Go ahead and guess which video this is.
You might remember a couple months back that Square Enix made the decision to sell off their Western studios. It’s actually doubtful that most people bothered to wonder why at the time. But they’ve released the reasoning, now, and it’s a doozy.
As it turns out, SE sold their Western studios due to the fact that they were eating into their Japanese sales numbers, according to their recent Financial Results Briefing Session. This interpretation comes from analyst David Gibson. Let’s jump around through his thread, shall we? Just the most salient points, though.
One might quite successfully argue that SE’s Western-developed games consistently underperformed. On the other hand, there was a reason they underperformed. Take, for example Deus Ex: Mankind Divided; Deus Ex is, by and large, a single player game, and doesn’t need microtransactions out the ass to the exclusion of just making a good game, however SE wanted them in the game to make money so that’s what happened. You could also point out Marvel’s Avengers, but that one has way too many points of failure to put on any one side of its creation. Point being, SE had a way of mismanaging these properties, since they’re not Dragon Quest and they figured they could do the EA/Activision thing with them.
You know what? I’m just going to point out that this is the company that thought NFT’s were a good way to go in the middle of the NFT market cratering. It’s also worth noting from their Briefing, that their sales this year overall are down roughly half to a fifth (depending on the type of sale: disc or download) what they were in the same quarter last year, and overall represent less than half of their total Q3 2021 sales figures.
That’s a good thing. However, let’s look at their upcoming slate of HD games:
Ignoring the top row, since those have all been released already, you have two Dragon Quest games: Dragon Quest X (Offline Mode, IIRC) and Dragon Quest Treasures. They’ll probably do okay due to the fact that they’re Dragon Quest games, though X is the offline mode of an over decade old MMO that never came West until now, so we’ll see, and Treasures is a spinoff.. Valkyrie Elysium takes the Valkyrie series and turns it into an Action RPG; the series is mostly cult classic in the West. Star Ocean: The Divine Force has a low bar to pass, so we’ll see. Crisis Core is a remake/remaster; I don’t trust Nomura with the editing knife for obvious reasons (even if he says he’s not changing anything), especially considering how his Gackt fascination nearly wrecked the original version of this game.
And finally, we get to Forspoken. I think critics and the usual suspects will praise it for its looks, and the people that will blindly buy anything with “Square Enix” on the cover will get it. I doubt it will sell all that well in Japan. It’s probably the big money project on the slate, and its release has been pushed back again to January 2023. I won’t be surprised if it sells well, but “not well enough”; I also won’t be surprised if it flops, because that’s the impression I got from it. Also won’t be surprised if they announce a sequel despite that; why could be anyone’s guess.
I kind of digressed, there, so apologies. Regardless, Square Enix selling off their Western studios was a good deal for all involved, even if the decision was potentially pushed forward by bad decisions from the company as a whole. It’s hard to imagine Embracer doing worse with Crystal Dynamics/Eidos. We’ll just have to see how Square Enix does moving forward.
Source: VG 24/7
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