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By Nelson Schneider - 08/10/24 at 04:38 PM CT
Oh dear! The news just keeps getting worse for the one-time Kingmaker and titan of industry, Square-Enix. While the titles coming out of both Squaresoft and Enix drove console sales across the globe in the Golden Age of the 4th and 5th Generations, things haven’t been going so well for the company after its early 2000’s corporate merger.
Over a decade ago, it was a well-established fact that Square-Enix was a ‘complete failure,’ falling from its position of creating games that consistently sold systems into a position of vague irrelevance. The massive Japanese publisher, like so many other Japanese videogame outfits, struggled to adapt to the modern era of gaming that began in the 7th Generation, and ultimately chose to ape Western game development trends, even to the point of buying some old, struggling Western PC game developers. This attempt at adopting Western paradigms was doomed to failure, and Square-Enix divested itself of its Western investments in 2022.
After that, Square-Enix attempted some meditative introspection, looking back at its own past for inspiration for how to move forward. The result of this navel-gazing was the creation of the in-house studio, Tokyo RPG Factory, which was to be staffed solely by volunteers who chose to work on classic-style Square-Enix RPGs for the company because they believed in the genre and wanted to bring it back to prominence. Unfortunately, everything Tokyo RPG Factory managed to produce since its inception has been mediocre swill, while attempts by other internal Square-Enix studios to recapture the magic of the RPG Golden Age have fallen flat, as nobody at the company seems to understand what made those RPGs great or why people loved – and continue to love – their classic tales. While Square-Enix has managed, somehow, to prevent the Enix flagship IP, ‘Dragon Quest,’ from being scuttled, their main flagship series, ‘Final Fantasy,’ has become something of a joke, no longer resembling what it once was in any way.
Most recently, in a financial report revealed in August 2024, Square-Enix’s dismal performance in the arena of traditional videogames was laid bare for all to see. It turns out that traditional videogames only contributes 0.5% to the ailing mega-publisher’s bottom line. The vast majority of Square-Enix’s earnings come, not from traditional videogames, nor macrotransaction-driven mobile titles (as one might expect), but rather from their subscription-based MMO products: Specifically “Final Fantasy 11,” “Final Fantasy 14,” and “Dragon Quest 10.” All told, 68% of Square-Enix’s revenue comes from MMO subscriptions, while just over 31% comes from the publisher’s mobile endeavors, which may explain why they took “Final Fantasy Record Keeper” offline outside of Japan, while also giving Japanese “Dragon Quest 10” players the option to purchase a stand-alone, offline version of the game.
The MJ Crew has played “Final Fantasy 14,” and none of us could fathom why anyone would pay for that dubious privilege, month after month, year after year. I can’t imagine Square-Enix’s other MMO offerings are much better. Simultaneously, while I greatly enjoyed the Free2Play experience of “Final Fantasy Record Keeper,” I can’t bring myself to take the dive – even with zero up-front cost – into a different Square-Enix mobile title. Instead, the rest of the MJ Crew and I are stuck sitting here waiting for new traditional RPG releases that are painfully few and far between, and when they do make an appearance, always disappoint. Meanwhile, Square-Enix has attempted to mine its back catalog for inspiration, releasing a remake of “Live-A-Live” in the West for the first time (too late, I played a fanslation ROM-hack and found it mostly underwhelming), while simultaneously attempting to cash-in on the current memetic social contagion of interest in frustrating games with a fully-funded attempt at making the ‘SaGa’ IP perform, with both remakes and sequels coming out globally after decades of complete disinterest by the gaming audience at large.
Square-Enix is in a precarious and unhealthy position. With nearly all of their revenue driven by perpetual subscriptions, they’re showing the world a preview of just how tenuous and shaky this business paradigm can be, even while Microsoft feverishly attempts to subject its Xbox Division to a similar fate. If Square-Enix can’t right its financial ship and start producing quality non-subscription, non-MTX products again, I foresee them crashing and burning, divesting valuable IPs to other studios for quick cash infusions, and ultimately being forced to cut-down their bloated salarymen to a skeleton crew. Who knows? Maybe Square-Enix won’t be able to survive at all, but will instead become just another victim of our modern economy of unsustainable bubbles, bought by a competitor, and ground to dust.
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