Gabriel Stanford-ReisingerSo Square Enix saw a sharp 15% decline in share price in Japan. This decline follows its latest earnings call, which was naturally a mixed bag of good news and bad news.
In Q2 2023, the company saw a 14% year-on-year increase, but profits were down, and not like kind of down, but rather 69% down. This sparked a lot of concerns from shareholders, leading to Square Enix going from ¥6,366 — $44.97 — a share on the Tokyo Stock Exchange on Friday evening at closing to ¥5,566 — $39.15 — when it opened.
According to Bloomberg (via VGC), this underwhelming financial status was partially due to the underperformance of the new entry to its biggest-hitting franchise — Final Fantasy. Supposedly, Final Fantasy 16 failed to meet the “high end of the company’s expectations.”
Square Enix CEO Takashi Kiryu placed blame on the slow adoption of the PS5 and called it a “limiting factor.” That’s not to say the newest entry is an entire failure — in a week, three million copies were shipped and digitally sold. This is more in line with Final Fantasy 7 Remake’s 3.5 million in 10 days, but it’s also understandably different.
While one is a remake of an established entry, one that holds a lot of nostalgia for quite a few FF fans, the other is a mainline game with loftier expectations as it’s expected to make use of what makes this console generation unique.
Final Fantasy 16 is a failure because:
1: it’s not a RPG game
2: it’s a bad action game
3: it’s a generic and forgettable game
Filling a game with cinematics and iconic names it’s not sufficient for creating an actually good FF game.
The longtime fans understand this.
But Square Enix don’t.
And just give white paper to YoshiP for build a game coping DMC and the Game of Thrones show it wasn’t a good idea, rather a terrible one.
So, bad sales for a bad game it’s exactly what Square Enix deserve
(they should learn to don’t change the genre of a franchise, first, and then they can start, and not copying for the sake of the money)