Square Enix Layoffs Underway in US and Europe as Restructure Begins

SE and their Absurd Sales Dream

I met Ana and Kathryn (another person that was laid off from Square Enix USA) last year at the Final Fantasy XVI pre-launch event in Los Angeles, so seeing them being laid off by Square Enix personally really hurts. Hope they find a better place soon.

This is insane…

The whole industry is going to continue to experience this for a good while into the future as AI and missed budgets happen. Sad to see it. Thats a lot of people out of work. I hope some of them can find new jobs on upcoming new studios. But new studios aren’t popping up quite as fast as they used to.

This isn't unique to the games industry, its happening in all industries, its quite scary and it must be in the 10s of millions of people that have been let go worldwide. Welcome to capitalism, it will take years for the world to recover

Good luck laying off your IT department. Such a supremely silly short-sighted move.

Reduce the scope of your games. FF7 Rebirth didn't need a mini-game for literally everything. You don't need 5-6 towers for every region. These are expensive and unnecessary additions for minimal quality gains.

FF16 didn't need to have the drab sidequests and could've just focused on companion quests that continued throughout the journey. Most of the sidequests were waste of time fetch quests.

Foamstars should never have existed.

Squareenix should focus on making japanese games without input from their western branch, do it like nintendo where western branch is used only for games translation.

SE has a budgeting/marketing problem. Their expectations are unrealistic. If they keep this up, it’s only going to lead to more lay-offs. I can’t imagine what huge expectations they will put on DQXII whenever that releases in the future.

I hope SE can rebound and adjust their strategy because they’re in the top 3 for my favorite game studios (probably #1 or #2 with Sega). Some of their smaller, niche titles are brilliant.

I said in March this was likely to happen due to the PS Exclusives under performing and big changes like going multiplatform would be required moving forward, but alot of people didnt believe me looking back at the comment replies. This exclusivity strategy for SE has been a disaster to be honest.

Always the staff that suffer from the miss management and poor commercial decisions.

In the words of Shawn Layden:

If you’re spending $250 million, you want to be able to sell [your game] to as many people as possible, even if it’s just 10 per cent more

@Vivisapprentice this is just the economic cycle at play here. We are coming off of the inflated COVID economy years and it is inevitable that this would happen. The gaming industry is a vanity industry and when money is tight leisure spending goes down.

@Sakai under performing based off of their own very high metrics. If they went multiplat they would still complain. As Xbox gamers overwhelmingly prefer western style games plus their base is which smaller. The reality is that these gaming studios have let game development costs increase just as employees demand more compensation. All while putting out less tangible products compared to previous generations.

Will be curious if they still do Nintendo exclusives, which I have a feeling they will. They'll look like hypocrites then, but at least they'll be happy because of good sales.

@breakneck I don’t see the problem with adding fluff to RPGs. One gets more entertainment value from their 70$ purchase. People would then complain about games being short and empty if things were removed.

This is the trend in the gaming industry which has become bloated. Companies have allowed development costs to soar, employees demand more compensation, and gamers complain about the cost of a new game despite the gaming industry not increasing costs to keep up with inflation like other industries. ALL while putting out less new products compared to previous generations because most including the suits and gamers alike expect big hits. So this trend will continue for the foreseeable future until gaming companies strike a proper balance for product output and get over the big hit marvel mindset.

For the value that we get from the gaming industry I think new physical games and digital should be more expensive. And subscriptions should only be for low tier games like mobile games.

They have released some pretty terrible games in recent years that lost a lot of money though. You cannot do that without consequences.
Yes, Forspoken. I am looking at you.

@breakneck whilst I agree the sidequests in FF16 where not anything special, I do think they were needed and I understand why they were so heavily loaded to the end of the game.

It was a problem they created for themselves by spacing out the Eikons, the last haul of quests was essentially just so you had something to do with Odin.

Sorry for all affected. Employee protection laws do cover the Japanese staff, but the EU and US are unfortunately not covered. Time to rethink western capitalism.

As much as I love Square Enix, they've fallen on their nose by following a business strategy set up in the early 2000s which should have been evaluated and adjusted since then. Nevertheless they did release an onslaught of mostly great games. I think a Japan based core team can continue the tradition, while reducing superfluous fluff releases like harvestella and foamstars.

Let's hope they started with the ethics department.

@Vaako007 Haven’t played it yet but I heard the minigames were placed on the main story path. I can see why the developers wanted people to play the minigames (due to sinking so much time and resource into them), but some players may be frustrated if games artificially increase the playtime due to this and who only want to go through the story.

Purge japan developers of western toxins outside of those who market and bring games over.

Was wondering if PS had covered this already and I missed it since this story is 2 days old already.

Squenix seems to be quite the mess these days, doesn’t it? Can’t imagine they aren’t at least exploring a sale or a huge investment from the likes of PIF or some such. All these moves lately seem to me like downsizing for a sale. Though admittedly I’m in the US and that’s how things tend to operate here, probably different in Japan.

Doesnt multi platform require more work to be done?

More work, less people?

With their new "strategies" / current quality level, I really fear for Square enix as a whole.

@wiiware "Squareenix should focus on making japanese games without input from their western branch" I mean if they didn't we wouldn't have that hacking mechanic that 9S has which was SO SIMILAR to Batman Arkham Knight(2015)

@Rmg0731 "Purge japan developers of western toxins" tbh Japanese devs needed to learn as well, look what happened to them during the PS3/360 era and they actually bounced back starting the PS4/xbone, however, I think Chinese devs with the likes of Genshin, Star Rail and all their upcoming games beat them to it. Still not a doom and gloom as both can enjoy successes, even Korean devs had a nice start aside from their usual MMOs, Stellar Blade leading the charge.

@WafflingHearts "I heard the minigames were placed on the main story path." only a few mandatory minigames and they were easy the rest are OPTIONAL and challenging(to sometimes an annoyance), if you haven't played it yet, snag a copy already, Rebirth actually made me remember the one of the older FFs in terms of exploration.

The real issue is, why in first place a studio is putting hundreds of thousands of dollars in the production of a game. Of course it's not sustainable and they will never recoup the spending. Is there at least a project manager looking at an Excel spreadsheet to warn people that there is a problem in the business model?

@WafflingHearts I agree with you about adding those games on the main story line. Fluff can be done well if optional. Good RPGs have this balance. I only played the demo of the game as I have too much of a backlog to even consider the full game.