squenix thing ever. Only part 3 already having a release date before canceling it would be more on brand. See FFXV announced dlc.
I know Rebirth is the first game that comes to mind as far as recently released titles...but let's also not forget they probably were hoping Foamstars would hang around a little longer. I'm sure that didn't help their finances very much at all.
I wish Square hade made ONE game, out of the FF7 remake, instead of a trilogy, packed with boring filler content.
I'm so bored of all the quantity over quality, in modern games.
Kind of a shame to hear since Square has a good number of IPs that are likely going to fall to the wayside due to this.
@rjejr Ah true, true.
They'll keep making those titles for Switch I'm sure.
I remember the DLC for XV. I didn't love that game in general, but I was hoping for that final DLC to round out the ending. Was really disappointing when it was cancelled.
As for FF VII Part 3, you can bet Sony will fund it if needed.
They definitely put resources and/or funding into the other two games. They show up in the credits for both.
@KeanuReaves They do this every single time there's an article about Square Enix. They keep pushing this narrative that FF is underselling and it's all disingenuous nonsense. Push Square is determined to die on this hill though.
@TheEnygma Square Enix would be in serious trouble if it wasn't for FF14. That game has carried its console-facing business for about a decade at this point.
@Shepherd_Tallon sony puts both. They pay development and have an internal team that works with studios that will release console exclusive games for them like SE, SU, KT, etc.
@GymratAmarillo minority owner is completely different than fully owning it full ownership has all of the power and won't 5% is meaningless when it comes to control. Did I explain it for you to comprehend? I might be using too complex language for you.
@Steel76 100% agree. I feel gaming peaked during the ps3/360 era. You got whole trilogies in one console generation, with tight stories and playtime. Now games are full of boring bloat, so they can advertise that they offer 60-80 hours of playtime
Unfortunately SE keeps making the same mistakes over and over. What SE should realize is big budget titles don't always guarantee success and that smaller cheaper titles are sometimes the way to go. SE has a huge back catalogue of titles it could use or revamped for newer consoles and they don't all have to cost multi millions. Lots of titles could be released which could be reasonable cheap and they could easily make money on these titles. But unfortunately SE has gone the route of games that have flashy graphics yet the story is just not there, or just a afterthought. I believe FFXV is were SE stopped making games that had great stories, in my opinion.
@Americansamurai1
Saudi Arabia owns 98% SNK with plans of owning 100% ... where are the changes?
China owns 100% GGG Where are the changes in Path of Exile 2?
You have to try harder because this is getting boring LOL.
Wasn't this announced last year that they were going to restructure development on games because they had to many projects going on.
@Bunchesopuppies Were we playing the same game?
Maybe they'll rerelease Chrono Trigger to rake in the big bucks.
@GymratAmarillo wow someone's so upset that they had to use Google to try and back up their claims. Didn't mean to hurt your feelings.
@Martijn87 Mentioning things like that in the article would make it too obvious that FF16 and Rebirth aren't to blame so of course those details are omitted.
"According to VGC, Square Enix is eager to "reduce the amount of development it outsources to external studios, and wants to focus on in-house development for its more high-profile titles, with the aim being to increase both quality and profit margins".
So Square Enix is going back to how it used to do things during its prime.
Remember in-house games like Brave Fencer Musashi? Xenogears? Vagrant Story? Mana Series? Saga Series? Chrono Trigger?
Square Enix was amazing in its prime!
@Americansamurai1 I don't need to use google to know stuff about the studios I love, thanks.
People that complain without knowing the industry, that people should be using google LOL.
And again ...
Saudi Arabia owns 98% SNK ... where are the changes?
China owns 100% GGG Where are the changes in Path of Exile 2?
I guess FF7 Redone will be substantially shorter. Colin Moriarty will be happy.
@GymratAmarillo whatever you got to tell yourself buddy. As for me I have better things to do with my time to argue. Good luck.
@Americansamurai1 so no changes or real arguments? Ok.
Bye bye.
I've actually really enjoyed their output the past several years (Dragon Quest XI, FFVII Remake & Rebirth, FFXVI, Star Ocean: the Divine Force, Trials of Mana remake, & Valkyrie Elysium come to mind), so hopefully this doesn't really affect the kinds of games I enjoy of theirs (big 3D JRPGs, mostly).
