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Square Enix share price drops amid claims Final Fantasy 16 didn’t meet ‘high end’ expectations
(www.videogameschronicle.com)
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this post was submitted on 07 Aug 2023
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After months of hearing about how Final Fantasy "needed" to become Devil May Cry because RPGs are dead, watching Buldurs Gate succeed and FF16 fall short of expectations is kind of cathartic.
Edit: I'm aware this Square's projections, not actual sales. The point still stands that they made a shift in genre thinking they would unlock a wider audience than they got. Then a shit ton of think pieces and reviews and FF14 fans came out spouting this nonsense about how turn based RPGs are old hat and Square NEEDED to abandon it to hook modern gamers.
Then Boulder Gate drops and proves every single one of them wrong, while Square is wondering why they fell short.
FF16 sold really well though. Square Enix likes making unrealistic expectations for their games and they do it every time. I don’t think they even believe their expectations are real. The real reason for their share loss is increased operational costs.
Capcom was guilty of this 10-15 years ago with the infamous "Capcom test" where they would release a small project or re-release a game in a franchise they were floating around ideas for a new entry in, and if the small game or re-release didn't sell basically like a new AAA game, the franchise didn't get the new entry. This was part of how the company was basically reduced to only Resident Evil and Street Fighter for a time. Fortunately they eventually snapped out of it, probably when they realized you can't make the kind of money you used to make when you're effectively killing off all but two of your IPs due to stupid sales expectations. Square Enix will probably hit that point eventually as well.
Baldurs gate sold great for larian, those are square enix numbers, and not numbers that would cover the investment square makes into their games. You know this surely.
I'm sure you are also aware of how many turn based games square puts out every year? Spoiler it's more than everyone else.
This sounds like a strawman to me. Maybe you meant that people were claiming that "JRPGs are dead"? In which case, holding up Baldur's Gate 3 of evidence to counter that seems strange. But I haven't heard anyone saying that RPGs in general are a dying genre.
The whole argument really is strange and all speculation. There’s plenty of areas where FFXVI and SE arguably fell short, but even by this guys own admission in his edit, the game met projections. If they were expecting to “unlock more,” those projections would have been higher.
If you look at their recent financial report this seems to be nothing to do with FFXVI as sales in that “HD Gaming” and “Merchandise” area are up. Literally every other area is down, even MMO sales (FFXIV).
Whether people like the game or not, it seems to have helped prevent SE suffer from a worse dip.