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Final Fantasy XIV: Square Enix Takes Massive Financial Hit
SBFord
Former Associate EditorMember LegendaryPosts: 33,129
In its latest financial report, Square Enix's earnings were down over 75% in the first half of 2010 as compared to the second half of 2009. Sales were reported down 30% in the first six months of 2010. The first half of 2010 generated $21 million as compared to $85 million in the the latter part of 2009. Sales were better than originally projected, however, due to strong sales of Just Cause 2 and Final Fantasy XIV.
Much of the decline was laid at the feet of MMO Final Fantasy XIV's disappointing performance. The PC game mustered global sales of 630,000 - although a PS3 version due in March may improve its fortunes.
"We're quickly working on reforms. We'd like to put our full power into regaining trust," CEO Yoichi Wada told investors.
"If we satisfy our users, they will return. On the other hand, once the users say, 'forget this,' there's no turning back. We can only recover our trust so far."
Read more at Gamasutra.
Comments
Gamers are finally speaking a language that these oblivious developers understand... money. If you knowingly release a half finished game devoid of content and riddled with bugs, then people will vote with their wallets. They deserve every bit of the pain they are feeling right now and hopefully it will send an industry-wide message that gamers expect a certain level of quality and not rushed out garbage.
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Well I'm not the least bit surprised by these turn of events, since Square were focusing a lot of their resources on FF XIV in the 1st half of this year, leaving them with no other major titles (well none that I remember). Sure some may be amused by this bit of news, after Square's failed 2nd venture into the MMO realm. But I'm more concerned by whether this will have an effect on future Square titles... most noteably Deus Ex: Human Revolution.
Let's hope they don't force other devlopers to rush out their games prematurely.
Here's the article so you don't need to register to read it:
Japanese publisher Square Enix has seen its first half net income drop to ¥1723 million ($21 million) - a 75 per cent decline from ¥6826 million ($85 million) in the second half of 2009.
Results for the six months ending September 30 saw net sales decrease by 30 per cent, down to ¥68 billion ($843 million) from the last half's ¥101.7 billion ($1.26 billion).
Forecasts for the fiscal year ending March 2011 put net income at ¥12000 million against last year's ¥9509 million, and revenues at ¥160 billion (¥192 billion in FY09).
Sales did not meet the publisher's forecasts, but higher than expected profits came in due to catalogue sales of titles including Just Cause 2 and Final Fantasy XIII.
During its fiscal half, the company sold 8.17 million software units - 2.84 million in Japan, 2.71 million in Europe and 2.48 million in the US.
The biggest seller over the six months was Japanese-only title Dragon Quest Monsters Joker 2, at 1.28 million units.
Kane & Lynch 2 racked up 1.12 million sales globally, while Just Cause 2 added 0.56 million units over the last six months, to reach a lifetime total of 1.48 million.
Much of the decline was laid at the feet of MMO Final Fantasy XIV's disappointing performance. The PC game mustered global sales of 630,000 - although a PS3 version due in March may improve its fortunes.
"We're quickly working on reforms. We'd like to put our full power into regaining trust," CEO Yoichi Wada told investors.
"If we satisfy our users, they will return. On the other hand, once the users say, 'forget this,' there's no turning back. We can only recover our trust so far."
-Letting Derek Smart work on your game is like letting Osama bin Laden work in the White House. Something will burn.-
-And on the 8th day, man created God.-
Square-Enix hasn't actually started receiving any subscription money for FFXIV yet since they added another 30 free days to the initial 30 free days. Since beta, players (myself included) were calling out for a fix to the horrible UI, nasty lag (all servers are in Japan), unimaginative quests, no auction house and just a plain lack of content. Maybe now as the 2 months of free trial are ending and S-E sees how few players actually purchase the subscription, they will listen. Then again, maybe the PC players were just crash test dummies for the actual real product, the PS3 version...
"We're quickly working on reforms. We'd like to put our full power into regaining trust," CEO Yoichi Wada told investors.
"If we satisfy our users, they will return. On the other hand, once the users say, 'forget this,' there's no turning back. We can only recover our trust so far."
I think im already on that second boat, the 'forget this' one.
Might wanna atretch out while you can. That boat is getting awfully crowded.
-Letting Derek Smart work on your game is like letting Osama bin Laden work in the White House. Something will burn.-
-And on the 8th day, man created God.-
What other failed venture? You're nt talking about FFXI I I hope as FFXi was actually a very good success for the time.
But I saw this coming. I told them in beta this game would be a fail despite the hordes of fanfags saying it's just beta. It wasn't bugs or the interface, it wasn't the absence of mouse support it wasn't not having a central player ran market system.
The game itself is fundamentally flawed. The very design they approached us with was just outdated. And SE in their finite wisdom opted not to listen to the multitudes of gamers who were trying to tell them, "hey this game isn't going to work."
Simply put gamers will no longer suffer games that force them to aimlessly grind. Sure sure most games have you grind quests now, but at least quests give you some kind of direction, some purpose. Aimlessly grinding mobs for no reason just doesn't cut it anymore. Aside from that gamers will no longer suffer games that force them to do anything. It's too bad that's what FFXIV was all about, controlling your experience.
The game IS beautiful but aesthetics only takes you so far.
I am playing FFXIV at their pace.