I'd say Kingdom Hearts III was the only one in recent memory that kinda failed to hit the mark, but I still liked it enough.
I read this to be less about big games not selling, nor small games being ineffective but more about squares infamous development hell where they're spending years developing a game and then scrap everything and start again from scratch. Ffxv, FFXIV, supposedly kh3, wouldn't doubt dq12, ffxiii, who knows how many games we never hear about. This seems focused on eliminating that kind of wasted content, not about released games underperforming.
That said, it's square so you know they'll also double down in homogenous graphics showcases with no soul and hollow focus group gameplay for "adult Western audiences".
Hilarious. Maybe they start making better games now.
@NEStalgia I’ll give Square another $70 dollar if they bring FF16 to Xbox. In fairness i got FF16 on PS5 for $40 on a digital sale around the holidays. They need to release a game on PS5, Xbox/PC day and date and see what the numbers look like. My guess would be they are leaving money on the table around launch window excitement time. I could be wrong, but that Sony deal don’t seem to be helping them all that much. FF on PC in Japan would sell a decent amount.
Maybe it's Xbox related? There was a lot of negativity over how Microsoft handled the FF14 Xbox port and now the Octopath 2 Xbox port is nowhere to be seen despite Early 2024 being over.
There goes my hopes for a FF13 trilogy remaster lol
@UltimateOtaku91 Yeah, this seems to be a trend nowadays unfortunately. Sony used to have smaller games in between their ''heavy hitters'' as well, but that's also a thing of the past unfortunately. Oh well, I'm still enjoying Sony's past titles while avoiding these heavy hitters all the same anyway. I don't need fancy graphics or 100+ hours gameplay to enjoy a game.
@rjejr Then again the PS5 has only sold 54 million consoles yeah i agree why port it over with such a small audience.
This is a shame. I honestly love Square for doing all their multimillion dollar goofball projects. I’ve bought more Square games the last five years than I’ve probably purchased from EA and Activision combined in my lifetime. I hope we keep getting Final Fantasy, Dragon Quest, and the like
@HonestHick Yeah it really is like wiiu for xb where publishers "test the waters" by releasing late ports and then when sales are low declare there's no market.
That said XV sold 1 million on Xbox and 4 million on ps so the market for ff is very heavily tilted to ps for historical reasons. Otoh that means the market for ff is old people like us and is part of their problem. And it still means 20% of XVs console sales were on Xbox which isn't insignificant. Half of all is sales were pc but a lot of that is because it became a benchmark test for hardware builds because the engine is pure garbage. Plus Sony had the marketing rights which obviously boosts the sales.
@WizzNL I didn't think that was about an ff9 remaster, I thought that was about dawntrail being ix-adjacent in theme.
@Grumblevolcano There's always negativity on everything Xbox. It's like how Nintendo was last Gen. The negativity around FF14 makes literally so sense at all though. They did make the payment unnecessarily confusing, and that's on square, the confusing part is their own website not the Xbox store front. The only negative is the inability to use retail prepaid cards with how the system works, that part makes no sense and needed to be advertised.
I doubt that's costing them much money though, and xb seems to do well for mmos/big services so I'd be surprised if that did poorly. It even had a game pass tie in. But it is curious that octo2 is still missing. That's not exactly an expensive game. Maybe waiting until June showcase?
This really seems to be about development hell, outsourced garbage, and their games, big and small just not selling that great. Their best was xvi and even that didn't do particularly great. And then there's For$poken.
@KeanuReaves I think the point is that you cannot look at Rebirth’s budget and profit in a silo if you have a business background.
Games like Rebirth end up covering other experiments that fail. Same reason an auto maker having a top rated in-class car with tons of sales can also happen when the company is staring down bankruptcy due to the rest of their production being stinkers.
People always get off bad mouthing square enix, but they've been consistently pushing out great titles that sometimes may be niche, but their biggest fault is releasing games in to quick succession, leaving little room to breathe and promote.
A) remake was a ps4 game and had a way bigger install base than ps5, so can we finally stop making rebirth look like a failure.
B) Have you heard of any square Enix layoffs? I sure haven't. It's not the Japanese way of business to lay off people for short term shareholder joy. Re-evaluating there workflow is a much wiser approach.
