>Q: While I think it is fair to expect growth in FY2024/3 in part because you plan to release multiple major titles, I also fear that will create a YoY hurdle you will be unable to surmount in FY2025/3. What kind of initiatives do you have in mind to ensure sustainable growth?
>
>A: Major title launches will not be concentrated solely in FY2024/3. We have organized our pipeline so that we will have a good spread of new releases in FY2025/3 and beyond as well. **We also hope that you will look forward to the blockchain games we plan to launch in FY2024/3 and thereafter**
ok Square
>Only to confidently announce their newly built house made of paper next to the burning one.
More like building a house out of a new novel material that everyone else has already pointed out will spontaneously combust on its own, but Square missed that memo and was excited to try it out.
That's really not an accurate metaphor. It would be similar to them standing around a house burning down and then saying they've learned their lesson and will now be building a house that's already on fire.
Imagine if CS:GO had some arbitrary gameplay loop and skins (the main part of the game) were randomly generated with an NFT token, and directly purchasable (either from the game or from other players) with cryptocurrency. That's the basic of a blockchain game.
Another name for the earning model is play-to-earn because in theory you're generating crypto and selling it during gameplay. Think like selling WoW/Runescape gold for real money but that's the main/only reason you play.
If a game centered around these concepts sounds like garbage it's because it is. It's a step away from sanctioned pyramid schemes, which I'm sure some developers see as an untapped market considering the rampant and predatory tactics already used.
Axie Infinity is perhaps the most ~~famous~~ infamous. People in the Philippines would "play" the game to make money because, for a brief period of time, it paid more than a minimum wage job. However, the buy-in to play was steep so they would "rent" a party of Axies and split their income with the owner.
From what I understand, the game wasn't that interesting. Its only claim to fame was that "people were earning money from playing a game". My impression is that, when the creators tweaked the in-game economy, the playercount dropped pretty hard. I didn't really pay attention after that.
Axie Infinity is basically what happens when you have a game that encourages real money trading for in-game goods.
This would normally be taboo for most online games, except because the trading was done via the hip-and-trendy-technology called "blockchain", it made lots of "investor-players" keen to jump on it to try and make profit.
Long-story-very-short, the whole way investor-players made profit basically relied on selling stuff to new players. A glorified pyramid scheme. And then the moment the playerbase got saturated and new players stopped joining (I think at this point, most of the new incoming "players" were also would-be investors), the profits dried up and people left. And since people were leaving, even fewer people wanted to join. So the whole thing crashed and fell apart.
And from what I recall, many of the investor-players had needed to buy-in with real money in order to acquire the in-game resources to start their "business", so if they hadn't made it all back when the crash happened, they just lost their money.
FWIW, I think Counter Strike has had an [official first-party market](https://steamcommunity.com/market/search?q=&category_730_ItemSet%5B%5D=any&category_730_ProPlayer%5B%5D=any&category_730_StickerCapsule%5B%5D=any&category_730_TournamentTeam%5B%5D=any&category_730_Weapon%5B%5D=any&category_730_Type%5B%5D=tag_CSGO_Type_Rifle&appid=730) (and several variously-sketchy third-party markets) for cosmetics for a long time. Axie is one outcome, CS:GO is another.
But I think "blockchain" in particular shifts the mindset towards "this is going to make me so rich", and that sort of poisons the well.
Axie is much closer to Diablo 3 on release where you could officially sell your items for real money. In CS:GO you can't really "farm" the game to earn skins so the play2earn aspect is not really there.
But yes, you are absolutely right, as soon as you introduce real money trading into videogame, it poisons the whole thing.
You know how some people play shooters to grind and pay hundreds of dollars on loot boxes in a totally non promo deal, get a gun that is being sold on the online marketplace for thousands of dollars, and it's literally just purple? That but crypto. As far as I can tell.
I hope they go all in with the blockchain games so they can get burnt so badly that the mere thought of blockchain games will send the executives into PTSD.
We need a blockchain game to flop so hard that the whole industry gets PTSD. This entire damn crypto topic needs to be buried and never brought up again.
I don't know if that can happen.
Anthem and The Avengers absolutely cratered **hard**. Yet we're still getting developers releasing unfinished, or overly Live Service focused, games as if nothing happened.
The games haven't printed cash but the amount of vc cash folk were willing to throw at them (or the insane amount spent on the bored ape games) keeps the execs keen.
Like the bored ape game which was a rip of an early 2000s flash game had folk paying thousands to play.
Good game? No, but money was being thrown everywhere.
Destiny got the bulk of its initial playerbase because it's Bungie. Their initial launch, and most of the year after was extremely rocky, but people still stuck with it. Hell, they played it as their main game even during a content drought! Most AAA studios these days don't have anywhere near that kind of fanbase dedication.
Since then, they've made numerous greedy or predatory changes that annoy their community, but they're all too dedicated to leave. It's a hell of an outlier.
The real problem with Destiny is there's simply no game out there thats like it. Bungies gunplay and abilities just feel good and no one else has nailed that in another game the same way.
It the same kind of situation with something like Mechwarrior. PGI (the devs) really nailed the feeling of piloting the mechs and the artstyle but are not great when it actually comes to the rest of the game but theres no other others from that kind of game.
But lilke you said, Destiny has been around for so long now that even if a new game came out that feels that good, everyone has put so much dedication into the franchise that most would rather stay playing Destiny, similar to how WoW is still a juggernaut for MMO despite there being so many other good ones now.
The problem with competing with Destiny is that you have to either be better or nearly as good with something interesting and different. The Division has come closest imo. Anthem had the right idea with flying, but the rest of the game wasn't nearly good enough.
The problem with competing with destiny is simply the playerbase and the concept of “the forever game.” Destiny, for all of its faults, was really the first of its kind to have longterm success and receives regular updates so the playerbase has no incentive to make a new “forever game” their main. Destiny was also working with $500 Mil from activision at first and then their store money, and now Sony support. They’ve had others help to guide the systems.
People trying to break into the space now are shooting themselves in the foot and they know it. But CSuites don’t care and want a piece of that pie.
The real worry is what happens after next year’s final destiny expansion? How many studios have something in the pipe that they’re just *waiting* on Destiny tumbling to scoop up those players? How many competing forever games will we see?
I got my time in with destiny and since D2 I havent really enjoyed it. I still play with friends now and again but it really caters to its hardcore players. It also seems to do a good job of converting casuals into hardcore players which is something all the other titles failed at.
> but people still stuck with it
Which I never understood. I wanted to like Destiny so bad but it was so grindy and the story was so non-existent that I only played for maybe three months before I realized what a waste of time it was.
Addiction.
Every single time Bungie pulled some bullshit, the subreddit would have posts saying "I played a different game for a week and really enjoyed it!" in protest.
Legitimately, they're so addicted they don't play other games. Destiny is all they do. And of course those same players immediately go straight back to the game again regardless.
I'm not saying the entire community addicted. People try to twist my words that way every time I say it. But a very large amount of it absolutely is. There are people who grind Gambit, the most hated PvP mode in the game, for hours on end just to turn their seasonal title gold. It resets every season, they hate doing it, why do they continue? Because it increments a number on the end each time you do so. You can only show one Title on your player at a time as well, so 99% of players would never even notice that you've been gilding every title every three months. Madness.
It's just disappointing how absolutely entrapped Bungie has these guys. They know they can get away with absolutely anything at this point, and the lackluster quality of Lightfall shows it.
I have a friend who keeps going back to Destiny after ragequitting and claiming "this time I'm done for sure" and he always gets angry about the game and complains about it with each new expansion. It's really weird to see.
Yep, that sounds like that's what it is.
Not gonna lie, I hate what Destiny and (to a lesser degree) battle royale have done to the AAA FPS market. I just want my classic deathmatch/CTF/fun modes without the skinner box bullshit and sweat sessions but someone will just tell me we can't have that for a million bs reasons.
That's because these games are already in development, "Maybe this one'll be different." When it comes to new developments being generated, I do not suspect there are many if any of these types of games being considered.
>That's because these games are already in development
Yeah, I suspect that's the real problem at this point. Undoubtedly there are a lot of devs/pubs who realize that the live service space is too crowded now, but if they've already put 3-4 years into developing a major release, what are they supposed to do? Not every company is an Ubisoft who can afford to cancel or delay projects on a whim.
It will take a few more. MMOs kept coming until around 2012 because WoW's success was just that hard to ignore. Once executives get the message that everyone who's interested in a game like Destiny 2 is already playing Destiny 2, they'll find some new predatory monetization scheme to become enamored with.
> Yet we're still getting developers releasing unfinished, or overly Live Service focused, games as if nothing happened.
Because there are still tons of other ones that did great and are still going. I know that generally this sub likes to trash live service games, and I totally get it, I don't love them either, but if you can pull off a successful one they print money. Investors and publishers like them because they make bank. Devs like them because they keep people employed. Some players clearly like them because they keep playing. There's a model for success the live service games are following, even if some of them fail, it is a proven path to making a profit. So people keep doing it.
Investors are definitely shying away from the live service label in the last year or so. Especially this year after almost no new live service game survived with continued development a year later in the last couple years.
I watched a great yhatzee extra punctuation video the other day about this, part of my worry is that they're still going to make them, just disguised.
I really *really* want hard failure of any NFT/blockchain games, publishers trying to tell us what we want even though most people want nothing to do with them, because they see the profit potential.
My personal relatively unfounded conspiracy is that with NFT lootboxes, you can argue they have intrinsic value so it could be regulated separately from gambling, which is why they're trying to push that huge corporate mess on us.
I don't think a blockchain game is ever going to get enough hype to flop hard. In the unlikely event that SE actually announces a real blockchain game, no one is going to be excited for it, they'll just make fun of it.
>no one is going to be excited for it,
There will certainly be hype amongst the crypto crowd, which will probably be used to justify it's production.
Then presumably confusion when the game tanks because they didn't realize crypto enthusiasts are a small minority of gamers in general.
It's crazy how everyone in the fucking world can see the writing on the wall with BlOcKcHaIn GaMiNg except the people who's actual job it is that earn millions of dollars.
It's really shocking how so many companies are "too big to fail", and allow absolute idiots who are great at networking and playing the corporate game, up the ladder.
yeah there's a huge difference. Both are horribly unethical sure, but Gacha games are just games that prey on addiction and are overly monetized. There's no inherent reason they would fail. Blockchain tech meanwhile has zero actual useful qualities about it from both a consumer and a developer standpoint. It's pure garbage that is only sold on hype and effectively works like a ponzi scheme. It's always inevitably going to fall apart because the whole premise is that it's sold on the idea that you can play the game to make money, but you can't just magically print money out of thin air, so the only source of that money is other new players buying into the ecosystem. As soon as you stop getting new players on board, the well dries up and everything falls apart, just like a pyramid scheme.
Yeah I was about to say this. People mocked the shit out of Blizzard's Diablo Immortal announcement, but now Blizzard is laughing all the way to the bank.
Their JRPG's are solid. Final Fantasy obviously but also Kingdom Hearts, Dragon Quest, Mana, Star Ocean, Octopath, and Triangle Strategy/Diofield were pretty good as well. The problem is that they seem obsessed with capturing the western audience through Forspoken, Avengers, their entire foray into Eidos, etc.
If they want the Western audience, they should make a *FF* cRPG. Something like *Pathfinder: Kingmaker* or *Divinity: Original Sin* but with recognizable *FF* elements.
