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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I totally agree with this. I have hated Square Enix since I was first introduced to them.
http://bitly.com/PXuVeN
I like that the image on the screen behind him shows the main culprit of this downfall.
It doesn't have "13" in it though.
It has the word 'soft' on the bottom.
That's not a downfall.
You mean the projector? That bastard, I never trusted him.
i blame sony for not keeping a shorter leash on squaresoft
Sony only owns a small percentage, not enough to voice their opinion on how Square fucks itself up the ass.
YOUDONTSAY.JPG
The year they merger all the fans knew it was the end of good FF games.
Idiot for not listening their fans.
Final Fanta stopped being good around 8.
Around 7, 8 was shit.
you are shit.
8 was good with the schools and stuff.
and yes i am butthurt problem????
8 fucking owned, you imbecile.
Around 1, 2 was shit.
it stoped being good around the time it was just rehasing the same shit over and over with the word "finle" on it
Only retards and gays like 8.
Got a problem with gays?
9 was good too. The series started to suck when they moved it to the PS2 and made it all 3D and shit.
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.
You're a moron. 9 was amazing
Fire Wada and problem solved.
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
I must say that I don't know whether it's Square's fault or Enix's fault.
To be fair, Enix made good games. (Star Ocean/Valkyrie Profile)
Square has made a LOT of really big financial mistakes, but most of them were with THEIR OWN GAMES. (Final Fantasy X-2... XI... XIII-1... Lack of a Kingdom Hearts 3... Then again they really did mess Star Ocean up pretty bad as well with 4: Last Hope.
And let's see... there was that movie in 2001 that cost them tremendous amounts of money with no real direction... A stupid anime series in 2004 was it: Final Fantasy: Unlimited...
This was a company that was ruining their reputation long before Enix showed up.
Also, they picked up other companies that they could have saved money on like that one that created "Fantasy Earth Zero". God, I love that game, but Square Enix probably could have done without both the game company that made them no money, and the music composer that "ruined Final Fantasy XII" by most critic's standards.
Square should do us all a favor and close it's doors... Final Fantasy XIV:Reborn becomes the FINAL FANTASY. 14. XV will never happen.
Close the book.
Done.
Just tell Tri-ace to make Valkyrie Profile 3, make more Ogre Battle/Tactics Ogre games, god with all that money you have (had) hire professional writers to make good stories and people who have experience in PLAYING roleplaying games.
Tri-Ace is with SEGA now, if I remember right.
Thank god for that.
they are a development team for hire, their latest game was with konami.
what the hell are you talking about? ffx-2, xi, xiii-1 where made when the compañy became square-enix.
Squaresoft made ffI to ffX, that just mean enix was the problem.
They have been SquareEnix since FF8, if not sooner.
not sir, you are wrong. Square-enix first appearence was on 2003 (ffviii was on 199x i can´t remember the exact date), and the first game of square enix was ffX-2 when the compañy start to downfall. just look at you FFX game, what does it say, squaresoft or square enix?
in fact everything FFXI (the initial release) and prior was pre-merger (X-2 came out after XI)
VIII came out in '99
Depends on when you got it. I've got a copy of FF9 that was apparently released after the merger, because it says square enix when I load it up.
X-2 was released nearly a month before the merger, you idiot. And an RPG does not magically appear out of nowhere, it takes many, many months of work to develop an RPG. Shit was developed long before the merger and you're just too stupid to realize that, cause it's easier to blame someone else [Enix] than admit Squaresoft turned into a huge piece of shit on their own. You're also one of those faggots that think Squaresoft "belongs" on a Sony game console because you never owned a SNES.
That's very strange, as FF9 was a Playstation game, whereas the Sqaure-Enix merger occurred well into the Playstation 2's life time. It's hard to imagine Square re-releasing FF9 that late into the PS2's cycle.
@Lonesnipa.
FF9 was made before the merge of Square and Enix
The logo you see is probably form the copy you got on the PS Store and caused the confusion...
but enix made good games like Nick R said, so it wasn't enix fault it was square-enix manegment fault rater than enix or square fault
i agree with that, each compañy has great games by they own, but when they do the fuse... we are all screw.
Enix never made a Squaresoft level game, not even close. Enix was on a MUCH lower level than Square was, and they brought them down hard. A team is only as good as its weakest member and after they merged they could only achieve Enix level games on their best day(FF12), and acidic bloody shit on their worst (FF13).
