Square Enix Disappointed With Forsaken, Still Excited About NFTs
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: Square Enix is disappointed with the sales of one of its games. Grave robber, Assassin, Outriders, Guardians of the Galaxy– It’s a long list, and The trial was just added to it. Current Square Enix president Yosuke Matsuda said during the company’s latest earnings call that sales of the magical realistic action RPG were “weak.” On the upside, he said he hopes people will look forward to it NFT games will be launched next year.
“Reviews of Abandonedwhich we released on January 24, 2023, has been challenging,” Matsuda said in a 3 February results orientation, whose translated transcript was first released today. He added that while the parkour and combat in the game were well received and will help the company’s development opportunities for other titles, the game is not selling as much as Square Enix had hoped.
“Sales have been weak and while the performance of new titles with release dates in February and March will be the ultimate deciding factor, we see significant downside risk to our FY2022/3 earnings,” he said.
Elsewhere during the meeting, Matsuda, who currently set to be replaced after a decade at the helm in June, said HD game sales were down year-over-year, in part due to not having a new Final Fantasy XIV expansion last year, “but also because many of the new small and mid-sized titles we launched this year did not perform as well as we had expected.”
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For those keeping track at home, Square Enix released one absurd number of RPGs in the second half of last year. Here are just a few of them:
- Diofield Chronicle
- Valkyrie Elysium
- Star Ocean: The Divine Force
- Harvestella
- Tactics Ogre: Reborn
- Dragon Quest Treasures
- Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII Reunion
Diofield Chronicle was an exciting new spin on real-time strategy. Star Ocean 6 was better than expected but not great. Valkyrie Elysium was a strange action-based sequel to a beloved turn-based series from the PS1 era. Some of the remasters as Tactics Ogre were amazing, like others Chrono Cross was substandard. However, almost none of these games worked set up to succeedlet alone meet expectations, due to lack of marketing (and sometimes bad marketing) or additional development resources.
When it comes to something outside Final Fantasy, Square Enix seems hesitant to take big swings or roll out the red carpet when it does. And then there are times when it seems to be trying to be a big success, as was the case with Abandoned, which was decent, but still wrong. And yet, this doesn’t seem to have stopped the company from going full speed into crypto skins.
While it may seem like the rest of the gaming industry has embraced NFTs, Square Enix seems fully committed to actually releasing games with them. “We have organized our pipeline so that we will have a good spread of new releases in FY2025/3 and beyond as well,” Matsuda told investors. “We also hope you will look forward to the blockchain games we plan to launch in FY2024/3 and beyond.”
The Forerunner probably won’t get a sequel. The studio behind it, Luminous Productions, is now is absorbed back to the larger Square Enix blob. But maybe its main character Frey can appear as an NFT in Crypto Chocobo or whatever else comes down the road.
