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.
What about “Life is Strange”? That game was good, yes?
The failure has nothing to do with the merger and everything to do with the fact that they don’t put out what would obviously be their best sellers in a timely manner. They put their top titles on the backburners for ridiculous reasons. FFvsXIII and Kingdom Hearts 3 should have been released by now, for example. Instead FFvsXIII has been no where in sight for years and the Kingdom Hearts series has been spread out through un-needed mini-sequels over several systems.
Any other company selling products would have the sense to put their best sellers and hero products as a first priority. I’m not saying to sacrifice quality by chucking them out faster than necessary, but with some of these games they are obviously wasting time.
Just make Final Fantasy 7 HD remake and Kingdom Hearts 3 on PS3.
Problem solved.
Oh you don’t say. We gamers already saw that coming even before you guys have merged.
Some games were good like FF 10 and FF 12 but the rest of the games got SHITTY. Online was the WORST game.
f♥♥k they did better when they were seperated. Why didn’t square just work on “square” projects and enix on “enix” projects then come under squareenix for a “team-effort” project?
They still could have kept the name “SquareEnix” but I miss the name SquareSoft. It had nice games.
SquareEnix got too busy trying to copy off some flight of ‘western’ gaming and got caught in generic anime filler crap with weak plot and typical CGI renders.
Get some better story-writers in and gameplay developers who aren’t afraid to try something different. The old games were GOOD because they had good plot, good gameplay, and good graphics!