Square CEO: “Our Merger With Enix Was A Total Failure”
- Categories: Games, News
- Date: Nov 8, 2012 03:10 JST
- Tags: Business, Final Fantasy, Final Fantasy XIII, Internet, MMORPG, RPG, Square Enix
Founder and former CEO of Square Hisashi Suzuki has damned the company’s merger with Enix as a “total failure,” declaring Square Enix has “no vision for the future” and pointing to its huge losses and a market cap which is now well below the company’s pre-merger valuation as evidence of the disaster.
Hisashi Suzuki, one of Square’s founders and its CEO until 2004, and now a top executive at Rakuten, let rip in a recent Tweet:
A market cap of ¥124 billion [$154 million]. It was ¥150 billion [$185 million] even before the merger with Enix.
The merger was a total failure. There is no vision for the future there.
From April to September, Square Enix Holdings posted a 5.4 billion yen net loss, much of it development expenses.
This all comes from Nikkei.
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What they need is young blood, with fresh ideas. Instead them insist on replying on the same burnt out writers, rehashing the same crappy story. Fuck them.
"Young Guy With Sword and Young Magic Girl go on a quest to uh.. light! Darkness! Darkness bad, light good! Throw in a crystal or two! Look, a Chocobo! That'll be sixty bucks, see you next year."
sad truth unfortunatly. they create a passable rpg and slap the famous name on it with some stuff here and there, expecting money. okay they got the money, however the name falls, as well as the expectations.
which is sad. the basics arent that hard and even if the series was in constant flux, they changed so much over the past three entries
don't forget 'GAIA!!!!!!!!!'
Old lady with bow and old mage being forced to go and slay good guys for money. Light is money, darkness is money, and crystals are throwing you, don't try to touch them,look at them or think about them. Don't look, it's a Chokobo, he will eat your eyes, your stomach, your heart, your brain!! First Reality, 09 bucks, we won't ever release this, because nobody will play this. Or not...
"Grim Marine fights off alien/monster/unholy invasion, finds out his own side is borderline fascist, doesn't care much." Sound familiar? The Japanese are far from unique in having some very familiar stories, and if anything FF13 showed some deviation (female protagonist, every main character got an almost equal amount of screentime, major focus on character development as opposed to plot compared to previous FFs like 12, etc). I'm kinda sick of hearing this tired "every FF game is exactly the same" argument when it's demonstrably false.
If they have a problem, it's that they focused way too much on cheap portable games after 2004-5, which has completely diluted the power of brands like Kingdom Hearts and Final Fantasy. That they haven't had any real good IPs in a long time hasn't helped either, though.
Thats just the Japanese way of doing things. Continue to venerate your elders even long after senility has set in. Its pretty much the reason why the Japanese game industry in general continues to lose ground in every market outside of Japan.
Japanese way? Look at Activision Blizzard and EA Westwood. Good gaming companies bought over by large corporations NEVER end well no matter where you are.
Still hasn't lost quality "yet" >.>
EA Westwood was a fucking tragedy for Command & Conquer
actually blizzard is not a good example since they were strong enough financially to not be assimilated by activision. Their contract dictates that activision shall not interfere with blizzard games. All the bad things that are attributed to activision about decline of quality in games like WoW are actually blizzard's faults
On the other hand Ensemble studios which made Age of empire series and was devoured by microsoft few years after age of empires 3 is a better example
I agree that since Square was merged with Enix things haven't necessarily improved, but this also doesn't really take into account how the gaming industry has evolved and the signs of the times. I don't actually know when their economy crashed, since it's been worse than ours for longer supposedly, but development costs have increased exponentially due to newer consoles because gamers' requirements for graphics have increased. There is no way to fight that.
The rehashing the same story thing is also a little bit of a misnomer. They did change the story, and people complained even though it was quite well executed because it wasn't the same as the past. The stories are still creative and the characters still very memorable in their games, because we still crave that style of delivery, because it's still very effective. It's also evolved, but gamers are also, by and large, childish hypocrites.
Across the entire planet companies have stagnated due to economic and global fear. Anon 7:01 mentioned it well in representing how a great majority of the western market that has earned the greatest revenue is nothing but a mirror, or even a lesser quality mirror of Square Enix's situation. Call of Duty Modern Warfare's many bastard children are a great example of that.
The thing that eludes me is why can't FF continue with its popularity while also newer IP are created? I found Last Remnant to be interesting, and was happy to see a different RPG from Square as well. Why do gamers always choose one or the other like its the only choice.