I played a decent amount with the early week for CE buyers, and I didn't hit the 100% the fatigue wall. I didnt' hit it, because 1/3 of my time (at least) was spent wandering through Gridania looking for weapons and then going throught he market wards and asking people who looked like crafters if they had weapons/armor for sale. It's a blast.
But, I did get bored with my cat-whore-person and wanted to play a different race. I chose Falafel, because I like middle-eastern food.
I gave myself a sandbox challenge - hit Rank 20 LNC in 1 week. I figured I could to it as I had all the gear I needed on my other toon. I started as a PUG and bought a Cane and got up to Second Wind and Cure then met up with the person who transferred my LNC gear to the new toon.
Within 4 days I was R 19 LNC and that was it. It was absolutely impossible to reach R 20. I was at 0% XP. I switched to GLA and THA for a collected 15 or so levels and still - NO XP on the LNC.
That made me finally get it - this game is made to be slowly savored - if you don't have leves up - DON'T PLAY. If you want to dedicate yourself to one path, because the other paths aren't interesting - then make sure you quit after 20 hours played and just chill.
Oh - and if you like crafting - at FIRST - you will LOVE this game....
Then you will see that you need guild points to get crafting skills after a month or so - so you CAN'T just be a crafting sim. You HAVE to go out and engage in combat!
Yay! This game is crap!
Linear, embarrassing and devoid of story.
BUT - it's really pretty and COMPLETELY mindless, so I grind whilst watching TV and reading books. I use a gamepad, so I can even play in windowed full screen mode and have another web page open and bascially have FFXIV as an interactive desktop and still be reading articles/doing other things and not lose control of my toon.
FFXIV is a Facebook title.
Someone please make a good MMO.
I will continue to give it a chance (IE not uninstall it) until my trial is up, so we will see. SE lost my trust after Blue Dragon, so this really isn't that much of a let-down.
I am entitled to my opinions, misspellings, and grammatical errors.
It seems like they should have should have seen it coming. With games being as advanced as they are now days, they are just simply going to take much much longer to make. Especially MMOs. The blame is mostly on the publishers probably.
Too bad Square isn't a korean company.Korean companies were given billions of dollars to create MMOs which is resulting in games like Blade and Soul, Vindictus, Tera, and many other MMOs that are actually going to be the next gen MMOs. These games have been given plenty of time and plenty of money. When FF14 was announced at e3, it came out like less than 2 years later. I expected it to take at least 4 or 5. It may not have helped though. APB had plenty of time and wasted money.
Personally, I didnt care for FF11. Having a needlessly complicated UI and controls and painfully slow combat, and even slower progression, doesn't make a game hardcore or innovative. So if FF14 is anything like that, combined with all these bugs and lack of content, even the FF loyalist wont keep this game alive.
"Failed second venture". In other words, their second venture is a failure. He meant XIV, not XI. Otherwise, he would have said "second failed venture".
-Letting Derek Smart work on your game is like letting Osama bin Laden work in the White House. Something will burn.-
-And on the 8th day, man created God.-
Blue Dragon was developed by Mistwalker, not SE. Mistwalker is head by Hironobu Sakaguchi, who is usually credited with creating FF, but other than that it has no connection to SE.
Just an FYI... Blue Dragon was developed by Mistwalker, not SE.
I bought the game at launch but haven't installed it yet. I've decided to wait until the PS3 launch when the game might actually be ready.
This has got to cast doubt on weather to go ahead with a PS3 launch of the game. If the PC version got so much bad reviews one can only expect that will bleed over to the console version, at least in the minds of the community.
Velika: City of Wheels: Among the mortal races, the humans were the only one that never built cities or great empires; a curse laid upon them by their creator, Gidd, forced them to wander as nomads for twenty centuries...
I am not surprised after the way I was treated with customer support. I had purchased 2 copies of the game, one for me and one for my wife. My wifes copy we only registered on SQUARE ENIX's site and created a character and she did not have time to play. 2 weeks later she got a email notifying her it was suspended. Then 3 days later at around 3am she got a email that said it was restored and then at about 5 am a email stating she was terminated.
My account which I had played quite a bit was fine. We used the same credit card for both accounts yet they state if it wasn't her our account had been compromised and we have to go through a 2 month process to get the account back. We had both picked up the collectors edition for $75 dollars and they stated they would not compensate gametime or anything else once they get all the paperwork back from us.
This is why I have already said FORGET IT. Until they open their eyes and stop punishing people for their mistakes then it is not worth it. My account is fine and has not been compromised and considering hers was only created and a character signed in you would assume mine would have been. I ran sweeps etc to confirm that there are no trojan/virus on the computer and sure enough there is not. Wake up Square-Enix
I just wanted to say that you should never compare the first half performance of a fiscal year against the second half of the previous year in an industry which has such an uneven quarterly sales distribution due to the impact of Christmas on that quarter. They should be comparing it to the first 6 months of fiscal 2010. Anything else is just an attempt to exaggerate the losses. That is all.
Move over a little, I'm squeezing in there too!
Is this a boat like the titanic? Cause we all know how that ended.
*Girl shoves boy off the plank to his death. The end.
I'll take the second option also though if that is the "forget this" one.
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Why did you buy the game twice? My partner and I bought one copy, installed on both our PCs. One of us used the sub it came with and the other purchased a sub.