jarrod said:
Actually, there's been quite a few more...
...and there's also several big titles that , while not releasing within the period, did release just weeks prior and undoubtedly had effects on this year's bottom line in terms of sustained catalogue sales (or lack thereof). There's also the issue of major titles getting delayed (and thus losing previously expected revenue). Examples of both of these include...
...and finally, given it's the fiscal year forecast... we can also include titles still expected for release...
...really, I don't think it's unfair to say that this fiscal year SE was putting a concerted amount of resources into HD games and specifically titles focused on the west, especially compared to past years, and in most cases it's basically blown up their faces. Their Wii support has been anemic as usual (just downloadables and a DQ spinoff) and their handheld support noticeably atrophied compared to previous years (though 3DS/PSP2 will likely be reversing that trend soon).
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I don't think the JP releases of other peoples games are really worth suggesting they had any negative impact on SE's finances - end of the day they know the games won't sell more then 5 figures and the only cost associated with these games is translation and basic shipping / manufacturing. They probably make SE a small, tidy profit as well, if SE are losing money on them they're ****ing insane.
The point is that SE's HD console release list this fiscal year was pretty much 2 games that EIDOS did most of the developement of, Nier, a game which I think exceeded expectations in Japan and was (I hope) pretty low budget and Mindjack, which we can't really judge yet.
I think the point is, it doesn't take a genius to see that the slashed forecast is primarily due to FFXIV being an utter shipwreck which has sold wayyyyyyy below expectations and generated no monthly fee revenue. The delay of Deus Ex will have hurt things too, but I don't think SE can really see that as a 'bad thing' as much as it might just be to bolster next fiscal years earnings (we'll have to wait and see if it comes out early April instead of March...).
Remember that last year, FFXIII and Batman:AA were two of the three 'big' games that lead SE to a record year for profit and revenue.
