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SanAndreasX said:
src said:
Great read.

Ultimately, Nintendo's own arrogance and strong arming led to the creation of their strongest competitor who has dominated them and the industry for 3 generations.

Not only that but it more importantly marked the end of Nintendo being the home to Japanese third parties, replaced with Sony and third parties for the large part have not looked back ever since. I can only imagine how dominant Nintendo would be if Sony never stepped in and if SE and others continued to focus on Nintendo only.

Don't know much about Japanese corporate culture and so can't say how outstanding these reactions from Nintendo and Square were or still are but whats clear is that for Square it was a massively risky move.

A massively risky move, that paid of above anyone's expectations. FF7 became the best selling Square game in history, the second best selling PS1 game, sold almost triple the amount of FF6, and revolutionized the JRPG genre on a global scale, a genre Square excelled at. Sqaure just put out hit after hit on PS1 and with PS1's global success was able to get a global audience that they would have never gotten with Nintendo. PS2 was a continuation of those efforts allowing SE to launch their new blockbuster IP Kingdom Hearts.

Square fully backing Playstation is what allowed Playstation to be the behemoth it is now and in turn in built Square to a level of success unseen by Japanese third parties.

This is still to this day, imo, the biggest betrayal in the gaming industry considering how it forever changed the landscape going forward.

It's a weird situation. Sony definitely did well with the arrangement, no question. But Square ended up collapsing under its own weight within a few short years after FF7. According to the interview they were teetering on the edge of bankruptcy in 2000, when FFIX was released. The movie was merely the nail in the coffin. They also ended up losing Sakaguchi and a lot of their other talent over the fallout from TSW. FFX-2 was what saved them from total collapse before Enix absorbed them into Square Enix. They were successful, but they spent money like drunken sailors at a Bangkok brothel. And Sakaguchi hasn't been a roaring success since he left. I haven't even seen any mobile games from his studio since Terra Battle, let alone console games.  Maybe they'd ultimately have been better off in the long term staying with Nintendo, who knows? In retrospect, Square didn't seem capable of coping with their sudden global success. 

The merger between Square and Enix was in talks long before then though. It was FF:TSW that led Square taking a massive loss and posting their first quarterly loss. They weren't really bleeding dry but it led to doubts about the merger. The timing of the movie's loss was also bad, as it was during the generational leap so PS2 titles were still in development and needed funding before release. Hence the Sony share buyout.

Once FFX and KH were out, 2002, Square posted record breaking profits. The merger went ahead and SE was formed.

Talent leaving is part of the gaming industry. Creatives want to take hold of their own projects, work on different franchises etc and since each company only has a set amount of projects/ directorial positions, talent moves a lot in the gaming industry.

Honestly, Sakaguchi leaving hurt Sakaguchi far more than Square.

Definitely not. Sony saw that the gaming market did not have to be concentrated in NA and JP. They opened up a market, EU, larger than both NA and JP, and with the PS2 showed how to sell gaming consoles on a truly global level to less developed countries on a level that Nintendo could have never dreamed of. Even to this day, Sony has presence in far more countries, many of which Nintendo does not even officially sell in.

Its hard to argue that Square and Sony did not make their best move.