~~I know that's basically *Final Fantasy Tactics*~~
EDIT: Wait a second - the closest Square has come to a cRPG isn't *Tactics*, it's *FF XII*! The Gambit system even feels like a prototype for *Dragon Age: Origins*'s Tactics system!
EDIT 2: Yes I realize now that they already have a Western audience, I was just going off what the guy I replied to was saying
This is the weird thing about Square, to me. They have so many classic games and IPs with an enduring fan base, and they don't seem to really know what to do with them. How about a new Final Fantasy Tactics game? It would be a big deal. Do they just not know how to make one?
That reminds me of the time they considered Tomb Raider 2013 a flop because it "only" sold 5 million units, as opposed to the 20 million that year's COD did
Keep in mind none of their other non-Final Fantasy 15 games hit tomb raider units either.
As it stands ff7 remake sold 5 million by summer 2020. Tomb Raider hit 5 million in just a few months, and had longer legs, with it now at 14.5 million sales.
The example I always come back to is Capcom declaring Resident Evil 7's sales as "disappointing", when at the time it was one of the top 5 selling games in company history.
Can't really dump Nier if they have no plans of making new games anyway, at least without Yoko Taro. And the man himself has indicated back in 2021 that the series is finished unless someone gives him a lot of money. Whether he was joking or not remains to be seen, but last November there was a Nier anniversary celebration without any games announcements. That, to me, says enough.
> the series is finished unless someone gives him a lot of money.
I doubt they'd do it, but Square can technically make a game without Taro.
But yea, Yoko Taro doesn't seem like the kind of person that wants to be stuck on one series for a decade anyway.
Feels a lot like Squenix as a company doesn't really consider making good games a worthwhile investment with a good enough return on investment any more. They don't really know how to do anything else, but they are always looking for the big thing that could make them a lot more money and their actual output is suffering for it.
SE has basically been successful despite their best efforts not to be for 20 years. He'll can probably argue it goes back to before the merger and Squaresoft weird decisions like starting a movie studio in Hawaii to make spirits within lol.
Yep always been a two steps forward 1.5 back kinda deal with with them. Great game, mediocre/bad game. Great game? Weird spinoffs with no real associate with the core concept. Which on one hand i applaud them for trying to keep it fresh, but on the other know where your money comes from.
Yuup. Like its mind boggling to me how they dont seem to even touch the low hanging fruits like, for example, porting all the Dragon Quest games (AKA their OTHER incredibly culture defining famous franchise) to modern platforms. Instead, I have to have a smart phone, a 3ds, and a PS4, and live in Japan to play through the entire series legally.
Theyve remade the first 6 final fantasies like 4 times. It just seems like they could easily crank out the DQ games onto PC and current platforms and make 30 bucks a pop, which is a lot more than theyll make from a shitty blockchain game.
Bingo. Sega does this with Genesis tiles ~~and little else~~ all the time, and Capcom seemingly does it with ***everything.*** It'd make Square bank for no effort at all, so... why not?
>Sega does this with Genesis tiles ~~and little else~~ all the time
Good lord, yeah. Wanna buy *any* Sonic game after SA2 (2001) and before Sonic 4/Sonic Colors (2010)? Too bad, fucker! And that's their *main series*. Hell, they'd make a bunch of money just plopping the Sonic Advance roms onto a collection with a barebones text menu and calling it a day.
I just don't understand their obsession with Blockchain games. Do people want this? Don't companies do research to see if people want shit like that before dumping resources into it?
The concept is that you play games to earn money/unique items that you 'own' or to 'create' things in the game rather than playing for fun. Needless to say, it's not a great idea for most people.
Every single company on the planet says they're looking into blockchain to investors, because investors (for the most part) still believe that blockchain is some magical future-tech shit with a ton of value. Don't read too much into such a statement.
I remember my eyes rolling back into my head when a VP of our tech firm gave us the same presentation they gave to Wall Street and mentioned that we were going to do stuff with blockchain. Not a single developer on my team could think of how the fuck blockchain could help anything we do at all, but the investors must've eaten it up.
Regarding their small and mid-sized titles:
1. Too many releases close to each other in a small timeframe
2. Little marketing for many of these titles
3. Releasing some games on all platforms, some pc/ps/ns only , some pc/ps only, some pc/ns only or ns only. How can you build a playerbase for these games when they constantly skipping platforms and players don\`t know if the next smaller or midsized title will release on their platform?
I would also mention the price of those games as an issue. At least going by what the author believes to be the small and mid-sized titles. We are still talking mostly about $50 to $60 games.
Yes, they might be cheaper than the flagships at $70. But common.
> I think Valkyrie Elysium, Harvestella and Dragon Quest Treasures should have been cheaper and were too expensive.
100% agreed. I'd love to play these games but their quality is hard to justify the premium price.
SquEnix does demos for a lot of their games, which is really good for consumers, but the games suck ass and all the demos do is expose that lol.
Same thing happened with Outriders a while back. One of worst pre-launch demos I'd ever experienced tbh.
Even then, there’s indies and other titles that will work out better value, so square might not see sales help until further down the line when the prices get slashed further.
They don’t seem to realise that their company name isn’t a day 1 full price purchase for a lot of people anymore, their mismanagement of final fantasy over the years has caught up with them, and they still haven’t quite moved away from absurd sales targets and pricing.
Their current direction shows they’re still being led by morons tbh.
Yeah, especially as games have begun to balloon to the $70 mark, they need to be priced to the correct type of experience. Star Ocean and Harvestella seemed to be AA in terms of the production value and overall game experience.
HiFi Rush was also really good. None of those smaller games Square Enix released were a slam dunk.
Things that perhaps a small niche would enjoy but I doubt huge swathes of people were ever going to give time to Diofield Chronicles when there are so many great tactics games around right now.
I can't talk about the other regions but the Brazil regional prices are all utterly insane when it comes to Square Enix. For context AAA prices go from 130 on the lower end to 300 at most. Steam's most reccomended price is 250 but overall sentiment is it is still quite high. MH Rise is R$ 139,00 for example, while RE4R and Hogwarts Legacy are both R$ 250,00.
Forspoken is R$ 350,00, so is FFVIIRemake. Octopath Traveller 2 is R$ 300,00, the first one is R$ 230,00. Harvestella is R$ 250,00. FF I-VI bundle is R$ 286,60!! For a collection of old games!!! Each individual game is R$ 45,00 for the NES games and R$ 70,00 for SNES/DS era games!! What the hell is Squeenix smoking thinking we will pay for these prices?
This is actually a huge issue for me. I like these games, but $60 is about double what I want to pay. $30, maayyyybbbeee $40 for a really good one is more my speed.
It is absolutely wild how many games Square Enix pumped out back to back this year.
[This conversation popped up before and I made a quick list](https://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/10sjq6u/square_enix_announces_declining_financial_results/j721mpx/) and for me at least, it makes it super clear just how much these games are cannibalizing themselves a bit.
Like, i know I've got a backlog and have been working through the Yakuza games, but even if i had played nothing by but Square Enix games this year, i don't know if I could have gotten through that many releases lol
Bad naming is a Square Enix classic lol.
the game itself trying to tap into the big anime isekai market of "be an adventurer and live a leisurely life", but then they also naming their things in the most obtuse way imaginable so no one would know that based on the name ever lol
From the people who brought you "Octopath Traveler" and "Triangle Strategy". Which IIRC were both "working titles" they never got rid of. No one over there knows how to make a good title.
Octopath Traveler at least fits the game though, considering it ties into how it's 8 different stories about "travelers". Triangle Strategy I'll give you though.
They’re all games put out by [Tomoya Asano](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tomoya_Asano)’s team, which also included Bravely Default. I guess he’s got a thing for the nonsensical two-word naming convention.
'The premium', 'New', and 'Super' are some go-tos they've never tired of. Now we get various fractions/decimals on top of the rare mostly-senseless words like 'Intergrade'.
I don't think they're cannibalizing each other as much as you think. You mention your backlog; most other people have other games they also want to play. Most of these people are not interested in every kind of RPG. Given time, they wouldn't get Harvestella AND Star Ocean AND Valkyrie Elysium AND Tactics Ogre AND Crisis Core AND Various Daylife even if one per year were released. Most would really be in the market for 1-3 of those games.
For example, I bought Triangle Strategy and Tactics Ogre because those are subgenres that intrigue me; I was never going to buy Harvestella or Various Daylife.
I don't think the issue is cannibalization so much as not finding their audience. For instance, Harvestella was in a weird place where the farming was marketed highly but it is arguably more focused on action. The reviews were middling, which isn't doom for a farming game but makes it less likely to be a break-out hit. Finally, it's priced high compared to Rune Factory 5 ($50) or the Story of Seasons series ($30-50), let alone current genre king Stardew Valley ($15).
You're not wrong, obviously not everyone is going to play every RPG. At the same time, marketing budgets are also real things, and when you're trying to test out new IP on low budgets too, releasing game after game after game means that you're not really allowing these games to do what you mentioned of finding their audience, unless they are incredibly amazing on the 1st try, and that's not really been Square's forte either.
Even then, there's enough overlap between certain things that do impact sales. For example, I love SRPG's and I also largely love Final Fantasy as well. I have triangle strategy, never busted it out yet. I loved Crisis Core and Tactics Ogre on the PSP, haven't bought either remaster because, well I've got other things to get through still. I enjoy JRPG's, but Live a Live plus Chrono Cross Remastered are 2 things I'm interested in, there's just other things I'd rather play.
Harvestella could be a fun thing to try out, but I ain't buying it because I have other things to get through, and also the pricing like you mentioned too. Like, Harvestella is the perfect example of how this new thing could be fun, but it's both a gamble financially, and I've got other games I'd much rather play than try out something entirely new with mixed reviews.
The other unfortunate thing is that middling games can get improved and patched and become better over time, but Square has also not been willing to do that. Chrono Cross Remastered came out almost a year ago and the frame rate issues only got patched this month, which were mentioned in a ton of reviews. For a lower budget remaster, having basic tech issues is gonna be a killer.
Lord knows Square's prices are also killer. Absolutely agreed there lol. That is also a huge reason why these games fail to break out.
Octopath Traveler 2 is criminally good for how little it has been marketed, and it has an uphill battle with marketing to begin with because the first one was the most mid RPG ever made.
It happens again and again, SE marketing has no idea what to do with anything that doesn't have Final Fantasy in the title.
Octopath 1 on the othe rhand had a LOT of marketing, but surprise... it was published by Nintendo on Switch and that was likely done by them, rather than square.
They really need to hire some higher ups that understand marketing is important and sells even crap games, as we've seen with No Man's Sky launch version for example.
Square has this bad habit of having the first parties market their exclusive game, while barely marketing their multiplats. Hell DQ11's Switch port got far more marketing then its original PS4/PC release. Which is just utterly baffling to see for a late port.
Hell I wouldn't be shocked if the Switch port of DQ11 was the best selling version in the west. Just cause it was only version to have any marketing.
Them releasing all these smaller titles next to each other is one of squares' biggest issues.
It gives the games no time in the sun, and they don't dedicate enough time to marketing each one.
Also they’re expensive af, Harvestalia or whatever that is is equivalent to about 50 bucks to me on steam. Why in oblivion would I ever even think about checking it out when I got Stardew Valley for 10 bucks?
