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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.
If Deus Ex: Human Revolution is done right, they'll be well into the black again.
August 11th, folks. Diaries should be marked.
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
It's really that simple, squeenix has lost all manner of quality.
They just make ugly designs, annoying musc, 100% grindy gameplay and stories which grow less and less cool.
The main problem is that japans gaming culture and western gaming culture has grown more and more widely apart.
This really hurts their market.
Square-Enix's problems mirror, to a large extent, those that have afflicted the wider Japanese gaming industry (including, once you discount early Wii hardware sales, Nintendo), during the current console cycle.
At the heart of this is a failure to evolve their games and franchises to reflect changing times and tastes. If often feels like the modern Japanese games industry doesn't recognise anything between "no change at all" and "total ground-up redesign". It's instructive to compare how the most successful Western developers have managed franchises and general gaming concepts over this time. If you look at the likes of Bioware, Bethesda, Bungie, Blizzard, Valve, even some of EA's own internal development efforts, you can see a pretty ruthless evolutionary approach to design. When a game comes out and the studio begins development either on a sequel or even a new property, the first thing that seems to happen is a look at what people liked and didn't like about the previous game, with this being factored into the development of the sequel.
Take Bioware as a case-study here. Baldur's Gate came out in 1998 and was pretty successful. However, it was the sequel, which came out a couple of years later, that really revolutionised Western RPGs. Why? Because Bioware had evolved the franchise, removing aspects of the original game that had been "a bit too pen and paper" for CRPG players (such as no-pausing-on-the-inventory-screen mechanics and large amounts of wilderness crawling) and had expanded the areas that had been well received (adding further complexity to the casting system, expanding character dialogue trees and so on). Once Bioware moved on from the Baldur's Gate series, they continued releasing RPGs that very clearly had BG in their DNA, but which shed some of the pricklier aspects of the old series, while borrowing popular elements of Japanese RPGs (such as the "active party" system). Then having reached a point where they faced a serious conflict between hardcore RPG gamers and the more casual crowd, they essentially "fork" their games, with the Dragon Age series pitched for the hardcore and the Mass Effect series for the action demographic. That isn't to say that Bioware don't make mis-steps - Dragon Age 2 feels very much like a mis-step, and Jade Empire can probably be seen as one with hindsight - but an evolutionary approach like this makes it much easier to get back on track after a wobble.
Then compare Square-Enix's management of its premier RPG property - the Final Fantasy series. There's no evidence of a planned evolutionary approach to the development of the series - just an odd mixture of clinging to past certainties combined with random-throw-of-the-dice leaps into the dark. There are elements of the Final Fantasy series on show in FF13 which feel like products of another era. Random encounters (and I'm sorry, but making them visible on the field map doesn't make them any less random encounters) have been pretty much entirely ditched in the West. Our developers have figured out that - surprise surprise - gamers don't like spending a couple of hours runnng in circles in a dungeon just to level up. Yes, levelling up is part of RPGs, but any Western RPG worth its salt these days ensures that it is done via interesting sidequests and subplots. And yet there they are, still at the centre of the flagship Japanese RPG series (and pretty much every other JRPG).
The throw-of-the-dice element seems to come in the way that Square-Enix completely changes its battle and level up systems (and often even wider mechanics) for each installment in the series. At times, this has been a strength. It does keep the games from feeling a bit too samey. But when the throw of the dice produces a result that people actually like, it inexplicably never seems to get developed any further. So, for example, FF12's move towards more open-world gameplay was pretty widely welcomed, even by people who didn't like much else about the game. Yet then FF13 comes out and is basically a 30 hour tunnel for the player to
Looking back, FFVII remains one of my favorite experiences. I tried to think more carefully about why on a recent replay.
The top thing had to be the music. It was just fantastic. Maybe I just like chiptunes, but even as late as FFX, it seemed like they had some notable 'background' tracks. Now it seems like they are all generic toned down orchestral pieces that aren't noticable at all and just barely tweak to fit the mood. Except for when they make some pop song to prop up somewhere in the middle of the game...
The open ended nature of exploration absolutely was up there. There are a lot of games that continue to get this part at least. One of the big moments when playing FFVII for the first time was leavinig midgar. Up until that point, I thought it was going to be a game like FFX or later turned out to be. Then when the world map presented itself, the contrast did a lot (for me) toward making midgar feel more like a cramped place with little control of your destiny relative to the larger world.
Another thing was how the story panned out. The general theme was certainly not new, but the details were so convoluted, I liked it. Of course, I like Crono Trigger and there was nothing partiuclarly complex about the story at all.
Finally, I think the lack of definition and no voice actors helped. I fill in the details with whatever I like. Crisis Core tought me I really won't like the voice actors if I get to make up my mind about how they should sound ahead of time.
The worst thing was the translation.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.