EA actually created a lot of new IP pretty recently: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=OaY4W_2NIEM#t=134s [http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=OaY4W_2NIEM#t=134s]
Yes, Activision and Blizzard don't interfere with each other. One of the purposes of their merger is for tax efficiency, as well as potentially consolidating non-production related costs. It's a merger technically speaking but in practice it's run as if it were held by an umbrella company.
Yup, it just lost everything else.
Western game companies can suck just as much. Too bad they get more slack than JP games.
Bias the Game Industry and Journalist are as well as the players!
@16:46
Buying Bioware months before the release of DA:O and ME is innovation now? Typical fanboyism.
Atlus was bought out by index holdings and still hasn't lost quality
It's just the Square Enix way of doing things. You don't see every other company crapping out.
@ 20:11
Supporting evidence is that Nikkei image of Square Enix Holdings stock value.
Are you actually this retarded or do you just play one on television? What goes on between Sony and MS has nothing to do with anything when it comes to the Japanese market. That's an issue that really, only the shut-ins in the United States seem to really give two shits about. Considering that Xbox was basically a household brand for awhile there and Sony was a joke they made the smartest decision in the world.
Ubisoft took Assassins Creed from a PS exclusive to multi-console and they've only grown from there, making a crapload of money and the new IP has grown to a five part game series on consoles (not counting handhelds). Every damn company that's gone multi-console has seen their profits grow from it. Except Square. Considering the mismanagement of FFXIV, the complete wreck that was the development of many of their new IPs this console generation and a staggering lack of innovation from them something tells me that is a bigger problem than where they get their money from.
Also you do realize that deal was ONLY for Final Fantasy XIII and they can do whatever they want right? That's why we don't have a FF compilations on the Xbox, that's why we don't have Kingdom Hearts games on the Xbox - they go where the money is. And apparently the money for your precious Kingdom Hearts games in the twelve year olds who are fangirls for Nintendo handhelds. So go blame Nintendo for that. Or would decrying a Japanese company insult your weebo senses?
It's WADA. Kill him and put the Playstation loving "Square" part of the company back into the front line and focus.
Since Wada is Enix-centric, he obviously despised the PS brand and killed off FF's fanbase with FF13 in 2008's E3. Now they see that kissing Microsoft's ass has backfired.
Remember that SE's stock received a huge increase when FF 13 went to 360? I bet now they wish they never allowed themselves to have MS money in them. They CANT make an exclusive game on the PS3, because it would count as betraying MS's money, and you know SE loves American cash. The only way they'd be allowed by the white man to release an exclusive on their own Japanese console is when XBox 720 is announced, and MS abandons the 360 the same way as the first Xbox.
Need proof? FF Versus 13, FF Type-0 outside Japan, lack of a Kingdom Hearts title on the PS systems this generation, and the deviation of the company to produce games connected or similar to the FFs that made them the most money on the PS platforms. Such as FF7's conclusion, after Crisis Core, there was a confirmation of a sequel, but it never got made.
Last I checked, FFXIV is PS3 exclusive.
@ 20:57
Stop being so mad. SE isn't the company that made Assassins Creed.
Ubisoft also never "promised" anything with Assassins Creed. Instead SE and MS got Don Mattrick to do the publicizing of FF13, in the most disgusting manner.
The results:
Loss of loyal customers, not because it went multi-platform on 360, but because SE flat out lied to their consumers.
Will you blame Sony when SE announced FF13 as an exclusive on PS3 and as a prime reason to buy one, yet take everything they said back and more?
By more I mean games like Last Remnant, where they promised to release it on PS3, but FAILED to do so and let it die in silence from lack of updates, never confirming if its cancelled or not, while supporting 360.
This only leads me to suspect that SE prioritized on MS's 360 while "COMPLETELY" turning their backs on those who made them a household name in the 1990s and 2000s.
And while I don't doubt the 360s popularity early this generation, by the time FF13 released, it was selling near equal to PS2 units.
SE doesn't have a reason not to do FF14 good on PS3, because at the moment, they're suffering from lack of credibility.
Gaming industry as a whole stagnates because AAA games are a REALLY expensive business, so publishers want to play it safe and risk-free, which means tons of sequels and clones of "genre kings".
Unless we find some way to cut down AAA cost significantly, that trend will probably prevail. I hope the giants won't fall and take the industry with them, because that would just hurt the medium as a whole, but I hope we'll finally be able to stop chasing after the best graphics and instead focus on smaller, more focused games like Indies and many Kickstarter projects are trying to do.
I could give a crap if a big company bit the dust. I don't think you're giving enough credit to the smaller companies that make games that they think are cool ideas, not just to make money.
Granted I pretty much only play PC games, but that affords me the ability to play games from companies that would never have a chance on making it on a console. PCs will always be my platform of choice, it's just too bad the game industry in Japan goes out of it's way to prevent PC games from being popular.