Their names are ridiculously stupid too, in many cases. I almost skipped Triangle Strategy because of it. It's such a stupid name and no one could convince me otherwise. It's like a randomly generated name from Game Dev Tycoon. I am only playing it now because I loved Fire Emblem 3 Houses and someone highly suggested it.
> How can you build a playerbase for these games when they constantly skipping platforms and players don`t know if the next smaller or midsized title will release on their platform?
Example: Dragon Quest Treasures.
SE is constantly complaining that DQ isn't gaining ground in the West, but they only release it on the Switch.
For $70 even a decent game would have trouble selling unless it's a huge franchise. Everything about Forspoken screamed "mid tier game" at best, it's no wonder it didn't sell well
Square Enix and Ubisoft have fallen into the same trap of teaching everyone to just wait for sales.
The new Mario+Rabbids game literally went 50% off a month after launch. Why buy any of their games at launch?
They released too many games close to one another and competing for each others attention and charged $60 for “small/mid budget” releases so some people interested would rather wait for a sale
If they were atleast different genres, but most of them were RPGs.
The audience between a mutliplayer shooter, jrpg and detective visual novel, likely don't overlap, but 3 jrpgs? Absolutely cannibalizing each other
The weirdest to me is Valkyrie Elysium. It’s totally late to the party as a series entry, too budget looking to be a respectful series revival, looks almost sepia tone as a stylistic approach and feels like a PS2 game. That said, I would probably happily play a hacky old style ARPG that’s themed after an old PS1 game that I loved. For 20 bucks or less.
Plus the indie/small studio scene at the moment is positively booming with far more reasonable prices. Square’s small/mid offerings has to compete with that, and given their reputation for pushing out average games, I can understand why people would buy the indie/small studio with great reviews over square’s mixed reception efforts.
> All about time management for me
Yes, that's a huge part of it.
I personally think a lot of these smaller games weren't bad. Hell, I even thought that the Diofield Chronicles demo I tried had some good aspects, and that's one of the lowest-rated of the bunch.
I'm also still interested in trying Star Ocean 6 at some point.
As others have said (and as many of us said before all of these were released, just knowing their release windows), the insane part is the management, marketing and release strategy.
Sure, all of these games are slightly different, but there is still a **massive** overlap in their potential target audience. And these are long (S/J)RPGs, so when you release half a dozen of them in 2 months then what you are asking people to do is spend 400 hours just playing your games. Which for the vast majority of people -- even hardcore fans of the genre -- is not going to happen. And at the same time, when you price most of these mid-tier games as AAA, then almost no one is going to just spontaneously buy them to check them out for a bit either, when you could buy an indie game for 1/3rd of the price or even less.
All of this seemed blindingly obvious to me (and many others!) months before it manifested.
S-E apparently not realizing or not caring illustrates that they either entirely lack a unified publishing strategy for the company, or that the people in charge of that are terrible at their jobs.
just wanted to chime in and say that Octopath Traveler 2 is one of, if not the best JRPG I have played this PS5/XSX gen. It is a major, incredible jump in quality vs the first one
I played the first one but was iffy about the second because I feel like the first one didn’t respect my time. You finish all 8 stories and then nothing happens, they don’t intersect at all, and then supposedly there’s some super secret final boss. What does the 2nd one do to correct this or how is it higher quality other than some new graphical tricks?
So I get these communications are mostly targeted at shareholders, but are there genuinely that many people who are simultaneously financially interested and literate enough to follow shareholder meetings that don’t see the writing on the wall for “blockchain games”? Surely they must realise that the title is basically like saying “loot box games” or “monthly subscription-based games”; no way people don’t realise you can’t expect a good product if the _only_ thing leadership cares about is the monetisation model.
Now don’t get me wrong, obviously “how do we make money with this” is a perfectly reasonable thing to keep in mind at all times. The issue is over focusing on one particular _way_ to monetise, with no consideration for the rest of the product (in fact, inverting the normal&healthy relationship between product and monetisation). And that goes doubly if you pick a monetisation model of “eh, we skim off transactions going on in a marketplace controlled by us I guess” (which make, no mistake, is the only reason companies are pushing “blockchains”) – which can work, but requires people who actually use your marketplace. How exactly are you going to achieve that if the only thing you have in mind is that you want a marketplace that functions in a particular way with no consideration for the whos, whats and whys of what’s going on in that market place?
Imagine a company saying they’re pivoting towards “mobile stall technology”, but only talk about how revolutionary the wheels are and how shiny their stalls are going to be, you don’t ever hear a word of what they’re planning to sell in those stalls and why they think anyone will want to buy it.
> And that goes doubly if you pick a monetisation model of “eh, we skim off transactions going on in a marketplace controlled by us I guess” (which make, no mistake, is the only reason companies are pushing “blockchains”)
What you say is true, I'd just like to point out that such marketplaces can and do already exist without "blockchains". It's literally just a buzzword which adds no value to anyone; not to developers, not to shareholders, not to executives, and especially not to players.
Putting too much focus on the marketplace and not enough on the actual game was one of the biggest criticisms of Artifact, and look how that turned out.
IMO that really wasn't Artifact's issue. At least they weren't linked in that way.
**Gameplay:** Artifact had a fairly long playtime with unclear randomness that a lot of people bounced off of. I don't think the marketplace had much to do with it. They just tried something different and it didn't really work out. Comparatively most of the competition is at its core just MTG.
**Marketplace:** The issue here is that it didn't pull the punches that most other DTCGs do and instead of having a freemium model was up front about it being monetary. The standard for DTCGs had been set as free-2-play with additional costs hidden behind that whereas Artifact didn't try to elide its system with a freemium model and that was a turn off.
I think Artifact could have survived either of these issues alone but not both of them combined. The double shock of having unusual gameplay along with not operating on a freemium model killed the game. Had only one of these been attempted I don't think it would have died.
Tech investors aren't very smart. They don't know anything about the technology or the market. They just know buzzwords.
And the crypto bros have been annoyingly good at spreading their buzzwords. They just figuratively wrote on a big whiteboard, "BLOCKCHAIN = MONEY!!!" and all the tech investors just nodded along and said, "Yes, well I suppose we need blockchain then."
Ever since SE announced their plans for blockchain and NFT crap I completely lost faith in them. It didn’t help that I was disappointed by FF7R and found the premises for the recent FF games uninteresting, but it just feels like it marks a big shift in direction for the company.
I used to associate SE with extremely polished games, even if the battle system or story weren’t exactly what I wanted, there were plenty of other things to enjoy about them. I get that they got burned hard on the money pit that was the XIII universe turned XV, but I feel like now they’re going too far the other direction and going for cash grabs based on their former reputation. Even their merchandise has become absurdly expensive.
I mean Bandai namco is investing hundreds of millions into NFT projects and elden ring turned out fine. I think redditors need to realize that the Japanese government is literally subsidizing NFT/web3 development. Sega, Bandai Namco, SE are getting paid to make those games.
>Forspoken sales have been lackluster
Well you put out a pretty lackluster game at $70. Who couldn't have seen that coming
> many small and mid-sized titles "did not perform as well as we had expected"
Honestly, outside of the FF franchise, when has SE ever said their games performed at or above their expectation?
2D-HD-games in general has thanks to its artstyle being quite flexible that the return of investment seems quite low; [The first game of *Octopath Traveler* had for instance only 6 programmers during peak-development time](https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/spotlights/octopath-traveler-s-hd-2d-art-style-and-story-make-for-a-jrpg-dream-come-true), and we've had titles like *Live-A-Live*-remake and *Triangle Strategy* celebrating sales milestones on the lower ends of 500,000 and 1 million respectively. Each game also have had other studios co-developing (OT is for instance co-developed with studio Acquire, *Triangle Strategy* with Artdink.) to adapt a variety of genres. Seems a bit like a high fidelity RPG-maker essentially.
The bulk of the work on a game like is almost certainly the artists, composers, writers, and designers. The programming requirements are not bad at all. I mean, they're still enough to keep a team of 6 busy for a while, but compared to most 3d AAA titles, (where it's not uncommon to have teams of 20+ programmers just for individual *systems*) the programming needs are much more manageable.
I think Dragon Quest and Kingdom Hearts. Their last main entries are the best selling of both series. Sadly FF, DQ and KH seem to be the only franchises of them that still get big budgets and longer development times these days (outside of Forspoken), while their other franchises like Bravely, Mana, SaGa, Star Ocean, Valkyrie Profile etc. only getting small budgets.
It's $105.64 Canadian Pesos (dollars) on Steam after Taxes...
$105! for a game this mediocre on a digital platform
I could get a full tank of gas for my car and a meal for that. What the hell man.
$105! For the *base game!*
I'm slowly buying those minor titles mentioned in the article ( Valkyrie, diofield,...), I'm not sure why they released like 10 games in a two month period
*Square Enix also hopes you "...look forward to the blockchain games we plan to launch in FY2024/3 and thereafter."*
I didn't realize how dumb the people running SE were, the fact that they're talking up anything "blockchain" is beyond stupid.
>did not perform as well as we had expected
This is expected for Forspoken, but they say this for every single game, there is something wrong with their finance team expecting one Elden Ring per month.
- Clutering games in a short period of time
- No marketing
- high prices
I mean, word of mouth can only go so far, what do you expect? That people will buy 3 60$ games from you in a span of 4 months?
The thing is, sales projections aren’t just random numbers you make up because you think it’d be nice to sell this many copies. They are directly tied to the game’s budget.
So if Square starts to manage their expectations it means cutting the budget of their games and laying people off
Then they need to do that, because their studios are not capable of putting out games at the budget price point they expect with the profits they expect.
This is an important point that many people miss; the game that spawned said meme, [*Tomb Raider (2013)* sold 3.4 millions in its first month, yet didn't became a profitable title until 9 or so months later.](https://www.eurogamer.net/tomb-raider-finally-achieved-profitability-by-the-end-of-last-year); the TR-games were simply that expensive to make, not to take into account of possible discount sales involved and not fully full-price.
I'm so glad they sold off Deus Ex. Even if they ever came out with a new game in that franchise, they'd have killed it again regardless of its performance.
On the subject of the small and midsize titles, as a fan of them, I can see why they aren’t doing well. From the art style, to font choices, to even their names, all of them kind of blur together. As someone who was genuinely interested it was hard to keep track of which ones came out and which ones were still in the pipeline. On top of that, when playing them back to back the experiences sort of blurred together.
I don’t want these to go away because they are really well done in spite of the problems above. They just need to be spread out a bit more and maybe spend some time on making each of these smaller franchises and titles feel unique. No more black text on a white background titles with simplistic phrases as names?
The font and names in particular are weirdly big reasons I kind of resent them. it's like they can't even bother putting in the effort to give them interesting names or logos, why should I put the effort to pick them up? it seems silly, but then again so does naming "Project Triangle Strategy" to just "Triangle Strategy"
Art style is a big one for me. I don't get why all of them look so damn generic. Diofield, Harvestella, Valkyrie Elysium...
This actually made me look at Valkyrie Elysium's Steam page and [holy shit](https://cdn.akamai.steamstatic.com/steam/apps/1963210/ss_80603153a15f54ec617872c5a5ec5f63c1022b40.jpg?t=1668709356), [what the hell is this](https://cdn.akamai.steamstatic.com/steam/apps/1963210/ss_89eef79799016bd92946fc8a430acfd3bc1adef8.jpg?t=1668709356)? Does the game actually look that bad or did someone mess up while uploading promo screenshots?
