Square-Enix is doomed. Here's why.

[Mr Khan]

loves2splooge said:

I would love to see Square-Enix publish more jrpgs on smartphones. Turn-based rpgs work well with touchscreen input. Hopefully they'll port their previous iOS releases (ie. Chaos Rings) to Android as well. Does it really matter whether a quality RPG is on a smartphone or a dedicated game handheld? A quality game is a quality game. The DS and PSP have so many fucking RPGs that it's really not a big deal if Square-Enix throws Apple and Google some bones.

I think a Square-Enix Facebook RPG would be great as well. Facebook games are not meant to replace console gaming or "regular" (non-browser) PC gaming. They're meant to be something you play on your browser at your school computer lab/work or if you just want something fun to play for free.

The recent trend lately on these forums is to basically bash anything that gamers see as a threat to dedicated console gaming ("smartphone games are not real games." "It has no buttons!"). Meanwhile statistics show that the iOS/Android pie in the handheld gaming software revenue market space is getting larger and larger (up to 34% in the US in 2010) while the Nintendo (57%) and PSP (9%) pie is getting smaller. http://www.mobile88.com/news/read.asp?file=/2011/4/19/20110418192208&phone=iOS-Android-gaming-increase-market-share-US 

I like my DS Lite and PSP but you can't blame Square-Enix for choosing not to ignore the growing smartphone market. Especially when the future of the 3DS and NGP is uncertain. Everyone keeps bringing up a bunch of 3D N64/PS2 ports and Mario Kart (The N64 and Gamecube had Mario Kart too...) as future saviors of the 3DS. And with NGP likely costing an arm and a leg and releasing watered down home console games on the go like Uncharted Portable, Sony has shown that they haven't learned from their past mistakes with the PSP. There is a market for Uncharted Portable. You can see hardcore Sony fans get excited for it on the forums. But there's no chance in hell that niche fanbase is going to cover the expense of creating that game. Most people want to play Uncharted on the big screen, not their handheld.

As for Final Fantasy XIV, I noticed that the Collector's Edition (!!) was reduced to $40 Canadian on amazon.ca and right now the game doesn't have any monthly fees. But I don't want to potentially waste $40 on garbage so I'm going to have to give it a pass. I don't think Square-Enix should shut the servers down. It's only going to piss off the people who actually bought the game and still want to play it. It would turn that $40-80 game (depending on when you bought it and which version) into a worthless paperweight. They should probably just scale down their infrastructure (instead of running 18 servers for say 54,000 people or however many there are, cut down on the number of servers maybe?) so that they can avoid losing anymore money on the game and call it a day.

The issue is will they be making iPhone games that are anywhere near as good as their console offerings? That's the main issue. SE has proven to be a worthwhile player when they stick to their guns, but if they just go following trends (like so many of the birdmen in this industry) they'll be reduced to irrelevance quicker than quick.