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Square Enix Facing Big Losses For 2010
eldavojohn writes "It's no secret that Final Fantasy XIV took a lot of heat early on, which required extensive damage control. And the Japanese tsunami (which appears to have added $7.5 million to their losses) certainly didn't help. But if what early investor reports are saying is true, then Square Enix is expected to report $148 million in losses for the closing fiscal year. Expect title cancellations (which might add to the hurt) and a very painful realization for the owner of Final Fantasy and Dragon Warrior (PDF). Perhaps a move to re-releasing classics will prove more fruitful than high development cost MMORPGs?"
Why not...uh...find out what made the classics classic and do a bit more of that?
You know, games with interesting, non-whiney characters, non-linear story with some exploration in gameplay, music that is better tailored to each scene so it doesn't sound like they just put a track in to fill the silence.
How could a company that consistently produced quality entertainment for nearly two decades be reduced to a mere shadow of its former self? What happened? As probably one of the few people on /. that actually loved FFXI, I have to say, FFXIV was a complete waste of time. FFXI was fun, but it didn't age well, and there were a lot of things that SE could have learned from and done better. Instead of learning from their mistakes, they ended up making a less fun, more frustrating version of FFXI, and thought that making it pretty would solve everything. Well, it didn't, and now they're paying the price for it.
SE needs to go back to the mindset that they had when they were just Square. They need to stop cranking out duds every 3 months. We need games that are on the caliber of FFVI, Chrono Trigger, and Xenogears. Otherwise, the world will simply stop caring about them... that is, if we haven't stopped caring already.