The AAA games market is suffering quite a lot it seems

Maybe they do.. the game market is too crowded to sustain all these AAA games from different developers.. I think they are going mobile to become a houshold name on the platform with a bright future ahead with the upcoming generation of people who are playing their first games on tablets and mobiles.. and to be fair Deus Ex the Fall is a pretty good game.. not for its platform but as a game..

Just a note for anyone who only read the title: SE Montreals AAA hitman game got cancelled...but IO is still working on a new AAA hitman game.

So Hitman is still coming to PS4/X1

It's awful late and go to mobile at this point. And these established franchises, they have no advantage on mobile (unless they are perhaps a huge, very mainstream game series, I don't know). A traditional hardcore franchise risks more to weaken and bloat its brand than strengthen it by going to mobile. I can't take the dev seriously when they put it on mobile. I'm a huge Assassin's Creed fan but Ubisoft putting their stuff on mobile, I can't take them as seriously anymore. I start to distrust them more and more.

What is Deus Ex The Fall? A mobile modern Deus Ex? (also, it's not so much about quality. It's more about perception. I bet many can actually do quality on mobile, but the mobile market is all together a different beast with different measures for success.).

But yes, it's hard for SE to gain a niche in the hardcore AAA HD market on console too, evedently (Tomb Raider and Deus Ex Rev as proof... great reviews but relatively poor sales).

Maybe SE West is destined to go the way of THQ. Sometimes you just can't do anything about it.

My fears for the industry are coming true (3rd parties):
- Console releases for big AAA annual iterations (AC, COD, BF, etc)
- Mobile releases for series we love but don't sell 3M+ copies (Splinter cell, Hitman, Tomb Raider, Resident Evil, etc). These will be dumbed down and will kill those series off.

Why is everybody surprised about that ?

Long ago SE announced that the last Hitman failed to give them profits and that they would focus they efforts on mobile and PC gaming. It was expected that a major franchise would be cancelled.

This paradigm is not sustainable anymore. Companies are taking too long to notice that.

If not for Square Enix's mismanagement, Hitman Absolution wouldn't have lost money. Many developers who actually make profits would love to have even a million sales for their games while Hitman Absolution sold well over three million. Their development and advertising costs were just way too high, and then they figured they'd sell far more copies than they did, even though Hitman Absolution is the second highest selling in the series.

Final Fantasy 13 was in development for six years, massive amounts of advertising, and then while there's nothing to prove this fact or otherwise, it's high metacrtiic score and how well over half the fanbase think it's a horrible game, assuming Square Enix paid a crap ton of money to review sites for the score.  They may have did the same with Hitman and Tomb Raider when there was no need.  I didn't like the new Tomb Raider, but it's got a lot of fans.

Not sure why they're supporting Tomb Raider and cancelling Hitman when both sold the same amount and because of their poor management they lost money on both.

Can't wait for Final Fantasy to go mobile-only so that it finally dies. Final Fantasy without Sakaguchi is like eating butter without bread. It simply doesn't work.

Or butter with bread if you're not a fan of butter.