Square-Enix Troubles

[Kenryoku_Maxis]

Wagram said:

Kenryoku_Maxis said:

Are you loco in the head boy?  Microsoft owning SquareEnix would be the same as killing them.  The vast majority of their market is in Japan.  If they were forced to only be on XBOX360, that would 1) Cost them more money to develop games and 2) Drop their sales even worse than now.

All SE needs to do is stop focusing on FINAL FANTASY FINAL FANTASY FINAL FANTASY and start focusing on the series that actually produce a profit (Kingdom hearts, Dragon Quest, Chrono).  As well as making new IPs, which tend to get the most sales on the HD consoles.  And this sounds like exactly what they're looking to do, finally.

SE is in this hole now because they spent literally half a billion dollars in advertising games like FFXIII, FFXIV, FFIV DS and FFTactics PSP.  All which underperformed expectations.  They should be focusing on more targetted advertising for Kingdom hearts, making Dragon Quest more popular internationally and making new games.

Even if Dragon Quest X comes out on the eve of Cafe, it'll still most likely sell at least 3-4 Million in just Japan.  Considering Cafe will also play Wii games backwards compadible, there's little problem of that.  But of course, you'll probably see a good 500,000 or more people buy a Wii just for that game.  People bought systems for Dragon Quest VI, VII, VIII and IX.  There's little evidence the trend won't continue for X.

Wow where to begin here.

1.) Yeah Square needs to focus on other franchies that generate profit, but Final Fantasy is a cash cow, it always has and always will be. Since when did FF not produce a profit with the exception of FFXIV which is their fault.

2.) Uhh Square-Enix didn't spend shit for money on advertising for hardly ANY of those games except for FFXIII. That's why some games have low sales because they do not market. They expect people to buy it because it says Square-Enix on it.

3.) Final Fantasy XIII did not underperform.

4.) I do agree that if Microsoft SE they would die off. If anyone were to buy them out it should be Sony or Nintendo.

1) The point is Final Fantasy has become less of a cash cow than it was before.  Back on the PSX/GBA days, they could release just a straight port of one of their past games and sell over 2 million copies.  Now they are struggling just to sell high budget remakes of their products like the DS remakes.  Hell, the Dragon Quest remakes did better than the FF ones, with a significantly lower cost to make.

2) SE marketed FFIV DS pretty heavily, even in America.  Way more than any of their non-FF products.  FFXIV has a lot of hype and advertising, at least in Japan.  Its just a clear case of a game failing upon release.  And admittedly, a lot of their marketing did go into FFXIII.  No report has been release, but people have estimated it between 300-500 Million in advertising, spread over 5 years.  For a game that sold less than FFVII, VIII and X.  And it didn't do that much better than FFXII.

3) It did underperform what they wanted it to sell.  And this is coming from the execs at SE, who expected it to sell better than FFVII.  SE has also admitted FFXIII cost the most to make out of any game they've ever made.  Any way you look at it, they didn't make the money they wanted between multi millions in advertising and an over-inflated development.  This is just an estimate, but they could have easily spent near 1 billion between marketing and making FFXIII.  They probably made their money back (game has sold 6 million copies), but not by much.  Especially since just 3 months after release, the game was going for $20.

4) I don't think Sony will bother buying them.  I think last I heard, they owned like 25% of their shares.  If Nintendo bought them, it might help, but I think it would be a mistake.  For lack of a better way to say it, one of the major focus for Final Fantasy is on graphics and Nintendo probably won't be the top dog in graphics, even next gen.  SE probably wouldn't consider selling to Nintendo for that reason just like they won't sell to another company because of how well they're doing on the DS/Wii with Dragon Quest.  Exclusivity would only hurt them at this point.