Square Enix share price drops amid claims Final Fantasy 16 didn’t meet ‘high end’ expectations
Square Enix share price drops amid claims Final Fantasy 16 didn’t meet ‘high end’ expectations
The publisher's share price dropped nearly 15% following its latest earnings report…
After months of hearing about how Final Fantasy "needed" to become Devil May Cry because RPGs are dead, watching Buldurs Gate succeed and FF16 fall short of expectations is kind of cathartic.
Edit: I'm aware this Square's projections, not actual sales. The point still stands that they made a shift in genre thinking they would unlock a wider audience than they got. Then a shit ton of think pieces and reviews and FF14 fans came out spouting this nonsense about how turn based RPGs are old hat and Square NEEDED to abandon it to hook modern gamers.
Then Boulder Gate drops and proves every single one of them wrong, while Square is wondering why they fell short.
62FF16 sold really well though. Square Enix likes making unrealistic expectations for their games and they do it every time. I don’t think they even believe their expectations are real. The real reason for their share loss is increased operational costs.
42FF15 sold 5 million copies on the first day, while FF16 took a few days to get to 3 million. It's not selling as well as 15. Anecdotally I'm seeing far less discussion of it online than when 15 came out.
They also have more competition this year. Personally I won't get it till it's on sale because I haven't enjoyed a FF game much in a long time, so I don't really trust them anymore even if critic reviews are positive.
12Capcom was guilty of this 10-15 years ago with the infamous "Capcom test" where they would release a small project or re-release a game in a franchise they were floating around ideas for a new entry in, and if the small game or re-release didn't sell basically like a new AAA game, the franchise didn't get the new entry. This was part of how the company was basically reduced to only Resident Evil and Street Fighter for a time. Fortunately they eventually snapped out of it, probably when they realized you can't make the kind of money you used to make when you're effectively killing off all but two of your IPs due to stupid sales expectations. Square Enix will probably hit that point eventually as well.
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Yeah. What I wanted was something like the graphics of FF7 remaster with the underlying game elements of FFX, the whacky classes of FFTA2 and FFX-2 and the scriptable party behavior of FFXII. And it's just nothing like that.
13Baldurs gate sold great for larian, those are square enix numbers, and not numbers that would cover the investment square makes into their games. You know this surely.
I'm sure you are also aware of how many turn based games square puts out every year? Spoiler it's more than everyone else.
4After months of hearing about how Final Fantasy needed to become Devil May Cry because RPGs are dead...
This sounds like a strawman to me. Maybe you meant that people were claiming that "JRPGs are dead"? In which case, holding up Baldur's Gate 3 of evidence to counter that seems strange. But I haven't heard anyone saying that RPGs in general are a dying genre.
4The whole argument really is strange and all speculation. There’s plenty of areas where FFXVI and SE arguably fell short, but even by this guys own admission in his edit, the game met projections. If they were expecting to “unlock more,” those projections would have been higher.
If you look at their recent financial report this seems to be nothing to do with FFXVI as sales in that “HD Gaming” and “Merchandise” area are up. Literally every other area is down, even MMO sales (FFXIV).
Whether people like the game or not, it seems to have helped prevent SE suffer from a worse dip.
2
Maybe releasing exclusively on the Playstation but not pc or Xbox wasn't the brilliant idea they thought it was 🤔
48PC Port always come late because Japanese studios can’t be bothered to support m&k and pc features. Even a year of porting will result in shitty ports that will need months of additional patching.
Other than that one can buy exclusivity.
Being expensive to produce means there needs to be more units sold. Just because there’s 40 million possible customers, doesn’t mean those have the funds or interest in the game.
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Which Squeenix game has ever met their expectations? Weren’t they also super disappointed with Tomb Raider and Hitman even though they moved millions of units.
It seems that SE is severely out of touch with the current state of the industry and where they are positioned.
40It seems that SE is severely out of touch with the current state of the industry and where they are positioned.
Considering how hard they tried to push NFT crap the past two years, I believe it.
22Especially since they thought selling all their western franchises off at bargain bin prices to go all-in on NFTs was a good idea, and they've been pushing them to date despite continued unpopularity. Decisions like that aren't just out of touch, they're downright stupid.