So in the end, is there room to improve, sure... yet still, Square Enix remains one of the better examples within this business.
Valkyrie Elysium was garbage. I paid full price for that bag of spanners
@NEStalgia I think the negativity of that port was justified like the Game Pass requirement on Xbox when PS+ isn't required on PS. It looks like nothing more than greed on Microsoft's part.
I can only say as I see, but squenix just doesnt exite me anymore - not like their games used to. Just taking the FF series --
FF15 - loved the 1st half to 2/3 up until they left the area leviathan featured in. Everything after was just a bit grim.
FF7 remake part 1 - having never played the original i bought this day 1 (PS5 version) (and was really looking forwards to it), and it was... ok. Good characters, decent fighting, okish graphics in performance mode (60fps+ is all I can play so no idea about other modes, but this game was nothing exiting at all on the technical front and felt below the curve for a AAA from a big company).
Then there was the story, which i found quite bad and overly convoluted - but i remember discussing with friends and all the stuff i didnt like, was things they changed for the remake.
FF16 - no 60fps lock, so didnt buy.
FF7 remake part 2.... just havn't been bothered with yet. Probably because of the above.
@Rich33 I was playing the PS1 games in the 90s and I can tell you for sure the remakes have nothing on the originals. It’s all about nostalgia bud
@Mikey856
Given all the good things i had heard over many, many years about 7s story (cant remember why i missed the game 1st time around), after playing remake part 1 i just was confused - after talking with friends at the time who had played the original it became clear - all the stuff i enjoyed was from the original, all the stuff i disliked was new/changes.
@Rich33 yeah I guess a new player isn’t going to have the same investment as someone who did the originals. I had to buy the remake and I really liked it becauseI knew wtf was going on lol
@Shepherd_Tallon FFVII Part 3 will release, but it was worth the post for the reactions from people with no sense of humour. 😂
But if somehow it doesn't, well I was worried about long it was going to take 7 years ago. 😝 My entire gaming life is going to be start playing FF7 and end playing FF7 R. Going to call my autobiography "FF7: From My Cradle to My Grave". 😜
https://www.pushsquare.com/news/2017/02/final_fantasy_vii_remake_still_has_a_long_long_way_to_go_before_release
@NEStalgia "double down in homogenous graphics showcases with no soul and hollow focus group gameplay for "adult Western audiences"."
We are due a "Bouncer" sequel. 😂 The beginning of the end for Squenix, all about those PS2 emotion engine graphics, who cares if the game is only 20 minutes long. 😝
@Flaming_Kaiser " why port it over "
Not sure what you are referring to here, my comment reply was that the 2D-HD games sell well on Switch b/c it has a huge install base but Squenix always seems to over estimate how many games it's going to sell, and FF7 Rebirth was only on the PS5 when FF7 Remake was on the PS4 followed by the PS5. 🤷♂️
@WizzNL Huh, I'd heard it was FF9 related. Kind of weird to me they'd base the new XIV story on an 11-theme while they're still running 11, unless they're planning on shutting it down soon. I would think they'd not want to kill a still populated MMO though. But that's really duplicative otherwise.
@Grumblevolcano Oh, yeah, good point the Game Pass requirement, I agree that sucks, but was also expected because, I don't think it's "MS Greed" so much as "MS incompetence", IIRC their policy is strictly up and down, if the game is F2P $0 in the store, it does not require GP, otherwise it does require GP. All other MMOs on XB are the same. ESO (since before MS owned it), Black Desert, Ark: Survival Evolved, etc. It's just their standard policy that has been in place forever, nothing special for FFXIV. The lone exception being PSO:New Genesis, which, is a F2P with a $0 store price. I'm guessing they have it set up that it's just tied to the store price, if it's not $0 it requires paid online to connect. Simple, stupid, and very MS.
Still the negativity for XIV in particular regarding that is stupid though. It absolutely looks stupid when it's not required on PS, but it's not like it was a new special requirement for XIV, it's been their standard rules since the X360 over 15 years ago when paid online was required. A stupid rule, yes, but a platform standard for over a decade. The only people "surprised" by it were PS or PC players watching the XB launch to see it fail, not people that actually play online games on XB who already know that policy.
