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Final Fantasy XIV: Square-Enix Profits Expected to Plunge
SBFord
Former Associate EditorMember LegendaryPosts: 33,129
Square-Enix will be releasing its final 2010 financial report very soon with the expectation that profits will have plunged up to 89% during fiscal 2010 and with revenue 28% lower than the same time period as fiscal 2009. Despite lackluster profits, SE's president, Yoichi Wada believes that new staffing and long-term planning implemented in late 2010 and a strong console/iOS lineup will bring revenue back into line as 2011 progresses.
"In other platform areas including PCs and smartphones, we have created successful examples of new content such as Nicotto Town and SENGOKU IXA. By pursuing these two independent markets, we are raising our ability to succeed in diverse business models."
Despite the hard times, both Kane & Lynch 2 and Dragon Quest Monsters Joker 2 sold over a million copies during Q3.
Source: GamesIndustry.biz.
Comments
I blame it on the ENIX part, SQUARE was an awesome company before the merger and now, they just can't seem to release quality anymore.
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I think the problem is simply that they expected XIV to be in a thoroughly finished state by now with the PS3 launch looming on the horizon.
Nobody can argue that their other titles are failing to deliver revenue, and nobody can argue that they arent taking XIV's success and player opinion serious NOW.
Enix made very profitable and interesting games back in their day, Lufia for one.
I blame SE's failures on their recent games they've made, have you guys SEEN Mindjack? or any of their other crappy C games they're making? Lords of Arcana too... So many horrible failure games that don't even get mentioned by most people because they aren't even aware SE made them.
SE's failure is due to their own incompetance.
They released a horribly unfinished & unpolished product with the mentality of "We'll fix it along the way...". This very same mistake has lead to the collapse of numerous MMOs in the past, and yet SquareEnix blindly trudged ahead.
All I have to say is:
-Serves them right...
-Lesson learned...
-Any LESSER of a company that did what they did would have collapsed by now from meager profit gains
-Move forward, and hope that SquareEnix can recover FF14, or hope they don't scrap the game. As this would be a sign of internal failure, and the company disolving 6months from there. (you don't nuke your new several hundred million dollar project if you intend to stick around).
Either way, I hear FF11 is picking back up as they've "fixed" many issues people had with it prior to FF14. So it's not like they're not gaining revenue.
The Theory of Conservative Conservation of Ignorant Stupidity:
Having a different opinion must mean you're a troll.
In addition to the previous comments, the merged company obviously did not listen to their beta testers, MOST importantly the ones who gave them clear, documented bug reports as to why a significant percentage of the testers were unable to log in to the game, as it was not properly ported for all current versions of Windows OSs, and configured properly for many multicore CPUs, running either Intel or AMD.
The tech staff's responses in the support/bug forums the first month of beta release were reminiscent of something one would expect a Tier 1 agent in the Philippines to say in response to a complex issue, before they finally realized that their “Knowledge Base funnel” advised them that the issue needs to be escalated to a higher tier for resolution.
Uhh..as you can see revenue is down by almost a third from last year and profits are plummeting. I'm not sure how in the world you think they are gaining revenue...
This is why you don't attempt to make a hard and time consuming (I've separated as they are not the same thing) game anymore, you'll get criticized to bankruptcy or until you simplify the game for the masses.
You're much better off making some accessible game aiming at a broad market.
It's sad, final fantasy deserves more; it deserves the success warcraft has enjoyed imo
The fear of a failed mmo must loom in every developers mind...bioware must be bricking it!
I half agree with you and half need to kill it with fire. If every game were like a Wii game or THAT mmo (you know the one) I dont think I'd be a gamer for much longer.
My theme song.
And now we are tasting what happens when we get over confident and only listen to the drooling fanboi's............
Dem hibbies! Dey be wrong!
IMO the last good game they made was FF9 and I didn't like that one much either.
My theme song.
I see your point, but I'm not sure I agree - people who were excited for FFXIV were expecting a hardcore pve game. Hell, I would've welcomed it as a good (and pretty) alternative to the other main players out there.
What people got though, was a horrible, unfinished broken mess in a somewhat pretty package (character graphics and animations were beautiful, environments were, at best, a bit lackluster). Hardly finished enough to even be called a game. That, in my opinion, was what pissed people off the most. The game was at least 6 months away from a releasable state when they pushed it out the door, and the developers chose to ignore all the criticism that the beta testers had given.
For the time the game had been in development, the game had surprisingly little to offer, almost like the dev team had pulled a 'duke nukem forever' on the game. I place the blame for that squarely on the management, and it seems the CEO of Square Enix did as well when he shitcanned them (pardon the language, but its a legitimate phrase) after release last year.
The game could have been good, possibly great, but no matter how much they improve the game from now on, it will already be too late to reach the numbers they could have had, if they had released the game in a properly working state.
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I know, I felt like killing me too after reading what I posted, when you make a game like this you are already incredibly limiting your potential market, in my imaginary world it would be quite the opposite, but meh, world domination is too hard not to mention it wouldn't be possible to game at all while you work on that :P
@ thecipher
You're probably right since I didn't play the game to have enough experience to comment on the game being bad and management getting fired shows that, but it's a bleed on top of an already limited scope. I played the beta but didn't feel attracted enough, but I am hoping that after all the changes they give some kind of trial for players to check the game, I still feel bad for judging a game purchase based on a Beta but there was no other alternative.
I am being naive but I do think a MMO can grow after a bad beginning as long as it gets good enough to get word of mouth working positively for the game (not to mention the number of press releases there will still be on this as they made the issue public by acknowledging it) as long as there is enough hard work being done instead of the shrinking development teams and budget that happen in reality.
It can grow, sure, but I doubt it can ever become what it could have been if they had had a proper launch. The closest similar example I can think of, is Age of Conan, for the following similarities:
It had a similar amount of hype (remember all the people hailing AoC as the WoW-killer?)
It had (for the time) very pretty graphics, and required a high end machine to run well.
It tried to bring something to the table that was out of the ordinary (in AoC's case, the combat system.
However, the launch was not only disastrous, but Funcom also failed to deliver on their promises:
Siege combat was not implemented.
PvP combat, one of the game's main selling points, was horribly broken.
No DirectX 10 support, despite it being marketed as a DX10 game.
PvE experience after Tortage was boring, and nothing like the starter area.
See the similarities between AoC and FFXIV now? Both games promised more than they delivered, and coupled with the large amount of hype surrounding the games, it left a bitter taste in the mouth of a lot of gamers. In the case of FFXIV, even their japanese market (who usually love anything SquareEnix) were vocally outraged, to the point where one wealthy gamer sold all of his (millions of dollars worth) of SE stock.
Now, a year and some change down the line for AoC, and it's finally shaping up to be the game it should have been at launch. PvP is still kinda broken from what I hear (never got into that while playing), but the PvE experience is fairly solid now, and it's actually fun to play for a while at least. The new expansion is being hailed as a very good one, and a lot of fixes and updates have been made during that year. Had the game launced in this state, it likely would have a much larger chunk of the market than it does.
From what I can tell, AoC is still profitable, but on a much smaller scale, and I suspect that even if they fix FFXIV up to be what it should have been, it will be a matter of "too little, too late" for a lot of potential customers. It can probably be turned around to be profitable for SE again... but it could have been huge. That ship seems to have passed by though, and it ain't coming back.
http://machineborn.guildportal.com - Now recruiting players!