It wouldn't surprise me if they ended up bought by Sony, considering their working relationship and poor leadership. Hell, I never bought FFVII Remake despite really enjoying FFXV, my first FF title, because of their business dealings. It was PS4 exclusive and I didn't wanna play it at 1080p 30 FPS on my near-launch console at the time. I knew it was temporary and coming to PC eventually, so I waited. This was followed by being Epic exclusive and the first $70 PC title, so I waited for a launch literally anywhere else and a sale. Eventually that happened with a Steam launch, woo-hoo, except by that point I didn't care as much as I did at launch and they had already given me the game as a PS+ title. Didn't really feel like buying it when I already had access, didn't ever even end up playing it, and now I have Intergrade's PS5 version as part of PS+ Extra these days for when I get around to it. In my eyes, they're kinda just standing in the way of their own sales in favor of taking whatever cash these companies are willing to offer them. I didn't buy FFXVI either, because I still have VII RI in my backlog from all that shit.
13Wow this sounds a lot like my outlook with Ff7 remake. I begrudgingly bought it on steam when it was on "sale" for the still too high price of $40, and when it was good it was great, but other than one mission it is just the story of Final Fantasy VII up through Midgar with a stupid amount of boring fetch quests to pad the time. Saying it is maybe 33% fun engaging game/story 67% boring fetch missions or "go kill this boring monster" over there is in my opinion being very charitable.
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There have been 38M PS5s sold so clearly anything less than 38M copies of FFXVI sold is a complete failure.
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I've played every mainline FF1-12, couldn't finish 3, beat 15, and went into this blind.
Outside of the 10% of spectacular moments, this was just so incredibly bland. I've never skipped cutscenes in a game before and I did that for the last 15 side quests.
Gear upgrading was pointless, exploration led to absolutely no secrets or purpose to do so, combat was praised early on as amazing but it felt like mash attack + wait for cooldowns. They removed all status effects and even elements of magic, again I know the "reasoning" for this but it's just made things more and more basic.
Marlboro spits on you, no consequences but damage
Cast fire on a bomb, pure damage, element means nothing
And locking hard mode behind ng+? Let people decide what mode they want, not everyone wants to spend 50 hours on a game which is too easy just to play it at a level they'll find engaging.
I found this game to be wholly forgettable which is a shame because I really tried to go into it with no expectations.
38Great and accurate critique.
I thought the story was really entertaining in 16, but after about 20 hours in, I remember saying to myself, “this is an RPG without puzzles”.
While you do get to choose what ability set you use, it’s not like you have to use those abilities to advance the game.
It basically felt like a 3rd-person shooter, but with swords and flashy moves instead of guns.
11I found similar. This is the most disappointing final fantasy game I have ever played, and I have played all the mainline ones outside of the mmos.
The combat was meaningless and the story was a bit much. It went way too hard into action adventure vs the RPG elements for me, and was too big a departure from previous games. At least there'll be ff7 next year which will return more to its core.
1Yeah I can't wait for that, now that IS a good combat system in my mind, I really thought they'd take it and build on it for 16 but instead it's quite clear the two teams developed separately and one struck gold while the other hit regular old rock.
I just hope next gen only fixes the million corridor sliding loading screen moments, the pacing of FF7:RE was so slow wandering around, the open world (or semi or whatever it'll be) from the trailers looks very welcome
1
This is the first negative review I've seen.
All the rest have been shitting rainbows on it. I don't get it at all.
Why make it less engaging by changing the combat to button mashing. I get they you need to stoke the fire try new things and bring in new people. Isn't there a way to do both. It just looks real boring to me. I hated the lady one. I waited so long for it and it was boring and uninteresting.
I'm massively in the minority and that's a real shame as the game will never go back to how I enjoyed it.
0
Has square ever met any of their expectations? They always seem to over estimate everything. Any time they have a game release, it's always followed with an article about how it didn't meet sales expectations. You'd think if company leadership is that far off from expectations over and over, they'd re-assess, yet they never do.
28According to Squeenix, what was the last game that actually managed to "meet expectations" according to them?
24Nothing. I remember Tomb Raider sold like 7 mil and they were crying about it
And of course made the genius decision the next year to make the sequel Xbox exclusive for a year
13That Tomb Raider thing was completely asinine. It was a quality reboot of a series that had gone horribly off the rails with a lot of promise and Square tanked it with completely unreasonable expectations, apparently expecting sales in the dozens of millions. And here we are with FF apparently not meeting expectations as well--it's easy to see where the issue is, and it's not with the games.
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Off the top of my head, NieR: Automata was the last big one. Before that was the first Life is Strange.
There's also Octopath Traveler, which is perhaps relevant here because that was a game that filled a need on a hot platform. Taking relative install bases into account, FF16 probably had a better attach rate than FF15 did at this point in its lifecycle. I'm sure SQEX was hoping for a much higher rate than that given the slow pace of exclusives developed solely for PS5.
I'm also going to speculate that, internally, there's alarm over the Japan sales. SQEX is part of a group of Japanese publishers that have historically been very--if not unduly--sensitive to poor home performance.
