New Square Enix President Will Review Whole Company
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Yosuke Matsuda will “fundamentally review what works and what doesn’t.”
New Square Enix president Yosuke Matsuda will conduct a thorough review of the company as part of his new role. As explained in a recent briefing session (translated by Siliconera), Masuda plans on “reviewing all Square Enix duties, business and assets on a zero-based budgeting standpoint.”
Matsuda said that “due to the radical change of environment, I’d like to fundamentally review what works and what doesn’t work for our company, then cast all of our resources towards extending what makes us successful and thoroughly squeezing out what doesn’t.”
Matsuda is set to take over as president in June following current president Yoichi Wada, who announced last week that he’ll be stepping down. Wada’s resignation comes following a financial revision for Square Enix, which noted that the company “expects to incur extraordinary loss in the settlement of the accounts for its fiscal year ending March 31, 2013."
Matsuda concluded his briefing by commenting that “as far as a concrete plan on what to expect from us, I will further explain it on another briefing session in the near future, so I kindly ask for your patience. Thank you for your support.”
Comments
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Hopefully he makes Square make good final fantasy games.
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FF7 on PS4?
Wada was one of the main people blocking the FF7 remake. -
No FF7 Remake for goodness sake
They're milking the ? out of FF7
Bring us the FF5 Remake for the 3DS and Vita with HD textures and more content
Like with FF4CC -
give us more Kingdom Hearts
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Parasite eve 3
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That's a spin off not true to tha form of tha 1st 2
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A true Chronotrigger sequel.
Another good Mana game.
Kingdom Hearts 3
A Vagrant Story sequel that bites a little from the Demon's/Dark Souls franchise.
A real Final Fantasy Tactics sequel on a console
Man, if they could make just one of those happen and it was actually good, I'd love Square again. -
^...too bad ain't none of tht ? gonna happen
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Man I know. A ? can dream though...
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They need to market their games better. Put as much emphasis on games like Sleeping Dogs, Tomb Raider and Hitman as you did with FFXIII. Games like Sleeping Dogs were highly underrated.
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someone send the Letter to SquareSoft
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They need to market their games better. Put as much emphasis on games like Sleeping Dogs, Tomb Raider and Hitman as you did with FFXIII. Games like Sleeping Dogs were highly underrated.
I don't think Square makes those games. They just publish them. -
The Lonious Monk wrote: »
I know that ...... but its still revenue for them. The complaint is that these games didn't sell as well as expected. They would have if they pushed them the way they push FF -
Square-Enix Reveals Sales Expectations for Tomb Raider
Plus Hitman, Sleeping Dogs and the other titles that failed to meet the publisher's expectations.
Square-Enix has revealed exactly how many copies of Tomb Raider, Sleeping Dogs and Hitman it expected to sell, after announcing that they all failed to hit targets last month.
Astonishingly, the publisher hoped to sell between 5 and 6 million copies of Tomb Raider in its first month, which would have placed it amongst some of the fastest-selling games ever. It managed 3.6 million, which by most standards is an extremely impressive launch.
Hitman: Absolution and Sleeping Dogs also underperformed. "We were looking at selling roughly 2-2.5 million in the EU/NA market based on its game content, genre and Metacritic scores," reads the transcript of Square-Enix's latest financial briefing. "In the same way, game quality and Metacritic scores led us to believe that Hitman had potential to sell 4.5-5 million units, and 5-6 million units for Tomb Raider in EUR, NA and Japan markets combined."
The briefing outlines how much Square-Enix had riding on its Western-developed games in the last financial year. "FY2013 was our first attempt to release hallmark Western titles like Hitman and Tomb Raider without releasing a blockbuster game in Japan," it reads. "We put [a] considerable amount of effort in[to] polishing and perfecting the game content for these titles, receiving extremely high Metacritic scores. [Tomb Raider currently sits on 86, Hitman on 79.] However, we are very disappointed to see that high scores did not translate to actual sales performance."
What's more, those internal sales estimates were conservative: 80-90% of what the company believed was their true sales potential. The report cites the "huge slump" in North American video game sales as the main factor in this shortfall, though the European market was also "soft".
Yosuke Matsuda is taking over the Square-Enix President position from Yoichi Wada later this year in the wake of an "extraordinary loss" for the company. With such exceptionally high internal expectations, though, it seems almost inevitable that these games' performance has fallen short. The entire company will be reviewed in due course. -
Oh no, Tomb Raider only sold 3.6 million copies even tho it came out March 5; Poor Square-Enix....? outta here.
LOL @ dumb ? putting stock in Metacritic scores. -
A lot of FF fans are happy about this because they mainly blame Wada, and Toriyama for everything FF13 related(and they are largely responsible), but like the above post indicate, it seems he is mainly getting sacked poor sales in other SE related games.
Toriyama may get demoted too if Lightning returns doesn't sell well. FF13 and 13-2 did okay, but SE has got to know that a lot of FF fans are not pleased with the direction they're going in.
For example 13-3 will be an action RPG, where you only have one single character to play with. -
Square has a ? way of thinking though. The FFXIII fiasco shows it perfectly.
Square releases FFXIII.
Fans make it clear that it's not the kinda game they want from Square.
Square reps say "So what, it's what we want to make so take it or leave it."
A lot of fans decide to leave it and the subsequent sequel.
Square decides to focus more on social games because traditional games aren't selling for some reason.
If your company ever goes through a sequence of stupidity like that, people need to be fired.