@Anon 04:59: Enix has the entire Dragon Quest franchise, which has always been way better than any Square franchise and has kept its quality high despite being older than FF.
Don't forget that most of art designers, writers,musicians retired after FFX
@ Anon 4;59
> A team is only as good as its weakest member
A CHAIN is only as strong as it's weakest link. An Olympic sprinting team is as fast as its fastest runner. A relay race team is as fast as the average of their combined speed. A cyclist racing team is fact faster than any of their individuals members.
Unless we know how the merger reorganized Square and Enix it's impossible to say that Enix ruined Square.
Nonesense. Illusion of Gaia was an amazing game. I wish that more games were of that calibur...
you must be out of your mind, or not know your gaming history, Enix was know to be one of the best developers of theor time before the merger, most of the games theyve developed people would remember as great games while square on the other hand had always had a number of ups and downs, anyone with ANY knowledge of past games would know that when the merger was anounced most people were worried square would ruin enix, even more so when people heard alot of enix's staff were getting "reorganised". not to mention the games you quote as enixs best days and worst days are some of squares usual trash. almost nothing ive payed from square can compare to the depth and enjoyment i had from star ocean 1 and 2, the only games square brought out that stand a chance they ruined with terrible seaquels and piss poor remakes (they really should have left tactics ogre alone, and FFTactics was good when it had a more serious story)
FFX was already pretty sad.
Look further back. The disease started with 8, or perhaps 7. Squaresoft got bought out by Enix because they were in a tailspin and Microsoft was trying a hostile takeover.
I got FFXIII-2 for $8 USD.
You've been cheated. It isn't worth that much.
I paid a buck-fifty, the cost of 3 blank discs and it wasn't even worth that.
It takes up to 4 years to develop a JRPG and FFX-2 was released within months of the merger, you idiot.
FFX-2 March 13, 2003
MERGER April 1, 2003
What? You ain't got shit kid.
you're shittin already old man
@Anonymous 7;37
It wouldn´t take 4 years if you already have the characters, worlds and +. And the new formed team can work at the time with FFX.
I dont need to say anything more, just go look at your game, in FFX say "squaresoft", and in FFX-2 say "square-enix"
P.D: don´t just belive everything that wikipedia says dumbass.
Then maybe you should google the release date, its not that hard you fucking idiot. Just kill yourself and the world will be a better place.
FFX-2 was released after the merger in North America and Europe, but was already released prior to the merger in Japan.
X-2 was actually made in less than a year. You can easily tell, too, if you play it...but you don't want to do that.
>I dont need to say anything more, just go look at your game, in FFX say "squaresoft", and in FFX-2 say "square-enix"
You're a fucking idiot. The game released in North America & Europe months AFTER the merger. But not in Japan. All they did was switch an FMV clip & change the packaging, while localizing the game for the western markets.
And it doesn't matter how long it took to make FFX-2, it doesn't change the fact that the game was programmed & went gold before the merger was completed.
God you're a fucking idiot.
TIL I disliked the company around the time Enix came in. Good to know.
they made a lot of financial mistakes but X-2, XI, and XIII-1 weren't 3 of them.
hate to break it to you and those that want to continue believing XIII (and even XIII-2 for that matter) lost S-E a ton of money but the fact is it made S-E plenty of money.
you can claim XIII sold only because of the FF name, and not because of quality, but that's irrelevant in regards to whether it made money or not.
it still sold 6.6 million copies.
you're an idiot if you're still insisting that's a financial failure.
X-2 likewise was considered a financial success at 5.3 million copies. anyone that told you it was considered a commercial failure (now or at that time) is clueless.
and XI has made more money than any Square/Square-Enix game in their history, so how you can attribute that as their financial misstep is mind-boggling.
shall we call Skyrim Bethesda's great financial failure?
some spin-offs with questionable quality.
a movie pushed through by an overly ambitious series producer that literally bankrupted Squaresoft.
THOSE were major financial missteps.
those 3 games were of mixed critical reception in the fan base, but financially?
they made millions.