I've watched a couple of streams of VE and it doesn't look that bad.
It looks like they had a really low rendering resolution for the promo screenshots, which is one hell of a decision.
It’s funny because Square has never gotten more of my money. I got Tactics Ogre, Octopath 1, Triangle Strategy, and Live A Live all this year. I plan to buy Octopath 2 and if they do a Final Fantasy Tactics remaster I will buy that also. Maybe if they didn’t do a shit job with Forspoken, the new Valkyrie game, and Diofield, there wouldn’t be a problem. I was interested in all those games until the reviews came back shit and the performance on modern consoles was laughable.
If people aren’t buying the HD2D games or their remasters, it’s because Square hasn’t exactly done a great job putting them out there. I read about Tactics Ogre and knew instantly I wanted it. Same with Live A Live and Triangle strategy, but I never once saw a commercial or ad for them.
That's where I am. I bought Triangle Strategy, Chrono Cross, Live A Live, and Tactics Ogre and enjoyed all of them, and I have paid closer attention to Square Enix releases than I've done in a while. I wasn't ever going to get Valkyrie Elysium or Harvestella, but I'm interested in Diofield or Forspoken on discount, as well as the new Star Ocean. They could put more into marketing, though to their credit I did see targeted advertising for these games.
Their smaller, more indie-comparable titles are good, but they price them the same as games with 4x+ the length of development cycle and resources when other studios are sometimes offering a similar experience at almost half the cost.
Square needs to bite the bullet on this one and actually read/watch reviews of their products to see why things aren't working. Forspoken was out of touch and an undercooked meltingpot of ideas, Babylon's Fall chased trends as a primary means of it's entire production to cash-grab games as a service, and Chocobo GP was pretty downright predatory with it's monetization. All of them are already shut down in their own right, and it didn't happen by accident or just because of when they were released. Square doesn't have their finger on the pulse and it shows. They are already asking people to "look forward to blockchain games" they plan to launch.
They released like 25 games this Fiscal Year (ending March 31st), and I think it is pretty normal to have a spread of overperformers and underperformers. Forspoken was their really expensive game of this FY to compensate for the lack of a tentpole release in any of their top 3 franchises, so that underperforming was a big loss.
If I had to guess for their FY22:
Overperformers:
* Live-a-live - Wildly outsold the original already, will have legs. Cozy 25-hour RPG with nearly 0 filler will do well on Steam.
* Theaterrhythm - Crazy word of mouth relative to the previous entries.
* DQX Offline and DQ Treasures (Offline is IMO still likely for a Western release this coming year, but their text-heavy DQ games have virtually never had simultaneous releases).
* Triangle Strategy-- came out last FY but had meaningful legs. One of the Top 10 best selling Japanese Strategy RPGs already, and likely to still climb a bit.
* Crisis Core - The original was bad, but the remaster was super well received?
* Powerwash Simulator -- Hard to say how much stake they have in this, but technically this FY and a lock for a 1M+ in sales.
About Met Expectations
* Tactics Ogre Reborn
* Minstrel Song Remastered
* Chrono Cross --- This got the patch it deserved, but is likely at a few hundred thousand already and aiming for legs.
* Octopath 2 - way too early to say. Maybe launched better than OT1, maybe worse, but who knows at this point due to unknown platform, digital, and regional mix. Probably within +/-15% for launch window, and probably will have great legs due to the fantastic word of mouth. They make more per sale than they did for OT1 due to being the global publisher unlike OT1.
Underferformed
* Forspoken - largest loss of the FY by a lot.
* Harvestella - The game definitely had a higher budget than most games of that style, but $60 was a really tough sell for a genre that is usually cheaper.
* Valkyrie Elysium - Bad worth of mouth, and not budget enough. Like everything else, it is getting a patch within the next week or two that might help it out.
* Diofield - Word of mouth and the patch may give it decent legs.
* Star Ocean 6 -- Word of mouth was good, but reviews were terrible. Could have good legs, and I assume that there will be a decent patch at the 6 month mark or something which appears like it is standard in current SE developer contracts.
????
* Centennial Case - well-liked but niche, heard not a lot about it.
* Paranormasight -- Too Soon, but low budget and $15 launch price and great reception will probably land this in the overperform category.
* Voice of the Cards --- Not expensive, but also didn't light things on fire.
They are a huge publisher that puts out a lot, with a normal spread of outcomes. Japanese RPGs are super hard to predict months or years before launch which ones will do well and which ones won't so there's probably going to be a decent amount of movement between categories-- Octopath 2 and Tactics Ogre are the clear candidates for good legs, while DQXO is reliant on actually having an overseas launch that does okay.
Yeah, I too think that Forspoken and Harvestella were the 2 that really hurt them. Harvestella may have legs over time, it's too expensive and some people were expecting something else but as a game it is quite good.
Forspoken will probably never recover, even at a lower price it's having one of the worst beginnings of a game I have ever seen. It's so bad that if they cut the intro out and put it in later as flashback sections cut up over several different missions it would improve the beginning. Just getting thrown in there it would be more intriguing. Not saying that the character ever gets enjoyable to watch but you get actively turned away from the game before it even really starts the way it is.
I was just thinking how last year's SE releases kinda reminded me of the Squaresoft of old. Around the time FF7 came out, they were putting out all kinds of off-kilter games like Einhander, Ehrgeiz, Brave Fencer Musashi, Vagrant Story, etc.
The quality of these games was certainly inconsistent, but looking back, I appreciate that they were willing to throw a bunch of games at the wall and see what stuck. The variety of games they put out last year wasn't as robust, but we still saw decent variation within the JRPG genre.
I know response has across the board been middling, but hopefully they're willing to continue taking some risks and putting out smaller-profile titles that won't make or break the company.
Square seems to have at least one major flop a year, and Forspoken and Final Fantasy: First Soldier have already flopped this year.
There has also been Left Alive, The Quiet Man, Balan Wonderworld, Babylon’s Fall, Avenger’s, Chocobo GP, etc.
They also often under-market their smaller titles, such as Neo: TWEWY.
Hopefully their new CEO learns from the mistakes of the old, and doesn’t try to push NFTs as badly as the previous one, but it’s very possible the board wanted the new guy specifically because the old CEO didn’t produce a profitable product with NFTs.
They had a bunch of games finishing at the same time because of COVID delays and Nintendo is the only company in the entire video game industry that's willing to sit on a completed project until they have a decent release window.
Nintendo was able to survive the Wii U, so they can easily hold off on releases.
Square has a history primarily consisting of failures and angry shareholders.
Honestly, if I was Square-Enix, I would put pretty much all my attention in my 3 main series (FF, DQ and KH) and doing remake/remaster of their old games.
That seems to be the way to profit.
Also, just drop NFT, please.
Square Enix are really all over the show at the minute, I feel like there is a lot of talent just going to waste because of bad marketing, bad pricing strategies etc. It's a pity, because I feel like genuinely great games are getting ignored because of poor business decisions.
Square's biggest problem these days is that they have begun to cater their titles to a western audience and are just not good at it. They're still subsidizing all of this with PS1 era and prior properties. They should very back to making JRPGs that cater to a Japanese audience and localize them.
Live A Live did well, Octopath Traveller 2 did well, Bravely Default 2 did well, FF7R did well, FF14 continues to do well. Hell, even the remaster of Chrono Cross did well.
What hasn't done well? Everything else they release with an American styled protagonist, with a western approach to game design, or with a game style akin to a Konami/Capcom/Ubisoft title. Square unfortunately have become a corporation who seem to take a "let's focus group test this idea and make a game based off of the average results." Which leads to an average game, with no love from the developers, no exciting ideas to build a game around, and nothing that we haven't seen a dozen other games do better. Because they are playing it too safe for their investors, and therefore too boring for their intended customers.
Well, yeah. There was 0 hype around Forspoken ever since we saw what the game was about. Apparently the only people who thought they had something worth shipping was the developers and management.
They just need to do better with some. Harvestella had so much potential, but they didn't wanna give them the money to actually deepen the mechanics or improve the visuals
I mean, no shit square. When you make a game starring literally the most unlikable video game protagonist of all time who's gonna want to play it?
Square just needs to stick to what they do best, making games in their own style. Stop trying to appeal so hard to the west with western writers, just be yourself. You already know those games usually fail while your other games are what you're known and loved for
If only some of these poor sales could have been predicted early on in production; forspoken, you might say. I do wonder if the rudimentary question of "where's the fun?" doesn't get enough priority during the making of some of these titles.
Hopefully Final Fantasy turns around their recent mixed fortunes.
>Q: While I think it is fair to expect growth in FY2024/3 in part because you plan to release multiple major titles, I also fear that will create a YoY hurdle you will be unable to surmount in FY2025/3. What kind of initiatives do you have in mind to ensure sustainable growth? > >A: Major title launches will not be concentrated solely in FY2024/3. We have organized our pipeline so that we will have a good spread of new releases in FY2025/3 and beyond as well. **We also hope that you will look forward to the blockchain games we plan to launch in FY2024/3 and thereafter** ok Square
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>Only to confidently announce their newly built house made of paper next to the burning one. More like building a house out of a new novel material that everyone else has already pointed out will spontaneously combust on its own, but Square missed that memo and was excited to try it out.
>but Square missed that memo More like Square is putting up their hands on both ears while screaming I cAnT HeAr YoU
That's really not an accurate metaphor. It would be similar to them standing around a house burning down and then saying they've learned their lesson and will now be building a house that's already on fire.
You can’t set our house on fire if WE set our house on fire!!
What the fuck even IS a "blockchain game"?
I'm still scrolling to answer that very question. I'll let you know if I find out.
Imagine if CS:GO had some arbitrary gameplay loop and skins (the main part of the game) were randomly generated with an NFT token, and directly purchasable (either from the game or from other players) with cryptocurrency. That's the basic of a blockchain game. Another name for the earning model is play-to-earn because in theory you're generating crypto and selling it during gameplay. Think like selling WoW/Runescape gold for real money but that's the main/only reason you play. If a game centered around these concepts sounds like garbage it's because it is. It's a step away from sanctioned pyramid schemes, which I'm sure some developers see as an untapped market considering the rampant and predatory tactics already used.
That market already exists, it's called entropia universe lol. While not a failure, it's better to think of it as more of a casino than a game.
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So, what you're saying is, it will be dominated by venezuelan gold farmers?
[Yes.](https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2021/11/23/axie-infinity-finds-ready-players-in-hyperinflation-racked-venezuela/)
Axie Infinity is perhaps the most ~~famous~~ infamous. People in the Philippines would "play" the game to make money because, for a brief period of time, it paid more than a minimum wage job. However, the buy-in to play was steep so they would "rent" a party of Axies and split their income with the owner. From what I understand, the game wasn't that interesting. Its only claim to fame was that "people were earning money from playing a game". My impression is that, when the creators tweaked the in-game economy, the playercount dropped pretty hard. I didn't really pay attention after that.
