naznatips said:
They don't profit. They barely profitted at all for years during FFXIII development, despite selling cheap ports and remake software in ridiculous quantities on DS, for massive profits, and inflated prices (In Japan SE games on DS cost as much as PS3 games). In fact, they were in the red numerous times over those years, which shouldn't even have been possible. You're right, I'm speculating, but logically they should have made hundreds millions of dollars during those three years, and the fact that they didn't suggests that FFXIII could have cost even more than I've postulated.Of course it's not responsible for all those losses alone. SE was developing many games at the time, including DQIX, Versus, and 432,168.3 Kingdom Hearts spinoffs, but it certainly was a big chunk of the reason that they barely broke even. As for the advertising costs supplemented by Microsoft, that could be true, but I doubt it. There wasn't nearly the ad-push you'd expect from a $75 million ad campaign, and even if it were it would have been a US-only campaign, and they would have spent their own money for TV spots in Europe and Japan, which would have been in the $30 million range anyway, after combining the two territories, so it's not like Microsoft handed them a free game. Not to mention if MS has really shelled out that much for the advertising of FFXIII it would have shown up on their fiscal results. And as for the Luminous Engine, it was created from the engine tools owned by Eidos (used by K&L 2 and Deus Ex) when they did their buyout of them, so even if it includes some fractions of Crystal Tools, basically it was years of labor scrapped after 2 games for what will amount to no return. As I said, though, all of this isn't even a fraction of the disaster that Versus will be with 5 years of development and 2-3 million lifetime units sold at best. |
Again you're speculating way too much, you're not even bringing sources to prove your point.
See page 3 http://www.square-enix.com/eng/pdf/news/20100518_02.pdf
Since 2004 they profited millions of dollars every year.
