"Square Enix say that they recently launched a new division in the U.S. to develop casual games for phones, but were forced to close it down after things didn’t go well. The company expects a 1 billion yen loss as a result of its closure."

Noobs, they should have done that in India, or Uruguay.

Yeah they may want to check Wada's bank accounts. Those games should been more than profitable given their sales. I mean Sleeping Dogs was all but finished when SE swooped in to publish it. Hitman and TR sales are damned good.

Sleeping Dogs was sadly a big flop, it deserves a lot more sales.

Hitman and TR should eventually hit the bare minimum of their expectations.

I don't know, it's all very Japanese. If they had admitted the western franchises are selling well but they are failing on the domestic side of things there would have been an uproar so they spun things. I can't believe they just ignored Dragon Quest flopping like that. I know it will earn more per game due to it having a semi-paid subscription model, but it managed to only sell a wopping 12% of it's predecessors sales.

This thread makes me confused. Did Sleeping Dogs sell 1.75m or not?

LOL at their sales expectations and implied game budgets. Did they not look at what real similar games were actually selling? Or did they imagine a Square premium?

Not mentioning how they've sunk 3 full AAA game budget's worth (at least) into each of FFXIV and FF Versus 13 to no return yet. That's what really hurt Square; they could have had 6+ mainline FF games in that time if those teams had been reined in.

Their expectations are too high, and using Metacritic to gauge the quality of anything, or even the market potential is next level retarded.

This made me think of something.

They don't know the Metacritic score when budgeting for the game, because the game is planned 3-5 years in advance. The sales expectations define the budget, unless they're idiots.

Are they TARGETING A METACRITIC SCORE when budgeting a game? Do they think a higher budget buys a better review score? Seriously?

So total loss was around 10 billion yen. In that pamplet, he goes sales are far less in NA and Europe, but not really Europle.

2 billion for Japanese Titles.
3.5 billion of Loss Devaluation of Content (2.0 Japan, 1.5) west.
2 billion restructuring
1 billion loss (US Social Game Closure)

Excepting what they said out of hitman is insane. Tomb Raider is less insane but not after 1 month.

@Soleron

I'm still trying to figure out Sleeping Dogs. I mean how is it even possible to lose money on that game. Activision had basically paid for almost all the games development when it was going to be the next True Crime. All SE did was publish, I mean anything they sold should have been nothing but gravy.

It does in some sense, if you compare it to other games they released like mindhack, nier etc to their higher budget recent ones, it does in a sense raise the score.

But for some reason Hitman a game that's never sold 5.5 million in its franchise would somehow sell that many, despite not being rated higher than blood money. Based on what? 

When they say hedging 80-90% of the sales potential. To me it still seems that they might have not necessarily been that high, but for wada to avoid being canned since they've lost money the last few quarters, they raised the expectations of those games, and prayed it would work.

It's my conspiracy theory atleast.