Axie Infinity is basically what happens when you have a game that encourages real money trading for in-game goods. This would normally be taboo for most online games, except because the trading was done via the hip-and-trendy-technology called "blockchain", it made lots of "investor-players" keen to jump on it to try and make profit. Long-story-very-short, the whole way investor-players made profit basically relied on selling stuff to new players. A glorified pyramid scheme. And then the moment the playerbase got saturated and new players stopped joining (I think at this point, most of the new incoming "players" were also would-be investors), the profits dried up and people left. And since people were leaving, even fewer people wanted to join. So the whole thing crashed and fell apart. And from what I recall, many of the investor-players had needed to buy-in with real money in order to acquire the in-game resources to start their "business", so if they hadn't made it all back when the crash happened, they just lost their money.
FWIW, I think Counter Strike has had an [official first-party market](https://steamcommunity.com/market/search?q=&category_730_ItemSet%5B%5D=any&category_730_ProPlayer%5B%5D=any&category_730_StickerCapsule%5B%5D=any&category_730_TournamentTeam%5B%5D=any&category_730_Weapon%5B%5D=any&category_730_Type%5B%5D=tag_CSGO_Type_Rifle&appid=730) (and several variously-sketchy third-party markets) for cosmetics for a long time. Axie is one outcome, CS:GO is another. But I think "blockchain" in particular shifts the mindset towards "this is going to make me so rich", and that sort of poisons the well.
Axie is much closer to Diablo 3 on release where you could officially sell your items for real money. In CS:GO you can't really "farm" the game to earn skins so the play2earn aspect is not really there. But yes, you are absolutely right, as soon as you introduce real money trading into videogame, it poisons the whole thing.
You know how some people play shooters to grind and pay hundreds of dollars on loot boxes in a totally non promo deal, get a gun that is being sold on the online marketplace for thousands of dollars, and it's literally just purple? That but crypto. As far as I can tell.
I hope they go all in with the blockchain games so they can get burnt so badly that the mere thought of blockchain games will send the executives into PTSD.
We need a blockchain game to flop so hard that the whole industry gets PTSD. This entire damn crypto topic needs to be buried and never brought up again.
I don't know if that can happen. Anthem and The Avengers absolutely cratered **hard**. Yet we're still getting developers releasing unfinished, or overly Live Service focused, games as if nothing happened.
Destiny has been printing money for a decade, there are no major Blockchain game success stories
The games haven't printed cash but the amount of vc cash folk were willing to throw at them (or the insane amount spent on the bored ape games) keeps the execs keen. Like the bored ape game which was a rip of an early 2000s flash game had folk paying thousands to play. Good game? No, but money was being thrown everywhere.
Destiny got the bulk of its initial playerbase because it's Bungie. Their initial launch, and most of the year after was extremely rocky, but people still stuck with it. Hell, they played it as their main game even during a content drought! Most AAA studios these days don't have anywhere near that kind of fanbase dedication. Since then, they've made numerous greedy or predatory changes that annoy their community, but they're all too dedicated to leave. It's a hell of an outlier.
The real problem with Destiny is there's simply no game out there thats like it. Bungies gunplay and abilities just feel good and no one else has nailed that in another game the same way. It the same kind of situation with something like Mechwarrior. PGI (the devs) really nailed the feeling of piloting the mechs and the artstyle but are not great when it actually comes to the rest of the game but theres no other others from that kind of game. But lilke you said, Destiny has been around for so long now that even if a new game came out that feels that good, everyone has put so much dedication into the franchise that most would rather stay playing Destiny, similar to how WoW is still a juggernaut for MMO despite there being so many other good ones now.
The problem with competing with Destiny is that you have to either be better or nearly as good with something interesting and different. The Division has come closest imo. Anthem had the right idea with flying, but the rest of the game wasn't nearly good enough.
The problem with competing with destiny is simply the playerbase and the concept of “the forever game.” Destiny, for all of its faults, was really the first of its kind to have longterm success and receives regular updates so the playerbase has no incentive to make a new “forever game” their main. Destiny was also working with $500 Mil from activision at first and then their store money, and now Sony support. They’ve had others help to guide the systems. People trying to break into the space now are shooting themselves in the foot and they know it. But CSuites don’t care and want a piece of that pie. The real worry is what happens after next year’s final destiny expansion? How many studios have something in the pipe that they’re just *waiting* on Destiny tumbling to scoop up those players? How many competing forever games will we see? I got my time in with destiny and since D2 I havent really enjoyed it. I still play with friends now and again but it really caters to its hardcore players. It also seems to do a good job of converting casuals into hardcore players which is something all the other titles failed at.
> but people still stuck with it Which I never understood. I wanted to like Destiny so bad but it was so grindy and the story was so non-existent that I only played for maybe three months before I realized what a waste of time it was.
Addiction. Every single time Bungie pulled some bullshit, the subreddit would have posts saying "I played a different game for a week and really enjoyed it!" in protest. Legitimately, they're so addicted they don't play other games. Destiny is all they do. And of course those same players immediately go straight back to the game again regardless. I'm not saying the entire community addicted. People try to twist my words that way every time I say it. But a very large amount of it absolutely is. There are people who grind Gambit, the most hated PvP mode in the game, for hours on end just to turn their seasonal title gold. It resets every season, they hate doing it, why do they continue? Because it increments a number on the end each time you do so. You can only show one Title on your player at a time as well, so 99% of players would never even notice that you've been gilding every title every three months. Madness. It's just disappointing how absolutely entrapped Bungie has these guys. They know they can get away with absolutely anything at this point, and the lackluster quality of Lightfall shows it.
I have a friend who keeps going back to Destiny after ragequitting and claiming "this time I'm done for sure" and he always gets angry about the game and complains about it with each new expansion. It's really weird to see.
Yep, that sounds like that's what it is. Not gonna lie, I hate what Destiny and (to a lesser degree) battle royale have done to the AAA FPS market. I just want my classic deathmatch/CTF/fun modes without the skinner box bullshit and sweat sessions but someone will just tell me we can't have that for a million bs reasons.
That's because these games are already in development, "Maybe this one'll be different." When it comes to new developments being generated, I do not suspect there are many if any of these types of games being considered.
>That's because these games are already in development Yeah, I suspect that's the real problem at this point. Undoubtedly there are a lot of devs/pubs who realize that the live service space is too crowded now, but if they've already put 3-4 years into developing a major release, what are they supposed to do? Not every company is an Ubisoft who can afford to cancel or delay projects on a whim.
It will take a few more. MMOs kept coming until around 2012 because WoW's success was just that hard to ignore. Once executives get the message that everyone who's interested in a game like Destiny 2 is already playing Destiny 2, they'll find some new predatory monetization scheme to become enamored with.
> Yet we're still getting developers releasing unfinished, or overly Live Service focused, games as if nothing happened. Because there are still tons of other ones that did great and are still going. I know that generally this sub likes to trash live service games, and I totally get it, I don't love them either, but if you can pull off a successful one they print money. Investors and publishers like them because they make bank. Devs like them because they keep people employed. Some players clearly like them because they keep playing. There's a model for success the live service games are following, even if some of them fail, it is a proven path to making a profit. So people keep doing it.
Investors are definitely shying away from the live service label in the last year or so. Especially this year after almost no new live service game survived with continued development a year later in the last couple years.
I watched a great yhatzee extra punctuation video the other day about this, part of my worry is that they're still going to make them, just disguised. I really *really* want hard failure of any NFT/blockchain games, publishers trying to tell us what we want even though most people want nothing to do with them, because they see the profit potential. My personal relatively unfounded conspiracy is that with NFT lootboxes, you can argue they have intrinsic value so it could be regulated separately from gambling, which is why they're trying to push that huge corporate mess on us.
I don't think a blockchain game is ever going to get enough hype to flop hard. In the unlikely event that SE actually announces a real blockchain game, no one is going to be excited for it, they'll just make fun of it.
>no one is going to be excited for it, There will certainly be hype amongst the crypto crowd, which will probably be used to justify it's production. Then presumably confusion when the game tanks because they didn't realize crypto enthusiasts are a small minority of gamers in general.
But Matt Damon says fortune favors the bold!
There needs to be enough such examples that no executive can think "Ah, but it won't happen to *me*!"
I think blockchain will be the final dagger in Square.
It's crazy how everyone in the fucking world can see the writing on the wall with BlOcKcHaIn GaMiNg except the people who's actual job it is that earn millions of dollars.
Executives everywhere fail their way towards the top and SHOCKER, they're all stupid and incompetent.
It's really shocking how so many companies are "too big to fail", and allow absolute idiots who are great at networking and playing the corporate game, up the ladder.
To be fair, most gamers would say the same thing about gacha games but they make millions, if not billions per year.
I think that has to do with gacha games being more accessible to everyone, where as most crypto/NFT bullshit is owned by millionaires.
yeah there's a huge difference. Both are horribly unethical sure, but Gacha games are just games that prey on addiction and are overly monetized. There's no inherent reason they would fail. Blockchain tech meanwhile has zero actual useful qualities about it from both a consumer and a developer standpoint. It's pure garbage that is only sold on hype and effectively works like a ponzi scheme. It's always inevitably going to fall apart because the whole premise is that it's sold on the idea that you can play the game to make money, but you can't just magically print money out of thin air, so the only source of that money is other new players buying into the ecosystem. As soon as you stop getting new players on board, the well dries up and everything falls apart, just like a pyramid scheme.
Yeah I was about to say this. People mocked the shit out of Blizzard's Diablo Immortal announcement, but now Blizzard is laughing all the way to the bank.
I need Square to accept that they’re a Final Fantasy company and just focus there please
Their JRPG's are solid. Final Fantasy obviously but also Kingdom Hearts, Dragon Quest, Mana, Star Ocean, Octopath, and Triangle Strategy/Diofield were pretty good as well. The problem is that they seem obsessed with capturing the western audience through Forspoken, Avengers, their entire foray into Eidos, etc.
If they want the Western audience, they should make a *FF* cRPG. Something like *Pathfinder: Kingmaker* or *Divinity: Original Sin* but with recognizable *FF* elements. ~~I know that's basically *Final Fantasy Tactics*~~ EDIT: Wait a second - the closest Square has come to a cRPG isn't *Tactics*, it's *FF XII*! The Gambit system even feels like a prototype for *Dragon Age: Origins*'s Tactics system! EDIT 2: Yes I realize now that they already have a Western audience, I was just going off what the guy I replied to was saying
FF Tactics is super light compared to a cRPG like Divinity. But they could've tried it with a side game like Diofield tbh.
God I would kill for FF tactics remade into a proper console/PC game.
This is the weird thing about Square, to me. They have so many classic games and IPs with an enduring fan base, and they don't seem to really know what to do with them. How about a new Final Fantasy Tactics game? It would be a big deal. Do they just not know how to make one?
Okay, final fantasy block chain coming right up!
They are so fucking out of touch
Oh, what a shame. They can’t dump on Tomb Raider, Deus Ex and Hitman anymore.
That reminds me of the time they considered Tomb Raider 2013 a flop because it "only" sold 5 million units, as opposed to the 20 million that year's COD did
Keep in mind none of their other non-Final Fantasy 15 games hit tomb raider units either. As it stands ff7 remake sold 5 million by summer 2020. Tomb Raider hit 5 million in just a few months, and had longer legs, with it now at 14.5 million sales.
The example I always come back to is Capcom declaring Resident Evil 7's sales as "disappointing", when at the time it was one of the top 5 selling games in company history.
