Topic: Square-Enix tell investors to expect huge loss; multiple projects cancelled.

I didn't feel like bumping the general Final Fantasy thread, as this is more of an all-encompassing S-E thread. But I'm curious as to what this news means for the unconfirmed Final Fantasy Tactics remaster? Throughout the lifecycle of the Switch, S-E have been putting a lot of effort into bringing their back catalogue of games to current platforms. This feels like the end of all that.

Final Fantasy Remake 3: Relive, Dragon Quest XII, Dragon Quest III HD2D, Kingdom Hearts IV, Visions of Mana...are all probably on-track. Beyond that? Ehhhhhh....

That western release for Dragon Quest X Offline probably just died...again.

Is this no News alot of most figure SE was messing up to do this.

If it helps, the speculation is that the multiple projects that were cancelled are mostly/all related to that crypto/metaverse initiative they were so pumped about.

@BrazillianCara That is a bit reassuring.

But my memory defaults to how Hironobu Sakaguchi was shamed out of S-E leadership because Spirits Within was a $140 million dollar loss.

If you remember how they sold off all Western studios in order to focus more on developing live service games. Well, they pretty much all bombed. Even their core franchises aren't performing that well. FF16 and FF7 Rebirth both failed to meet sales expectations.

I'm pretty sure that heads are going to roll for this.

I'm not sure where their Switch output lies though. Remasters and AA games are a lot cheaper to make, but they don't tend to sell as well either, and the temptation is almost certainly going to be there to get rid of anything that's only marginally profitable in order to concentrate on the bigger projects.

Does any Square-Enix game ever meet sales expectations? I swear — more than any other game company — they are constantly spouting that X game failed to meet sales expectations.

It's a shame really, because I think SE have been producing banger after banger in the past 6 years or so (compare with the ~decade period in the late 00s / early 10s where their notable list of games could be counted on one hand).

Square Enix is in a weird spot right now. Hopefully they learn their lesson to stop moving towards live service and other unhealthy practices for the industry.

I feel bad in a sense because SE one of the few gaming companies that actually puts out a decent quantity of games, a lot of which are good, but between the inevitable live service bombs, poorly marketed, sometimes bizarrely high budget looking sequels to niche older games and selling off their western studios because they wanted to focus on NFTs...

shrugs Yeah, this was gonna happen. Also, PS5 is not Ps4 in terms of success (AFAIK anyway) so their AAA games can't make the same money back.

This worries me for series like Dragon Quest Builders, Octopath, and Bravely Default. I wonder what this means for Yoko Taro's next game as well, seeing as it won't be a NieR title.