Yea, see, X-2 was totally a failure. They made money off a game that completely debased women everywhere. Anyone who likes that game thinks women are fucking retards. WOMEN who like that game should be fucking ashamed of themselves. 13 was the straw that has me saying I'm not buying from square enix ever again. Alienating your fanbase is fail.
It's a company making products, not your mother. You don't have to love it and respect it to enjoy it's products.
@Lonesnipa
How exactly did they debase women with an entirely female main cast taking lead rolls and fighting enemies while overcoming their pasts... I mean honestly... are you seriously sitting there with that nonsense and attempting to say that X-2 was sincerely debasing women? Because of what? Because of the shorts? Because they were having fun occasionally in a way that was a bit girlish? Because Yuna missed someone she loved?
Actually no, if you still haven't figured it out, then you are an embarrassment. If you're a man, you're pathetic, if you're a woman, you debase women more than that game did. In no way did it debase women at all if you even bothered to play it. I won't defend it as some groundbreaking game, but you are absolutely worthless to any arguments relating to gaming at this point.
Women are objects, get over it.
Seriously? You guys can't tell why that game is demeaning to women? Ok lets start with Yuna. She's now a "sphere hunter" looking for Tidus. So far not so bad. An intelligent girl in FFX all things considered. Ok, fast forward to when you go sphere hunting the first time, in the Ruins of Zanarkand. Here we learn that Yuna is now apparently the stupidest person in the game. You have two pieces of a word. Mon, and Key. What does she say? KEYMON. Are you fucking kidding me? Lets fast forward some more.
When Yuna and crew steal the sphere from the temple. Brother chastises them for doing so telling them they HAVE to give it back. Why? Because stealing is wrong. Fuck, that, noise. That's all a sphere hunter is about, stealing things from other people. Yuna and crew don't tell him to shove it down his noise hole and then go do that. I'm honestly not going to go on about this any further, but its this sort of shit that characterizes the game as one that should be despised.
I don't mind the "dress up" or the fact that it was an all female cast. One of my favourite FF games is 5 and those who know that game know it was a 1 male 3 female cast at the end.
So in conclusion no its not for the stupid retarded reasons you guys thought when I said women should hate this game. This game makes out Yuna to be a fucking moron, who doesn't mind being bossed around by Brother because... I still don't know why she lets him get away with that shit.
@Lonesnipa
...those are even worse reasons for crying out loud! Have you ever even seen an anime or JRPG? The situations you're describe are just jokes that didn't work, not demeaning to women! I can give you dozens of instances where it's a male character in exactly the same context in anime and games, but do I go on about it being demeaning to men?
No, I don't, even though I am getting sick of the stupid male protagonist, and so are most people, which is why more intelligent ones are coming about. Only women who lack perspective and the pussified men that doggedly follow their brainless idealism can possibly see that crap as demeaning to women except for the veeeery slim context that they'd never seen that Japanese joke set up before. Like Patrice O'neal, I won't defend a bad joke, but bad jokes and good jokes come from the same birth, so I will not ever hold it against them for trying, but I will not acknowledge it as good.
And Brother chastising them is obviously yet another joke that didn't work. In the context of the game anyway, Yuna is not really trying to be a thief anyway, she's just stuck between trying to live in the present and the fact that there is something she senses that tells her it's not over which she faces the entire game. All the initial stuff was her desperate attempts to distract herself. Whether the execution was good to you or not, that was the case, and they tried to bury it in anime lightheartedness that didn't work as well as they had hoped. Yet somehow you had already decided it was demeaning to women, because otherwise you'd have noticed all of that if you had paid attention.
If anything you should find the men who follow the idiocy of your statements more demeaning to women, because they're the ones who are lying to get laid.
I'm a woman and I loved FFX-2, as did all of my game-playing female friends. Oddly it is my male friends who all seem to hate it. It was silly but fun.
Yea uh, as someone who's been watching anime for quite a while, and playing JRPG's for even longer, those jokes ARE failed, BECAUSE they are terrible and demeaning. This is a WHOLE FUCKING YEAR later, if Yuna still needs distracting from the guy she knew for 2 weeks then clearly we need to fix something here. Name those anime please. Name them now. I have no fucking clue what anime it is you are talking about where the guy gets two words, and then makes the totally ASSININE choice in how to combine them. Please show me the anime, where the guy goes and steals something, then is chastised and told to return it by a woman, even though stealing is basically the job. They didn't try to make it light hearted, THEY TRIED TO MAKE IT CHARLIES ANGELS for crying out loud.