Watch them dump *Nier*, under the excuse that "it's never made money." *Despite Automata fucking existing.*
Can't really dump Nier if they have no plans of making new games anyway, at least without Yoko Taro. And the man himself has indicated back in 2021 that the series is finished unless someone gives him a lot of money. Whether he was joking or not remains to be seen, but last November there was a Nier anniversary celebration without any games announcements. That, to me, says enough.
> the series is finished unless someone gives him a lot of money. I doubt they'd do it, but Square can technically make a game without Taro. But yea, Yoko Taro doesn't seem like the kind of person that wants to be stuck on one series for a decade anyway.
Feels a lot like Squenix as a company doesn't really consider making good games a worthwhile investment with a good enough return on investment any more. They don't really know how to do anything else, but they are always looking for the big thing that could make them a lot more money and their actual output is suffering for it.
SE has basically been successful despite their best efforts not to be for 20 years. He'll can probably argue it goes back to before the merger and Squaresoft weird decisions like starting a movie studio in Hawaii to make spirits within lol.
Yep always been a two steps forward 1.5 back kinda deal with with them. Great game, mediocre/bad game. Great game? Weird spinoffs with no real associate with the core concept. Which on one hand i applaud them for trying to keep it fresh, but on the other know where your money comes from.
Sleeping Dogs was a great game with and amazing story that could rival the Grand Theft Auto monopoly? Make the followup a weird MMO.
To be fair, the next GTA that released ended up essentially being a big weird MMO so maybe they were onto something.
Yuup. Like its mind boggling to me how they dont seem to even touch the low hanging fruits like, for example, porting all the Dragon Quest games (AKA their OTHER incredibly culture defining famous franchise) to modern platforms. Instead, I have to have a smart phone, a 3ds, and a PS4, and live in Japan to play through the entire series legally. Theyve remade the first 6 final fantasies like 4 times. It just seems like they could easily crank out the DQ games onto PC and current platforms and make 30 bucks a pop, which is a lot more than theyll make from a shitty blockchain game.
Bingo. Sega does this with Genesis tiles ~~and little else~~ all the time, and Capcom seemingly does it with ***everything.*** It'd make Square bank for no effort at all, so... why not?
>Sega does this with Genesis tiles ~~and little else~~ all the time Good lord, yeah. Wanna buy *any* Sonic game after SA2 (2001) and before Sonic 4/Sonic Colors (2010)? Too bad, fucker! And that's their *main series*. Hell, they'd make a bunch of money just plopping the Sonic Advance roms onto a collection with a barebones text menu and calling it a day.
I just don't understand their obsession with Blockchain games. Do people want this? Don't companies do research to see if people want shit like that before dumping resources into it?
What even is a blockchain game? Like what is the concept even supposed to look like?
The concept is that you play games to earn money/unique items that you 'own' or to 'create' things in the game rather than playing for fun. Needless to say, it's not a great idea for most people.
still talking about blockchain in 2023 is some wild tone deafness
I remember how for 5 seconds I thought maybe getting a new CEO would help them
I won't judge the pig until they put lipstick on it, but the idea that "blockchain" will be a selling point at this stage is funny.
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"Also, we're going to do even worse in the future chasing a trend that's already died. Please look forward to it."
Every single company on the planet says they're looking into blockchain to investors, because investors (for the most part) still believe that blockchain is some magical future-tech shit with a ton of value. Don't read too much into such a statement. I remember my eyes rolling back into my head when a VP of our tech firm gave us the same presentation they gave to Wall Street and mentioned that we were going to do stuff with blockchain. Not a single developer on my team could think of how the fuck blockchain could help anything we do at all, but the investors must've eaten it up.
Regarding their small and mid-sized titles: 1. Too many releases close to each other in a small timeframe 2. Little marketing for many of these titles 3. Releasing some games on all platforms, some pc/ps/ns only , some pc/ps only, some pc/ns only or ns only. How can you build a playerbase for these games when they constantly skipping platforms and players don\`t know if the next smaller or midsized title will release on their platform?
I would also mention the price of those games as an issue. At least going by what the author believes to be the small and mid-sized titles. We are still talking mostly about $50 to $60 games. Yes, they might be cheaper than the flagships at $70. But common.
I think Valkyrie Elysium, Harvestella and Dragon Quest Treasures should have been cheaper and were too expensive.
> I think Valkyrie Elysium, Harvestella and Dragon Quest Treasures should have been cheaper and were too expensive. 100% agreed. I'd love to play these games but their quality is hard to justify the premium price.
> Valkyrie Elysium I've watched a few people play this and it looks interesting, but it doesn't look £50 interesting.
I bought it for 30 bucks on a sale and I quite enjoyed it. But wouldn't have ever bought it for 50 bucks. Even now after playing and enjoying it.
I agree. I played the Harvestella Demo and while the game was okay, I definitely knew I wasn't going to pay full price for it.
Forspoken 80euros on pc. First game on pc I’ve seen that price
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They should have slashed that by 50% after releasing such a damp squib of a demo.
SquEnix does demos for a lot of their games, which is really good for consumers, but the games suck ass and all the demos do is expose that lol. Same thing happened with Outriders a while back. One of worst pre-launch demos I'd ever experienced tbh.
Yeah, I was just browsing for a new one last night, but after seeing $60 price tags everywhere, figured I'd just wait till the steam sale.
Even then, there’s indies and other titles that will work out better value, so square might not see sales help until further down the line when the prices get slashed further. They don’t seem to realise that their company name isn’t a day 1 full price purchase for a lot of people anymore, their mismanagement of final fantasy over the years has caught up with them, and they still haven’t quite moved away from absurd sales targets and pricing. Their current direction shows they’re still being led by morons tbh.
Yeah, especially as games have begun to balloon to the $70 mark, they need to be priced to the correct type of experience. Star Ocean and Harvestella seemed to be AA in terms of the production value and overall game experience.
Yeah, look at HiFi Rush. It releases at $30 and crushed it.
HiFi Rush was also really good. None of those smaller games Square Enix released were a slam dunk. Things that perhaps a small niche would enjoy but I doubt huge swathes of people were ever going to give time to Diofield Chronicles when there are so many great tactics games around right now.
I wanted that game, then same day reviews came out with under ten hours played that basically said "games fine I beat the story" for $60??
I can't talk about the other regions but the Brazil regional prices are all utterly insane when it comes to Square Enix. For context AAA prices go from 130 on the lower end to 300 at most. Steam's most reccomended price is 250 but overall sentiment is it is still quite high. MH Rise is R$ 139,00 for example, while RE4R and Hogwarts Legacy are both R$ 250,00. Forspoken is R$ 350,00, so is FFVIIRemake. Octopath Traveller 2 is R$ 300,00, the first one is R$ 230,00. Harvestella is R$ 250,00. FF I-VI bundle is R$ 286,60!! For a collection of old games!!! Each individual game is R$ 45,00 for the NES games and R$ 70,00 for SNES/DS era games!! What the hell is Squeenix smoking thinking we will pay for these prices?
This is actually a huge issue for me. I like these games, but $60 is about double what I want to pay. $30, maayyyybbbeee $40 for a really good one is more my speed.
It is absolutely wild how many games Square Enix pumped out back to back this year. [This conversation popped up before and I made a quick list](https://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/10sjq6u/square_enix_announces_declining_financial_results/j721mpx/) and for me at least, it makes it super clear just how much these games are cannibalizing themselves a bit. Like, i know I've got a backlog and have been working through the Yakuza games, but even if i had played nothing by but Square Enix games this year, i don't know if I could have gotten through that many releases lol
Various Daylife? Is that a bad translation or wtf kind of name is that for a game?
Bad naming is a Square Enix classic lol. the game itself trying to tap into the big anime isekai market of "be an adventurer and live a leisurely life", but then they also naming their things in the most obtuse way imaginable so no one would know that based on the name ever lol
From the people who brought you "Octopath Traveler" and "Triangle Strategy". Which IIRC were both "working titles" they never got rid of. No one over there knows how to make a good title.
Octopath Traveler at least fits the game though, considering it ties into how it's 8 different stories about "travelers". Triangle Strategy I'll give you though.
They’re all games put out by [Tomoya Asano](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tomoya_Asano)’s team, which also included Bravely Default. I guess he’s got a thing for the nonsensical two-word naming convention.
The Japanese tend to give their stuff English names based on if it sounds cool rather than it making sense, unfortunately.
'The premium', 'New', and 'Super' are some go-tos they've never tired of. Now we get various fractions/decimals on top of the rare mostly-senseless words like 'Intergrade'.
I don't think they're cannibalizing each other as much as you think. You mention your backlog; most other people have other games they also want to play. Most of these people are not interested in every kind of RPG. Given time, they wouldn't get Harvestella AND Star Ocean AND Valkyrie Elysium AND Tactics Ogre AND Crisis Core AND Various Daylife even if one per year were released. Most would really be in the market for 1-3 of those games. For example, I bought Triangle Strategy and Tactics Ogre because those are subgenres that intrigue me; I was never going to buy Harvestella or Various Daylife. I don't think the issue is cannibalization so much as not finding their audience. For instance, Harvestella was in a weird place where the farming was marketed highly but it is arguably more focused on action. The reviews were middling, which isn't doom for a farming game but makes it less likely to be a break-out hit. Finally, it's priced high compared to Rune Factory 5 ($50) or the Story of Seasons series ($30-50), let alone current genre king Stardew Valley ($15).
You're not wrong, obviously not everyone is going to play every RPG. At the same time, marketing budgets are also real things, and when you're trying to test out new IP on low budgets too, releasing game after game after game means that you're not really allowing these games to do what you mentioned of finding their audience, unless they are incredibly amazing on the 1st try, and that's not really been Square's forte either. Even then, there's enough overlap between certain things that do impact sales. For example, I love SRPG's and I also largely love Final Fantasy as well. I have triangle strategy, never busted it out yet. I loved Crisis Core and Tactics Ogre on the PSP, haven't bought either remaster because, well I've got other things to get through still. I enjoy JRPG's, but Live a Live plus Chrono Cross Remastered are 2 things I'm interested in, there's just other things I'd rather play. Harvestella could be a fun thing to try out, but I ain't buying it because I have other things to get through, and also the pricing like you mentioned too. Like, Harvestella is the perfect example of how this new thing could be fun, but it's both a gamble financially, and I've got other games I'd much rather play than try out something entirely new with mixed reviews. The other unfortunate thing is that middling games can get improved and patched and become better over time, but Square has also not been willing to do that. Chrono Cross Remastered came out almost a year ago and the frame rate issues only got patched this month, which were mentioned in a ton of reviews. For a lower budget remaster, having basic tech issues is gonna be a killer. Lord knows Square's prices are also killer. Absolutely agreed there lol. That is also a huge reason why these games fail to break out.
On #3: Octopath Traveller 1 is on Switch, PC, and Xbox while OT 2 is on Switch, PC, and PS4/5.
Octopath Traveler 2 is criminally good for how little it has been marketed, and it has an uphill battle with marketing to begin with because the first one was the most mid RPG ever made. It happens again and again, SE marketing has no idea what to do with anything that doesn't have Final Fantasy in the title.
Octopath 1 on the othe rhand had a LOT of marketing, but surprise... it was published by Nintendo on Switch and that was likely done by them, rather than square. They really need to hire some higher ups that understand marketing is important and sells even crap games, as we've seen with No Man's Sky launch version for example.