4
Removing the RPG elements from Final Fantasy will do that.
18People seemed to enjoy this game, but it seems like they had a budgetary look at expectations; spend millions on the intense CGI action scenes and voice acting, get tens of millions back. It even seemed to come forward in their interviews that they “needed” this one to be epic and unmissable.
I’ve never felt that’s a winning approach to games though. Comparing to XIV, you just never know when your major hits are going to come forward.
I will say this much; Shadowbringers and Endwalker felt like that creatively exited the theme of building up to a fight against an unknown and evil god, and had very strong story themes to their conclusion. Sometimes the final boss still registers as a “god”, but that’s not the reason you’re fighting them.
15I’m excited to buy it when it comes to PC, but my single-player rpg backlog is long already. I’ll probably end up waiting for a sale, which shouldn’t take too long if articles like this keep coming.
This will be my first single player FF since 10. I love XIV, so it seems to me that the hype of using the XIV team on this game wouldn’t add a huge amount of value to a PS5 exclusive release when the majority of XIV players are on PC, and others are still on PS4. It’s not like PC enjoyers and PS4-content players are going to go buy a PS5 just to play it early. They’re waiting for the port, then they’re waiting longer still for the port to be fixed.
13Thats surprising. FF16 is great
10They really need to take a step back and remember why people enjoy the franchise. I enjoyed the characters and the gameplay but they keep changing it. 12 was the beginning of the end of turn based combat. I still like 12 but give us a mainline turn based game. It can be fun and people will like it. Just make good characters.
8Yeah imo FF12 was the last legit FF game. FF15 is fine, but doesn't feel at all like FF to me, and I have zero interest in FF16.
4
I just couldn't get into 16 at all, and this is from someone who loves everything right from the NES up to and including FF13 and 14.
Xenoblade has filled in the gap FF has left for me in many respects.
4while I enjoyed playing it, it did get a bit tedious near the end, and fully keeping up with the story involved spending as much time in menus reading stuff as playing the rest of the game, 11 hours of which were cutscenes. edit: near the end I just couldn't be bothered and started skipping all cutscenes and dialog just to be done with it.
3So that may explain their recent commitment to release games also on XBox.
3I would have purchased it by now if I could get it on the xbox. I could be wrong, but it seems the Xbox gets the short stick a lot this generation. Switch and playstation seem to be given for a games release but it's always a toss up if the Xbox will be included.
I wish it was less intensive for devs to make their games multiplatform. I hope with their recent announcement fir more Xbox support we'll get ff7 remake and ff16 in due time
2Xbox isn't popular in Japan at all, and there's the issue gamepass cannibalizing sales. Makes it a hard sell for Japanese studios for sure.
But in this case it's because sony gave them a bucket of money. Microsoft isn't really the place you want to be to support multiplatform games though, literally anywhere else is better, Microsoft is spending near a hundred billion dollars just to remove games from other people's stores
0
Maybe they should release it on other consoles then.
2There is no single piece of media that has had more impact on me throughout my life than the Final Fantasy series. I enjoyed the first half or so of 15 so much that I thought for sure it would be my new favorite game of all time. It devolved into such a shit heap that I couldn't even bring myself to play it post updates & DLC. It along with KH3 has left me sour on all of Square's modern releases. I was pleasantly surprised by FF7 Remake and will play FF16 at some point. Even a mediocre Final Fantasy is better than what 15 gave us.
2The dlcs in my opinion were great. My PS4 is shit so I haven't played the final dlc but they were a unique experience. But yeah 15 was ... It has good ideas. Also cup noodle.
2The Remake is beautiful and isn't a bad game, but every second that I'm playing it I keep asking myself "would I be having more fun playing the original?," and every single time my answer is an immediate "yes."
If they had kept the same gameplay mechanics (yes, including traditional turn-based combat), the Remake might have been my all-time favorite game. As it is, it's just a very pretty shadow of what it could have been.
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This times 100. I'm a massive FF fan. While there is debate in my mind about the combat system, I can't even play it because I don't have a PS5.
Hoping to get one eventually but the PS4 and Switch still have value. If SE want my money, they'll have to wait.
1From the company that got rid of its western developers for performing better than them.
0Ff is not meeting expectations since 8
-314 vastly exceeded expectations and 16 is from that same team, which is probably why they set high expectations in the first place.
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-6It did sell well however, selling over 3.5 million copies in the first 10 days. I don't know how high Squeenix's expectations were but it's wild they thought it would sell higher for a game that only released on the PS5.
21I want you stop for a second and think about how long Final Fantasy has been around (NES) then think about how many other franchises from that time still exist. Then maybe try this comment again.
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3Have you heard of a little company called Disney?
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