Very bias comment.
gaming is just a money funnel now, they dont give one ounce of crap about the product anymore.
they even sell you a 10Kb file for $10 to change you characters hair color which is already on the disc.
wait till every game is always online they cant use the excuse of pirateing anymore when they lose money.
Sure is nice when you can talk out of your ass with no data to back it up, huh?
Do you really think almost all of the Japanese game companies are just toting old, tired designers?
@anon 07:33 08/11/2012
All the "young blood" are being labeled by their elders as hikikomori for daring to openly show an iota of pleasure from playing any form of video games, watching any anime or reading any manga. Doesn't matter one whit if the game is an eroge, a JRPG, a WRPG or an FPS; the anime a service anime like To Love Ru or Training w/ Hinako, or a serious series like Cowboy Bebop or GITS; the manga, S&M fap fodder like Nana To Kaoru or Domina Na Do, or a slightly more serious series like The World God Only Knows or Noblesse.
The social stigma of this label causes them to either lose their jobs or become unable to get a job in the first place, causes everyone who knows them to shun them and refuse to give them so much as the time of day... and causes them to hole themselves in a small apartment, never leaving except to buy basic sustenance supplies (read:microwavable food and instant ramen) and generally wind up as hikikomori, isolating themselves from society until the lack of human contact drives them to suicide.
The handful of young blood who get labeled as hikikomori by their elders but refuse to fulfill the otherwise self-fulfilling prophecy end up getting arrested for daring to enter the line of sight of any female who either is a JC/JK or knows the elders who say he's a hikikomori.
Here's some of the top names in the Japanese market, they all are pretty damned old:
Shigeru Miyamoto 59
Yuji Horii 58
Yu Suzuki 54
Hironobu Sakaguchi 49
Keiji Inafune 47
Yuji Naka 47
Tomonobu Itagaki 45
Now where's the young blood?
@07:33
Don't forget Hideo Kojima 49.
Was not the case designers be old, but the Japanese market as a whole.
They make games with the approval of the company and investors, not just the desire of the author.
Was commented several times after bad reviews that the author did not agree with several changes made to the game!
Even the government has its share of blame for castrating games with censorship and in the worst hypotheses to prohibit the release.
The culprit of losing credibility is 100% of the decisions taken by the board!
Suzuki took wrong decisions and now blames others :P
A pity the Square end that way ..
15:22 I'm not even sure how I forgot him, damn he's an old fat too.
22:05 old fart*
This is actually considered pretty common knowledge. Turnover in Square-Enix is actually a bit too low. I remember Warning!! A Huge Podcast had something quite a while ago about how part of why SE isn't getting the talent they need is because their lower-level staff are highly specialized and regimented to try and keep other companies from poaching their top talent. Like there was supposedly a woman that they had on staff and her only job was to render roads. They referred to her as 'Cobblestone Girl.'
The old guys drank it all.
you were bullied a lot weren't you
What does bullying have to do with senile old men?
What they need is a total CLOSUREof their company, period.
I havent liked a single release since their merge. The good old squaresoft days. Im not sure if it is because the plots from the old ones are rehashed or if the old ones were just done better somehow but..
What they need sir, is Hironobu Sakaguchi.
Yeah, I've love for a return to the Square of 1997... Who remembers Bushido Blade? Ehrgeiz? Brave Fencer Musashi(Musashinden)? Einhander? Parasite Eve? And then... back to JRPGs... How much of that is there now? Death by Cube?
YOUDONTSAY.JPG
The year they merger all the fans knew it was the end of good FF games.
Idiot for not listening their fans.
Are those the same fans who say FF12 is one of the best games in the series? Or the other bunch?
They release 1 or 2 good games then it goes back into generic heap trash
Fire Wada and problem solved.
Final Fanta stopped being good around 8.
You're a moron. 9 was amazing
8 had good graphic, and that was all.
The story was slow and the level up system was a completely failure.
The enemies leveled up with you, and you actually had to use magic cards to increase your health and attributes...
FF started to kill itself with 8, 9 got them back on the right track again, until 10 yet again ruined it.
After that it have only been going down with 123 as the last straw.
9 was like the classic 16-bit FF.
9 was good too. The series started to suck when they moved it to the PS2 and made it all 3D and shit.
Around 7, 8 was shit.
8 fucking owned, you imbecile.
Got a problem with gays?
it stoped being good around the time it was just rehasing the same shit over and over with the word "finle" on it
you are shit.
8 was good with the schools and stuff.
and yes i am butthurt problem????
Around 1, 2 was shit.
Only retards and gays like 8.