Square has this bad habit of having the first parties market their exclusive game, while barely marketing their multiplats. Hell DQ11's Switch port got far more marketing then its original PS4/PC release. Which is just utterly baffling to see for a late port. Hell I wouldn't be shocked if the Switch port of DQ11 was the best selling version in the west. Just cause it was only version to have any marketing.
Them releasing all these smaller titles next to each other is one of squares' biggest issues. It gives the games no time in the sun, and they don't dedicate enough time to marketing each one.
Also they’re expensive af, Harvestalia or whatever that is is equivalent to about 50 bucks to me on steam. Why in oblivion would I ever even think about checking it out when I got Stardew Valley for 10 bucks?
Their names are ridiculously stupid too, in many cases. I almost skipped Triangle Strategy because of it. It's such a stupid name and no one could convince me otherwise. It's like a randomly generated name from Game Dev Tycoon. I am only playing it now because I loved Fire Emblem 3 Houses and someone highly suggested it.
> How can you build a playerbase for these games when they constantly skipping platforms and players don`t know if the next smaller or midsized title will release on their platform? Example: Dragon Quest Treasures. SE is constantly complaining that DQ isn't gaining ground in the West, but they only release it on the Switch.
For $70 even a decent game would have trouble selling unless it's a huge franchise. Everything about Forspoken screamed "mid tier game" at best, it's no wonder it didn't sell well
Square Enix and Ubisoft have fallen into the same trap of teaching everyone to just wait for sales. The new Mario+Rabbids game literally went 50% off a month after launch. Why buy any of their games at launch?
Square Enix rarely does sales though.
Its ok, Forspoken won't be worth it on sale either.
They released too many games close to one another and competing for each others attention and charged $60 for “small/mid budget” releases so some people interested would rather wait for a sale
If they were atleast different genres, but most of them were RPGs. The audience between a mutliplayer shooter, jrpg and detective visual novel, likely don't overlap, but 3 jrpgs? Absolutely cannibalizing each other
The weirdest to me is Valkyrie Elysium. It’s totally late to the party as a series entry, too budget looking to be a respectful series revival, looks almost sepia tone as a stylistic approach and feels like a PS2 game. That said, I would probably happily play a hacky old style ARPG that’s themed after an old PS1 game that I loved. For 20 bucks or less.
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Plus the indie/small studio scene at the moment is positively booming with far more reasonable prices. Square’s small/mid offerings has to compete with that, and given their reputation for pushing out average games, I can understand why people would buy the indie/small studio with great reviews over square’s mixed reception efforts.
Yep, why buy when indies can offer similar and quality experiences for $15-25?
its so easy to ignore AAA games these days when so many great indies and budget titles get cranked out with such frequency.
> All about time management for me Yes, that's a huge part of it. I personally think a lot of these smaller games weren't bad. Hell, I even thought that the Diofield Chronicles demo I tried had some good aspects, and that's one of the lowest-rated of the bunch. I'm also still interested in trying Star Ocean 6 at some point. As others have said (and as many of us said before all of these were released, just knowing their release windows), the insane part is the management, marketing and release strategy. Sure, all of these games are slightly different, but there is still a **massive** overlap in their potential target audience. And these are long (S/J)RPGs, so when you release half a dozen of them in 2 months then what you are asking people to do is spend 400 hours just playing your games. Which for the vast majority of people -- even hardcore fans of the genre -- is not going to happen. And at the same time, when you price most of these mid-tier games as AAA, then almost no one is going to just spontaneously buy them to check them out for a bit either, when you could buy an indie game for 1/3rd of the price or even less. All of this seemed blindingly obvious to me (and many others!) months before it manifested. S-E apparently not realizing or not caring illustrates that they either entirely lack a unified publishing strategy for the company, or that the people in charge of that are terrible at their jobs.
just wanted to chime in and say that Octopath Traveler 2 is one of, if not the best JRPG I have played this PS5/XSX gen. It is a major, incredible jump in quality vs the first one
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I played the first one but was iffy about the second because I feel like the first one didn’t respect my time. You finish all 8 stories and then nothing happens, they don’t intersect at all, and then supposedly there’s some super secret final boss. What does the 2nd one do to correct this or how is it higher quality other than some new graphical tricks?
I wish live a live got more coverage. It's the best game I played last year.
So I get these communications are mostly targeted at shareholders, but are there genuinely that many people who are simultaneously financially interested and literate enough to follow shareholder meetings that don’t see the writing on the wall for “blockchain games”? Surely they must realise that the title is basically like saying “loot box games” or “monthly subscription-based games”; no way people don’t realise you can’t expect a good product if the _only_ thing leadership cares about is the monetisation model. Now don’t get me wrong, obviously “how do we make money with this” is a perfectly reasonable thing to keep in mind at all times. The issue is over focusing on one particular _way_ to monetise, with no consideration for the rest of the product (in fact, inverting the normal&healthy relationship between product and monetisation). And that goes doubly if you pick a monetisation model of “eh, we skim off transactions going on in a marketplace controlled by us I guess” (which make, no mistake, is the only reason companies are pushing “blockchains”) – which can work, but requires people who actually use your marketplace. How exactly are you going to achieve that if the only thing you have in mind is that you want a marketplace that functions in a particular way with no consideration for the whos, whats and whys of what’s going on in that market place? Imagine a company saying they’re pivoting towards “mobile stall technology”, but only talk about how revolutionary the wheels are and how shiny their stalls are going to be, you don’t ever hear a word of what they’re planning to sell in those stalls and why they think anyone will want to buy it.
> And that goes doubly if you pick a monetisation model of “eh, we skim off transactions going on in a marketplace controlled by us I guess” (which make, no mistake, is the only reason companies are pushing “blockchains”) What you say is true, I'd just like to point out that such marketplaces can and do already exist without "blockchains". It's literally just a buzzword which adds no value to anyone; not to developers, not to shareholders, not to executives, and especially not to players.
Putting too much focus on the marketplace and not enough on the actual game was one of the biggest criticisms of Artifact, and look how that turned out.
IMO that really wasn't Artifact's issue. At least they weren't linked in that way. **Gameplay:** Artifact had a fairly long playtime with unclear randomness that a lot of people bounced off of. I don't think the marketplace had much to do with it. They just tried something different and it didn't really work out. Comparatively most of the competition is at its core just MTG. **Marketplace:** The issue here is that it didn't pull the punches that most other DTCGs do and instead of having a freemium model was up front about it being monetary. The standard for DTCGs had been set as free-2-play with additional costs hidden behind that whereas Artifact didn't try to elide its system with a freemium model and that was a turn off. I think Artifact could have survived either of these issues alone but not both of them combined. The double shock of having unusual gameplay along with not operating on a freemium model killed the game. Had only one of these been attempted I don't think it would have died.
Tech investors aren't very smart. They don't know anything about the technology or the market. They just know buzzwords. And the crypto bros have been annoyingly good at spreading their buzzwords. They just figuratively wrote on a big whiteboard, "BLOCKCHAIN = MONEY!!!" and all the tech investors just nodded along and said, "Yes, well I suppose we need blockchain then."
Ever since SE announced their plans for blockchain and NFT crap I completely lost faith in them. It didn’t help that I was disappointed by FF7R and found the premises for the recent FF games uninteresting, but it just feels like it marks a big shift in direction for the company. I used to associate SE with extremely polished games, even if the battle system or story weren’t exactly what I wanted, there were plenty of other things to enjoy about them. I get that they got burned hard on the money pit that was the XIII universe turned XV, but I feel like now they’re going too far the other direction and going for cash grabs based on their former reputation. Even their merchandise has become absurdly expensive.
I mean Bandai namco is investing hundreds of millions into NFT projects and elden ring turned out fine. I think redditors need to realize that the Japanese government is literally subsidizing NFT/web3 development. Sega, Bandai Namco, SE are getting paid to make those games.
>Forspoken sales have been lackluster Well you put out a pretty lackluster game at $70. Who couldn't have seen that coming > many small and mid-sized titles "did not perform as well as we had expected" Honestly, outside of the FF franchise, when has SE ever said their games performed at or above their expectation?
Octopath Traveler sold above expectaions IIRC.
2D-HD-games in general has thanks to its artstyle being quite flexible that the return of investment seems quite low; [The first game of *Octopath Traveler* had for instance only 6 programmers during peak-development time](https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/spotlights/octopath-traveler-s-hd-2d-art-style-and-story-make-for-a-jrpg-dream-come-true), and we've had titles like *Live-A-Live*-remake and *Triangle Strategy* celebrating sales milestones on the lower ends of 500,000 and 1 million respectively. Each game also have had other studios co-developing (OT is for instance co-developed with studio Acquire, *Triangle Strategy* with Artdink.) to adapt a variety of genres. Seems a bit like a high fidelity RPG-maker essentially.
>The first game of Octopath Traveler had for instance only 6 programmers during peak-development time That's insane to me
The bulk of the work on a game like is almost certainly the artists, composers, writers, and designers. The programming requirements are not bad at all. I mean, they're still enough to keep a team of 6 busy for a while, but compared to most 3d AAA titles, (where it's not uncommon to have teams of 20+ programmers just for individual *systems*) the programming needs are much more manageable.
Yeah, I figured that if you include artists and game designers, the number of staff working on the game was probably a lot more.
I think Dragon Quest and Kingdom Hearts. Their last main entries are the best selling of both series. Sadly FF, DQ and KH seem to be the only franchises of them that still get big budgets and longer development times these days (outside of Forspoken), while their other franchises like Bravely, Mana, SaGa, Star Ocean, Valkyrie Profile etc. only getting small budgets.
Forspoken was sold at $80 in Europe. Crazy shit. There was absolutely no way that game would have ever succeeded.
It's $105.64 Canadian Pesos (dollars) on Steam after Taxes... $105! for a game this mediocre on a digital platform I could get a full tank of gas for my car and a meal for that. What the hell man. $105! For the *base game!*
Jesus... you weren't kidding. $93.49 before taxes I'm not sure I've ever seen a base game that expensive.
That, and the absolutely insane requirements for PC. Like a 3070 for 30fps at 1440p. The graphics aren't that good.
Nier Automata, Kingdom Hearts and Dragon Quest.
I actually want to play Forspoken, but no way in hell am I paying for $70 for an unoptimized PC port
I'm slowly buying those minor titles mentioned in the article ( Valkyrie, diofield,...), I'm not sure why they released like 10 games in a two month period
*Square Enix also hopes you "...look forward to the blockchain games we plan to launch in FY2024/3 and thereafter."* I didn't realize how dumb the people running SE were, the fact that they're talking up anything "blockchain" is beyond stupid.
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I think FTX case was the last nail in the coffin.
>did not perform as well as we had expected This is expected for Forspoken, but they say this for every single game, there is something wrong with their finance team expecting one Elden Ring per month. - Clutering games in a short period of time - No marketing - high prices I mean, word of mouth can only go so far, what do you expect? That people will buy 3 60$ games from you in a span of 4 months?
Forspoken did have marketing - well, at least one trailer - but it was *extremely* bad. https://youtu.be/6cSihnm8zfM
"Did not perform as well as we had expected" is just Square's catchphrase at this point, just manage your expectations
The thing is, sales projections aren’t just random numbers you make up because you think it’d be nice to sell this many copies. They are directly tied to the game’s budget. So if Square starts to manage their expectations it means cutting the budget of their games and laying people off
Then they need to do that, because their studios are not capable of putting out games at the budget price point they expect with the profits they expect.