FWIW, I'm actually playing/paying on XB because despite trying to get into it on PS no less than 4 times and bought the whole complete edition back when Heavensword came out, I gave it one last final shot with the XB launch and it finally clicked, maybe because the touchpad is terrible for the UI selector on PS, and now that my higher level character is on that new account, and I'm not allowed to unbind my PS account because stupid square enix, if I want to play it again on PS I have to create a whole new PSN account to do nothing but play that one game......grrrrr....
Well, that sucks. Hopefully they don’t cancel Dragon Quest XII.
@HonestHick I agree. I have not yet bought a ps5 yet because most Sony exclusives are also on PS4 or Xbox series X. FF VII Rebirth is the only game tempting me (and Stellar Blade now too, to be fair), but I don’t want to buy a whole console just for one game. It’s not like it’s a new Zelda. Therefore I’d like a port to Xbox too, would have bought the game in a heartbeat.
Also, they’ve seen Capcom release Street Fighter on everything, and Bandai Namco and Sega did the same with former exclusives Tekken and Persona. And FromSoftware with Bloodborne / Elden Ring. You’d think that would have learned Squeenix a thing or two?
I hope this doesn’t mean no Octopath Traveler III (if that was ever going to happen). I love a lot of Square’s “niche” titles
@Jill_Sandwich I'd say this falls into big games bucket, so it's probably a safe bet if they continue to remake older FF games after FF7.
I hope they achieve their (reasonable please) goals. I truly enjoy Square Enix games, so it would be great if could take a hint from Capcom and focus on what they do best with quality.
@Friendly i agree, but Square has that relationship built in with Sony and they take it every time. Plus there was some tension between Square and MS. Phil got that ironed out supposedly. All i am saying is most games need their launch window to be on all platforms and it will do much better. People on here act like Xbox has 7 million consoles sold and 3rd party should just skip it. Sure Xbox is behind PS, but they have around 30 million consoles sold and will have more in the future. If only 5-10% buy your game that is a lot of launch day units sold. I won’t even try to guess how many units FF16 would have sold on PC on launch, but i am sure it’s a solid number. At the end of the day i think FF16 does come to PC/Xbox after the deal with Sony expires this June. I love the game. I like action and not turn based so it’s in my wheel house. I kind of hope Square goes back into it with the PS5 Pro and updates it. Hey if you still don’t have a PS5 yet and the Pro is in your price range that would make some sense for you 😊
Thats just greed. Last year they say they will invest in live service, cellphone and cripto games, they sold the western studio for that. Lately they try to be mainstream, rpg is a niched sub genre , they want to grow but dont evaluate the market, if they dont change how they play things they will continue to loss money.
At this rate, we're never going to get a Bravely Third or remaster for the series.
At the very least they can finally stop blowing their load on mobile game after mobile game that won't even last a single year.
Square enix have some games that are exclusive to PS5. If they were multiplatform, I'm sure they'd have made a bit more money, especially on PC.
Man they better leave the star ocean series alone
Final Fantasy has a Final Fantasy problem. It does not click with the majority of gamers and has been on a downward trend for a decade or more.
They better not touch Dragon Quest 12!
But of a ramble here, but I think they messed up with Remake and Rebirth by inexplicably making them into quite tough and gruelling combat gauntlets. The original was easy and most battles could be won by repeatedly pressing X and picking 'Attack'. To take that and make a pretty punishing, challenging action game seems quite odd. Perhaps they were going for a Dark Souls style Twitch buzz with livestreams going viral and 'fail compilations' flooding YouTube.
Either way, I love the original but Remake - after the excitement wore off - just brings to mind the words "slog", "stressful" and "off-putting" when I think about it now. I had high hopes that the more adventurous and exploration focused Rebirth would remedy that, but it still has random enemies way harder than anything in the OG game, it still forces you down overlong corridor dungeons, it still gives me this apprehensive attitude to what's next.
After forcing my way to the point of no return in Rebirth I did the rare thing of deciding to drop a game. I just didn't want to force myself through hours of stuff I knew would just be stressful and annoying. When I started playing Dragon's Dogma 2 afterwards, I genuinely thought "Ah, this is what it feels like to enjoy the game I'm playing!"' I'd legit forgot after basically gaslighting myself into thinking I was enjoying Rebirth. Looking at how many players didn't return for Rebirth despite it being a direct sequel, it seems a lot of others were put off too. Anyway, thanks for reading my blog.
