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This Week in Games - What in The Fresh Hell is Going On With Square-Enix?

It's weird to see people are trying to frame this like Square-Enix is selling off a priceless heirloom for pocket change to fuel some drug habit rather than them selling a beat up old car in their driveway for a few hundred bucks to get rid of it after years of collecting rust and doing nothing.

It all leads to a feeling that Square-Enix are a soulless, money-hungry corporation whose management doesn't care about what they're putting out.

Dark Mac wrote:

so this should be a perk for their Japanese studios as well. Also, I wouldn't really say they're focusing on AAA output, considering how many small games they're putting out. You didn't even mention Triangle strategy, which came out a bit over a month ago and seems to be a big success.

Probably be mentioned more if it weren’t a switch exclusive or had more fanfare surrounding it.

BadNewsBlues wrote:

Dark Mac wrote: so this should be a perk for their Japanese studios as well. Also, I wouldn't really say they're focusing on AAA output, considering how many small games they're putting out. You didn't even mention Triangle strategy, which came out a bit over a month ago and seems to be a big success. Probably be mentioned more if it weren’t a switch exclusive or had more fanfare surrounding it.

It sold more than Stranger of Paradise and Square put out some press releases about it.

The problem is that SE just labels nearly any single player game a "flop" these days, even if it sells tens of millions of copies, because they want every game to sell huge AND generate constant live service revenue on top of that.

The company is barely profitable if you go off the earning reports. Crystal Dynamics had a profit margin of 3.6% while Eidos Montreal had a profit margin of 0.65% in 2021. Lara Croft has not been an industry icon since the 90s and Crystal Dynamics is even on record stating they hate classic Lara and think she's a much better character now. Whatever status these characters companies had in the 90s is no longer relevant.

It's weird to see people are trying to frame this like Square-Enix is selling off a priceless heirloom for pocket change to fuel some drug habit rather than them selling a beat up old car in their driveway for a few hundred bucks to get rid of it after years of collecting rust and doing nothing.

Heidi might be interested to know Naoki Yoshida has expressed interest and support for NFTs. He even called out the English Twitch chat during a live-letter for complaining about them and called them ignorant on the subject.

Yeah, while I think SE is doing a lot of things wrong, the numbers in this case speak for themselves. SE said they didn't do well and outsiders went "Whaaa?" when they could only see the sales numbers (and rightly so), but I imagine those kinds of margins aren't something most companies want to continue to risk spending tens of, if not hundreds of, millions of dollars on when any game could end up a flop.

It sold more than Stranger of Paradise and Square put out some press releases about it.

Unlike Capcom which did a phenomenal job at growing their PC gaming audience,

Really? What was your first clue? The fact that everything completely unrelated to Final Fantasy, Kingdom Hearts and Dragon Quest has failed to make an impact?

did anyone care about the third tomb raider?

You’re basing this off of what exactly? them having other things to look over is not why the FFXIII stuff was messy (and people were comparing about FF in general long before 2009), why Kingdom Hearts 3 took so long to come out, nor why you have titles that are still waiting on newer entries like Musashi, Vagrant Story, or Bushido Blade or why some games were never localized outside of Japan like the 3DS version of Dragonquest XI..

Just because they aren't focusing on some other specific niche games doesn't mean they aren't do any.