Square-Enix is doomed. Here's why.

[Mr Khan]

mrstickball said:

Mr Khan said:

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.

Given that their likely most profitable game in the past ~5 years was on the DS, I'd say they don't have to make it as good as their console offerings.

The advantage of smartphones is that Square can build up and dominate a brand. If that happens, then they can sell their back catalog of games until the cows come home - something few companies outside of Nintendo have the ability to do. It would likely improve their forecasts when they have ancient games like Secret of Mana selling a few hundred copies every month - and multiply that by dozens or hundreds of IPs.

True, if they put their best talent on it. Hell given their notoriety they could just skip to the second part and make it a Virtual Console/PSN-esque dumping ground for SNES/PS1/NES classics.

The problem is that Wada seems to think hiring outsiders is the way to go on that, and not to expand internally. It just doesn't look like they're going in the right direction here (though either way they likely will wise up and do some easy dumping)