Remake comes out - Finally FF7 has been remade in modern glory! Nope, we were misled. It's a sequel with KH level of story changing nonsense.
Rebirth comes out - We now know it isn't FF7 remade in modern glory. We are afraid of how much worse things can get. The dev team didn't learn their lesson from the previous game. Hype is reduced.
Part 3 will come out. Even less hype due to even more story changing nonsense. They will sell even less.
People can choose to blame what they want but sales don't lie. All the OG fans who made Square successful were expecting the promised faithful remake. New fans were confused by the new sequel story or flat out disappointed by the plot holes.
@Matroska the only good things about Remake and Rebirth is the combat and music. The visuals too, to an extent.
@Friendly
"Also, they’ve seen Capcom release Street Fighter on everything"
1 million in 1months a MULTIPLAT game.
FF16: 3 Million in 1 week on PS5 alone.
Playstation 5 market is still too small for true 3rd party exclusive, squareenix has to develop games for either ps4 or at least pc to recoup the development cost. And fire every executive that greenlighted forspoken.
Also I think most people actually want ff7 remake, it's okay if the story a bit different, but ff7 remake/rebirth is a sequel with multiverse, I don't think that what gamers want. That's why the second game isn't selling as good, casual player already know it's not a true remake.
@MikeOrator Nintendo will. Because of focusing on all age groups and creativity plus ignoring crazy high resolutions and frame rates that turning videogames into movies!
@TheEnygma I don't think they could've imagined the success of ff14 in their wildest dreams
@Strikke You can't compare a fighting game to an Action game. Fighting games are more niche.
Rebirth is a tougher sell as it is the middle part of a remade classic that fans have already played. I still haven't got round to completing it. Think it would of been better in two games maximum. But full price for a part of the story with the conclusion part years away 🤔 that said I really enjoyed the first part.
If they mess with my chances of a third NieR game there’ll be hell to pay!
Yeah I remember reading an article around the time everyone was saying Foamstars wasn't doing well where Square said going forward they are going to start focusing more on Quality than Quantity.
@Lup hilarious indeed. Quality is not the issue.
£70 / €80 games during a heavy cost of living crisis in two huge markets, at a time when player choice (and therefore backlogs) are higher than ever because of subscription models.
I WONDER why it hasn't sold as many as the £45 PS4 version of the first one?
Also releasing it pretty closely to the time sink that is FF16 probably wasn't that smart either.
@rachetmarvel REASONSDOTCOM much?
@2here2there @TrickyDicky99
Nintendo saved the industry back in the 80's as well. You are right! Nintendo! Nintendo! Nintendo!
@Matroska I haven't played past the opening of Remake because I'm waiting for the trilogy which apparently isn't for years to come, but it's been clear with SoP and XVI that they're hellbent on trying to use FF to catch onto the Souls buzz. That's been their problem, instead of creating their own identity for FF they keep trying to use it to latch onto some other game's zeitgeist, and budget assuming it will succeed.
I didn't know Remake/Rebirth was like that. That's...offputting. I don't know what possessed them to take a widely popular RPG series and try to turn it into an almost-tough-as-nails action series, but not tough-as-nails enough to appeal to the people that play other tough-as-nails action series. And somehow believe that's the golden ticket to getting Mario Kart sales numbers.
It's like they learned nothing from XIV 1.0 where they focused so much on gfx they had flower pots with more polygons and shaders than the player character model in an MMO. They blew it up, rebuilt it with budget graphics on a shoestring budget and ended up with the only game funding them for a decade. Yet the same guy who did that told us before XVI launched that FF is about having the best graphics. Of course he, and most Square producers seem to repeat contradictory and ever changing nonsense corporate statements like they're making hostage videos.
@2here2there Nintendo actually used to focus on framerates above all, in the Wii and WiiU era they were all about everything being 60fps graphics be darned, it's part of what made those consoles feel good despite being "weak". They just abandoned that for now on Switch because they have no choice with the hardware. All companies really need to take a generation to step back from the graphics cliff and just say "everything at 60fps from now on, period" and the graphics land where they land. Then the next gen they can add graphics from there while still hitting 60fps. Maybe this is the gen for that. The industry seems to be resetting. Maybe the last games in the pipeline are the end of graphics above all, as everyone's losing mountains of cash on it.
