Square-Enix had their time, their greatness began to fall after FF12, really, from FF7 (with the rare highlight)

Nowadays, they're too focused on being mainstream and how it looks as opposed to how good the game is. And that is a shame.

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.

I've been saying that they are doomed for 3 years lol. They will rebound they just have to go back to their roots

Sorry for the late reply, I've been beyond busy.

Anyways, as far as costs go I don't know a whole lot beyond what common knowledge and google can get you.  I had the cost breakdowns for a last gen AAA game but that's a slightly outdated by now.  For those above costs I just googled for server prices and that made it pretty easy to see that servers cost a lot of money.

Also, man, Teo completely destryoed me with that last argument.

Alright. I was unsure if there was anything outside of what I knew on my end. You'd think that Square would need about 150,000-250,000 active subs just to keep the lights on - much less pay them back for all the work they did to make the game in the first place (likely between $50-$100m not including any updates).

It'd seem that unless they have a miraculous turnaround, FFXIV is going to cost them a lot of money.

Yeah, it's just completely amazing to me that they're still actively trying to turn around.  I honestly don't know what they're thinking.

The damage has been done and the game just has a pitiful reputation and that isn't going to change easily.  Even if the PS3 version got released and reviewed seperately people would still that 40-something average for the PC version and think something is up.  There's also the added bonus of people don't really play MMO's on the consoles and even if they did they'd probably play a better one like DCUO.

Even looking at their project plan, it's still pretty pointless for them to go on.

http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/threads/11012

At first glance it does look like they have a plan and they're getting things done but then you actually read the individual items and you realize they don't really have a clue what they're doing.  This game has to easily be the biggest screw up of the generation.  If it just released bad and they were done with it, I wouldn't say that, but the fact they're trying to hard to keep it alive is just so bad.

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.

Chaos Rings (a Square-Enix iOS RPG) scored 92 on metacritic. I haven't tried the game myself (since it's not on Android) so I can't vouch for it myself. If they put the effort in and don't half-ass games, they can produce quality. If they put out more rpgs on smartphones my smartphone battery is going to hate me though. lol.

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)