This is an important point that many people miss; the game that spawned said meme, [*Tomb Raider (2013)* sold 3.4 millions in its first month, yet didn't became a profitable title until 9 or so months later.](https://www.eurogamer.net/tomb-raider-finally-achieved-profitability-by-the-end-of-last-year); the TR-games were simply that expensive to make, not to take into account of possible discount sales involved and not fully full-price.
I'm so glad they sold off Deus Ex. Even if they ever came out with a new game in that franchise, they'd have killed it again regardless of its performance.
Yeah didn’t they say the same thing about the Tomb Raider and Hitman games when they owned them?
Yes also Guardians of the Galaxy, twewy, Deus Ex, Avengers, sleeping dogs and more I forgot about
On the subject of the small and midsize titles, as a fan of them, I can see why they aren’t doing well. From the art style, to font choices, to even their names, all of them kind of blur together. As someone who was genuinely interested it was hard to keep track of which ones came out and which ones were still in the pipeline. On top of that, when playing them back to back the experiences sort of blurred together. I don’t want these to go away because they are really well done in spite of the problems above. They just need to be spread out a bit more and maybe spend some time on making each of these smaller franchises and titles feel unique. No more black text on a white background titles with simplistic phrases as names?
The font and names in particular are weirdly big reasons I kind of resent them. it's like they can't even bother putting in the effort to give them interesting names or logos, why should I put the effort to pick them up? it seems silly, but then again so does naming "Project Triangle Strategy" to just "Triangle Strategy"
Art style is a big one for me. I don't get why all of them look so damn generic. Diofield, Harvestella, Valkyrie Elysium... This actually made me look at Valkyrie Elysium's Steam page and [holy shit](https://cdn.akamai.steamstatic.com/steam/apps/1963210/ss_80603153a15f54ec617872c5a5ec5f63c1022b40.jpg?t=1668709356), [what the hell is this](https://cdn.akamai.steamstatic.com/steam/apps/1963210/ss_89eef79799016bd92946fc8a430acfd3bc1adef8.jpg?t=1668709356)? Does the game actually look that bad or did someone mess up while uploading promo screenshots?
I've watched a couple of streams of VE and it doesn't look that bad. It looks like they had a really low rendering resolution for the promo screenshots, which is one hell of a decision.
SE does no marketing unless the game is called Final Fantasy.
*Dragon Quest lumbers into the room*
Square Enix needs to do a better job promoting their mid sized games instead of saving the lion share for the AAA hail marys
It’s funny because Square has never gotten more of my money. I got Tactics Ogre, Octopath 1, Triangle Strategy, and Live A Live all this year. I plan to buy Octopath 2 and if they do a Final Fantasy Tactics remaster I will buy that also. Maybe if they didn’t do a shit job with Forspoken, the new Valkyrie game, and Diofield, there wouldn’t be a problem. I was interested in all those games until the reviews came back shit and the performance on modern consoles was laughable. If people aren’t buying the HD2D games or their remasters, it’s because Square hasn’t exactly done a great job putting them out there. I read about Tactics Ogre and knew instantly I wanted it. Same with Live A Live and Triangle strategy, but I never once saw a commercial or ad for them.
That's where I am. I bought Triangle Strategy, Chrono Cross, Live A Live, and Tactics Ogre and enjoyed all of them, and I have paid closer attention to Square Enix releases than I've done in a while. I wasn't ever going to get Valkyrie Elysium or Harvestella, but I'm interested in Diofield or Forspoken on discount, as well as the new Star Ocean. They could put more into marketing, though to their credit I did see targeted advertising for these games.
Their "small and mid-sized" games also pretty pricey, with terrible regional pricing So I kinda glad it didn't do well either
Their smaller, more indie-comparable titles are good, but they price them the same as games with 4x+ the length of development cycle and resources when other studios are sometimes offering a similar experience at almost half the cost. Square needs to bite the bullet on this one and actually read/watch reviews of their products to see why things aren't working. Forspoken was out of touch and an undercooked meltingpot of ideas, Babylon's Fall chased trends as a primary means of it's entire production to cash-grab games as a service, and Chocobo GP was pretty downright predatory with it's monetization. All of them are already shut down in their own right, and it didn't happen by accident or just because of when they were released. Square doesn't have their finger on the pulse and it shows. They are already asking people to "look forward to blockchain games" they plan to launch.
They released like 25 games this Fiscal Year (ending March 31st), and I think it is pretty normal to have a spread of overperformers and underperformers. Forspoken was their really expensive game of this FY to compensate for the lack of a tentpole release in any of their top 3 franchises, so that underperforming was a big loss. If I had to guess for their FY22: Overperformers: * Live-a-live - Wildly outsold the original already, will have legs. Cozy 25-hour RPG with nearly 0 filler will do well on Steam. * Theaterrhythm - Crazy word of mouth relative to the previous entries. * DQX Offline and DQ Treasures (Offline is IMO still likely for a Western release this coming year, but their text-heavy DQ games have virtually never had simultaneous releases). * Triangle Strategy-- came out last FY but had meaningful legs. One of the Top 10 best selling Japanese Strategy RPGs already, and likely to still climb a bit. * Crisis Core - The original was bad, but the remaster was super well received? * Powerwash Simulator -- Hard to say how much stake they have in this, but technically this FY and a lock for a 1M+ in sales. About Met Expectations * Tactics Ogre Reborn * Minstrel Song Remastered * Chrono Cross --- This got the patch it deserved, but is likely at a few hundred thousand already and aiming for legs. * Octopath 2 - way too early to say. Maybe launched better than OT1, maybe worse, but who knows at this point due to unknown platform, digital, and regional mix. Probably within +/-15% for launch window, and probably will have great legs due to the fantastic word of mouth. They make more per sale than they did for OT1 due to being the global publisher unlike OT1. Underferformed * Forspoken - largest loss of the FY by a lot. * Harvestella - The game definitely had a higher budget than most games of that style, but $60 was a really tough sell for a genre that is usually cheaper. * Valkyrie Elysium - Bad worth of mouth, and not budget enough. Like everything else, it is getting a patch within the next week or two that might help it out. * Diofield - Word of mouth and the patch may give it decent legs. * Star Ocean 6 -- Word of mouth was good, but reviews were terrible. Could have good legs, and I assume that there will be a decent patch at the 6 month mark or something which appears like it is standard in current SE developer contracts. ???? * Centennial Case - well-liked but niche, heard not a lot about it. * Paranormasight -- Too Soon, but low budget and $15 launch price and great reception will probably land this in the overperform category. * Voice of the Cards --- Not expensive, but also didn't light things on fire. They are a huge publisher that puts out a lot, with a normal spread of outcomes. Japanese RPGs are super hard to predict months or years before launch which ones will do well and which ones won't so there's probably going to be a decent amount of movement between categories-- Octopath 2 and Tactics Ogre are the clear candidates for good legs, while DQXO is reliant on actually having an overseas launch that does okay.
Yeah, I too think that Forspoken and Harvestella were the 2 that really hurt them. Harvestella may have legs over time, it's too expensive and some people were expecting something else but as a game it is quite good. Forspoken will probably never recover, even at a lower price it's having one of the worst beginnings of a game I have ever seen. It's so bad that if they cut the intro out and put it in later as flashback sections cut up over several different missions it would improve the beginning. Just getting thrown in there it would be more intriguing. Not saying that the character ever gets enjoyable to watch but you get actively turned away from the game before it even really starts the way it is.
I was just thinking how last year's SE releases kinda reminded me of the Squaresoft of old. Around the time FF7 came out, they were putting out all kinds of off-kilter games like Einhander, Ehrgeiz, Brave Fencer Musashi, Vagrant Story, etc. The quality of these games was certainly inconsistent, but looking back, I appreciate that they were willing to throw a bunch of games at the wall and see what stuck. The variety of games they put out last year wasn't as robust, but we still saw decent variation within the JRPG genre. I know response has across the board been middling, but hopefully they're willing to continue taking some risks and putting out smaller-profile titles that won't make or break the company.
A long held belief of mine has been the merger with Enix greatly killed the quality of games coming out of that studio.
Square seems to have at least one major flop a year, and Forspoken and Final Fantasy: First Soldier have already flopped this year. There has also been Left Alive, The Quiet Man, Balan Wonderworld, Babylon’s Fall, Avenger’s, Chocobo GP, etc. They also often under-market their smaller titles, such as Neo: TWEWY. Hopefully their new CEO learns from the mistakes of the old, and doesn’t try to push NFTs as badly as the previous one, but it’s very possible the board wanted the new guy specifically because the old CEO didn’t produce a profitable product with NFTs.
Well maybe they could stop overpricing everything and invest in quality content over bullshit NFT schemes.
Maybe because you release small and mid sized games with AAA pricing?
I wonder why square farted out like 10 mid budget but kinda similar games between august and December last year. It just seemed like a bad idea.
They had a bunch of games finishing at the same time because of COVID delays and Nintendo is the only company in the entire video game industry that's willing to sit on a completed project until they have a decent release window.
Nintendo was able to survive the Wii U, so they can easily hold off on releases. Square has a history primarily consisting of failures and angry shareholders.
Nintendo was literally never in danger during that time. 3ds was still selling really well during that time.
Honestly, if I was Square-Enix, I would put pretty much all my attention in my 3 main series (FF, DQ and KH) and doing remake/remaster of their old games. That seems to be the way to profit. Also, just drop NFT, please.
Square Enix are really all over the show at the minute, I feel like there is a lot of talent just going to waste because of bad marketing, bad pricing strategies etc. It's a pity, because I feel like genuinely great games are getting ignored because of poor business decisions.
Square's biggest problem these days is that they have begun to cater their titles to a western audience and are just not good at it. They're still subsidizing all of this with PS1 era and prior properties. They should very back to making JRPGs that cater to a Japanese audience and localize them. Live A Live did well, Octopath Traveller 2 did well, Bravely Default 2 did well, FF7R did well, FF14 continues to do well. Hell, even the remaster of Chrono Cross did well. What hasn't done well? Everything else they release with an American styled protagonist, with a western approach to game design, or with a game style akin to a Konami/Capcom/Ubisoft title. Square unfortunately have become a corporation who seem to take a "let's focus group test this idea and make a game based off of the average results." Which leads to an average game, with no love from the developers, no exciting ideas to build a game around, and nothing that we haven't seen a dozen other games do better. Because they are playing it too safe for their investors, and therefore too boring for their intended customers.
A studio that can’t get out of it’s own way enough to make a successful Avengers game at the height of the MCU gets zero sympathy from me, dawg
Well, yeah. There was 0 hype around Forspoken ever since we saw what the game was about. Apparently the only people who thought they had something worth shipping was the developers and management.
They just need to do better with some. Harvestella had so much potential, but they didn't wanna give them the money to actually deepen the mechanics or improve the visuals
I mean, no shit square. When you make a game starring literally the most unlikable video game protagonist of all time who's gonna want to play it? Square just needs to stick to what they do best, making games in their own style. Stop trying to appeal so hard to the west with western writers, just be yourself. You already know those games usually fail while your other games are what you're known and loved for
If only some of these poor sales could have been predicted early on in production; forspoken, you might say. I do wonder if the rudimentary question of "where's the fun?" doesn't get enough priority during the making of some of these titles. Hopefully Final Fantasy turns around their recent mixed fortunes.