@old-dad Square's problem is that Final Fantasy doesn't need to click with the majority of gamers. It just needs to click with Final Fantasy gamers, and Square needs to budget it accordingly. For some reason they want to make every game with a Call of Duty budget and then don't understand when it doesn't hit Call of Duty numbers, while being not Call of Duty. Sony, seems to have fallen into that same trap with their games turning low margin. They all somehow thought if you just blow $200m+ on a budget you'll double your sales and learned 4-8 years of development spending later that it doesn't work that way.
Sega seems to be the only company that understands the business these days. Funny, that.
Good. Maybe this means they will stop dumping money into trash live service and and mobile game stuff and get that FF9 remake to me.
@rachetmarvel Here's one, ALAN WAKE 2, a MULTIPLAT game sold 1million, celebrated as a 'success' ...........and just now Remedy said that they have yet to recoup costs. lol
@Konks Rebirth would have those expectations on it ahead of time. There is no way Rebirth has missed its target by almost $150m in profits ahead of this report. In fact, I'm pretty sure most of these restructurings were announced last year well ahead of Rebirth "failing" or "succeeding". So this was coming with or without Rebirth.
@HonestHick you are wrong on this one,they simply spend waaaay too much money on great graphics,sound,music,etc. Jrpgs simply are not that big as they used too be. They should take some notes from Atlus and Nippon Ichi. Plus FF 13 and 15 did opposite of expected,alienated fans.
@Radekbejbl1 well if they spend that much then simply make sure it get’s to more platforms was my point. Japan is turning into mobile and PC. But with the PC launch of FF coming who knows when is my point. Take advantage of the launch window excitement on as many platforms as possible and numbers would be up. I love FF16, bought it for PS5 and plan to buy it on Xbox when it comes out after the June deal with Sony. Sure it might only move the FF normal on Xbox which is around 1-1.5 million copies but thats decent money for all that production you speak of. Throw in PC and we should be seeing decent profit returns. Unlike the story of Square losing $140 million dollars.
https://www.ign.com/articles/final-fantasy-maker-square-enix-takes-140-million-hit-in-content-abandonment-losses-as-it-revises-game-pipeline
@HonestHick I get your point dude,but it won't help,believe me,I follow FF from very first one and FF was only big,like really big on PS1 and early PS2,they need go back to series roots. Gameplay like FF X,with 8 gen graphics will do the job(barely) or stylized graphics like Dragon Quest or Persona. Second option is there best chance,and yes on all platforms day 1
@Radekbejbl1 Yeah i wish the FF series and Square well in the future cause i like the story, art and music they provide. I am just saying to take advantage of gamers on as many platforms as possible cause cash is king in today’s market. There are a lot of games people play now on all types of platforms and it’s not wise to not be there. Like i said i fully plan to double dip FF16. I really enjoy that game. But you are right that this isn’t the PS1-PS2 days and i think it’s best they take a different approach going forward and i think they will.
@HonestHick yes money rules,and I agree 💯,also wish them best in future endeavors,plus I'm big fan of FF ,now I'm off too finish Detlaff in Blood Wine for final trophy of W3 next gen. Enjoy gaming and life buddy,c ya around✌️
@Strikke
Here's another one Persona 3 Reload came out 22 days prior to Rebirth. Came out for PS4, PS5, PC, Xbox Series X/S and according to Circana sold less than Rebirth (PS5 only).
@press_x_button Which is why its crazy when some very specific crowd of ppl would call Rebirth or FF16 "fLoPs"
@Radekbejbl1 Do it! Thanks for the chat. Good times and yes FF needs to be here for the foreseeable future. It’s just to important to the industry to not be doing well 😊
@rjejr Only Sony payed for the game so they are not going to cancel FF7R parts.
@Flaming_Kaiser Did Sony pay more than $140 million? Neither Sony nor Squenix should have signed a contract they couldn't get out of if they thought the game was going to lose them money.
For the record though, and I think I may have said this before, I don't really think they'll cancel it, but I do think there's a chance, like 1%. Maybe 2%. It will make them money as people buy the trilogy. then buy the upgraded trilogy on PS6, PS7 and PS8.
@rjejr If Sony didnt pay up you probably never would have get to play the game its that simple.
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