Final Fantasy general

> At least this might scare them off from Final Fantasy X-3.

Fat chance,Final Fantasy titles sell,if anything it makes it even more likely

I mean, didn't Rebirth basically flop or at least sell well below expectations?

desperate times call for desperate measures,they make money selling final fantasy and they lose money making final fantasy titles

As much as I despise the FF 7 Remake, its not its fault that it didnt sell as well. Players did love it and I doubt anything else of Square Enix could have sold any better anyway.

Edited by AegisP on May 13th 2024 at 11:06:39 AM

You think they'll actually sell the brand itself?

Either way, Rebirth didn't sell well, so there's a lot of trouble for Square's future.

Edited by RedHunter543 on May 14th 2024 at 2:07:14 AM

> You think they'll actually sell the brand itself?

would be funny if they tried but no,they're not stupid enough to sell the one thing thats keeping them relevant

or are they?

The way you phrased it, made it sound like they would sell the brand if it's costing them too much money.

Nintendo: " In regards to the next Smash, we always have to renegotiate the third party characters since we don't know if they still want them in our product or not. Some companies can be alittle wary about their char-"

Square: "NO, KEEP THEM ALL! Cloud, Erdrick, Sephiroth and Sora can all stay! Hell, have some more! Here's Chrono, Geno, Roxas, Terra, Riku, Cecil, Mallow, Zack, Aqua, whoever! Just give us that revenue!"

Nintendo: "Oh cool. Can we have some more music?"

Square: " .......OK, we aren't THAT ****ing desperate."

square jumped out the window when they suggested licensing their music

Well I don't think Square Enix is any danger of closing down any time soon. Large companies have so many ways to get money that it takes a lot to kill them. Plus judging from their financials they're still making money, it's not like Square is losing money, either in general or from games. The issue is that with large publicly invested companies, simply making money isn't good enough, you're expected to keep making more money than you did before, and Square Enix seems to be stuck when it comes to that.

The main issue is that Square Enix wants to sit at the big boys' table and make huge, expensive AAA games that get 10+ million sales, and they expect that to be their way to make the line go up. But it seems like Square just doesn't really have enough of an audience for their games for that, especially when they're tying themselves to Sony and keeping their games off PC, which results in their biggest games making them less money than their smaller games once you factor in the bigger costs to make them.

I'm not sure if there's really an easy fix for this. Either they need to reevaluate what kind of company they are and what kind of games they make, or they need to catch lightning in a bottle and make a game so good everyone wants to play it and it sells 4x of much as FFXVI did and then just keep doing that again and again. I think the latter is what they're going to try to go for.

Hmmmm... good assessment.

I'm very curious how much FF XIV is contributing to their bottom line.

Get rid of excluive deal that right there helps a little.

It might let them budget their games more intelligently.

For those who have played Rebirth, are there parts that feel superflous and only there to justify the massive budget?

Edited by RedHunter543 on May 14th 2024 at 2:38:47 AM

Well it says their MMO revenue has declined from last year, and last year their MMO revenue had declined from the previous year as well.

My read is that FFXIV is still making Square a lot of money and there no way they're going to shut it down (hell, they're still running FFXI) or stop making expansions soon, but it's been making them less money than it used to and has been on a downward trend, so I imagine that's making them nervous.

Edited by KuroBaraHime on May 13th 2024 at 2:40:52 PM

And layoffs incoming at Square.

This won't cause Square to close their doors, but it could spook them enough to make stupid or knee-jerk reactions to it like canceling smaller games or dropping plans.

They already did that. They responded to disappointing sales of their AAA games by saying they're going to restructure to put even more eggs into the AAA basket and cancelled so many in-development games it cost them roughly 150 million dollars in "content disposal" expenses.

That ralph wiggum egg gif is typically I'd describe it

There's not enough Esuna cast to remove that regert status.

I have to make a correction about the exact state of their game revenue. I said they made 1% more revenue and 38% less profit off games than the previous year, but that's all their games, because those were the only numbers given in their financial report. There's a different financial briefing that gives the exact breakdown between "HD games" (all non-MMO console and PC games), MMOs, and mobile.

Mobiles game revenue was ¥101.5 billion (~$650 million) in FY 23-24, down 10.7% from ¥113.6 billion (~$727 million) in FY 22-23. After taking out operating costs, mobiles game profit was ¥14.2 billion (~$91 million), down 12.3% from ¥16.2 billion (~$104 million) from the prior year.

MMO revenue was ¥47.3 billion (~$303 million), down 11.3% from ¥53.3 billion (~$341 million) in the prior year. After taking out operating costs, MMO profit was ¥19.3 billion (~$124 million), down 33.7% from ¥29.1 billion (~$189 million) in the prior year.

HD game revenue was ¥99.2 billion (~$635 million), up 26.4% from ¥78.5 billion (~$502 million) in the prior year. But after taking out operating costs, HD games lost them ¥8.1 billion (~$52 million), just about twice of what they lost the prior year with ¥4.1 billion (~$26 million).

So what I said before isn't totally correct. They did make significantly more revenue off this last year's games than the previous year when they didn't really have big AAA releases (except Forspoken which flopped), but their costs were so high they actually lost twice as much money, and they've actually been losing money on non-MMO, non-mobile games for at the least the past couple years. Their profits have only been in MMOs and mobile, and those profits were both lower than the previous year.

So yeah, their AAA game development is pretty borked.

Could this kill FVII Part 3 entirely? That would well and truly blow.

it won't kill off the project entirely but they may have to..compress a few things

Doubtful. Even ignoring that cancelling the final part of their big hyped up trilogy would be embarrassing, while Rebirth likely cost a lot, they were able to reuse character models and other assets from Remake to help keep costs down, and Part 3 will be able to do more of that same reusing assets from Remake and Rebirth.

In the long run, I think it makes more financial sense to keep going forward with the VII remake plans. The asset reuse means Part 3 will cost less than an entirely new AAA game, you keep good will with people who bought and liked the first two parts, and after it's all done you can eventually sell a trilogy bundle that may get a boost in sales from people who are just waiting for the whole thing to be done before they hop on.

The XIII trilogy effect

Honestly I hope I never learn any details about the glut of games they just cancelled. I feel like some of them would be 100% up my alley and I just don't want to know.

I've been buying and enjoying all of Squeenix's middling games it hasn't been trumpeting; Valkyrie Elysium, Harvestella, Little Goodie Two Shoes...

Not Diofield Chronicle though fuck that game.

Edited by ShirowShirow on May 13th 2024 at 5:36:52 AM