That of course is without even going into the retardation of them making x-2 to begin with, BECAUSE TIDUS SHOULD BE DEAD. Fucking ruins X for me, because it was this build up about how someone was GOING TO DIE. Then Tidus lives even though he is fucking from within the Fayth, THEN LIVES IN THE OCEAN FOR A YEAR before being found. No, X-2 is shit, will always be shit and trying to say otherwise just means that your opinion has absolutely no value to me.
@Lonesnipa
And thus finally your childish, ignorant stupidity shines forth in all its glory.
I don't like it, therefore it's shit.
The Fayth were never fully explained, and consciousness in that world is such that how we perceive death and how it occurred there are not the same.
"Tidus is supposed to be dead" is a bad argument anyway. He was, so be happy. Now he's not, so be happy again because he and Yuna get to be together. Best of all worlds. You got your tears for FFX and then got to see the happy ending.
YOU'RE clueless. You're confusing sales with profits. If a company's ever-overconfident dumbass CEO makes them produce 10 million copies of a game, then they're still going to take a huge loss on it even if it sells 6.6 million copies. Especially when most of those copies they did move off the shelves were sold at a small fraction of the launch price.
Just FYI, FF13 series already sold more than the entire Star Ocean + Valkyrie Profile franchise combined. Yes, FF13 also did a little better than FF12.
Just because you didn't like some of the FF games you mentioned doesn't mean it didn't sell.
Some people thinks that SE going down because they didn't make a good game, thus no sales. For me, that's wrong.
The biggest problem with SE isn't with the games not selling, but with the market changing.
And why are you bringing FF movie and anime? do you even see the graph? Do you know that SE also involved in Index, FMA, Star Driver, etc?
Anything with the titles Final Fantasy & Dragon Quest are guaranteed sales over there, the people have been conditioned to buy them through familiarity & word-of-mouth. Just like One Piece.
Don't forget that outside of Japan the Final Fantasy game's still have that huge "brand name"
recognition as well.
07:54 Only with nerds dude. In Japan FF & DQ are mainstream titles.
Nearly one in five Japanese PS3 owners bought FFXIII, because the Final Fantasy series is a major mainstreamer series.
In Japan other JRPG titles, like Tales are lucky if they sell a quarter to half million units.
Japan figures:
PlayStation 3 8.6million
19% Final Fantasy XIII 1.7million
04.5% Tales of Vesperia 0.39million
That's a major sales figure difference.
Of course FF13 sold more.
It was so bad that it only took 2 weeks before they reduced the price to 50% or lower.
I had only heard bad things about it when it came out, so i never bought it when it was 105 dollars, a couple of weeks later it was down too 53 dollars.
The only reason that game sold was because the cut the price down 50%-70% and because it had the name "Final Fantasy".
Are you retarded? FFXI a financial mistake? It has been one of their biggest sources of income for many years, and may only be replaced by FFXIV once it relaunches. Stop talking out of your ass.
Square really needs to stop with the DS/portable/lightning/corridor shitware and build an engine on a major console for multiple games and to reduce dev costs.
Star Ocean and Valkyrie Profile were made by tri-Ace.
http://na.square-enix.com/games
He's right bro, Square Enix is just the publisher, not the developers. Tri-Ace made the game. SE just provides the money.
http://www.tri-ace.co.jp/en/product/index.html
You fail to understand something here...
Just because they are sold under Square-Enix does not mean that Square-Enix MADE them.
There is many games that is sold by SE but is made by another company.
And SW have also said that they will never make a big game again, they will hire in someone else to do it and release it under their name.
Its most likely squares fault, they need to stop rehashing the same titles/series and do something new for a change. All of the Enix games have sold well compared to square titles when you look at squares projected sales, then their actual sales. They need to keep sales up to keep their profit margins, I also think FF14 was a huge hit on their profits considering they have probally spent a fortune remaking the game bascally from scratch, and remaking a mmo is not like making a single player game, its much more costly for the mmo.
You can't blame only one of them, both was good companies but together they didn't work well.
I don't think square should shut it's doors, but really it does seem like the bad decisions were being made on the Square side, so it's likely they'd be in the same place if they'd managed to get this far without absorbing Enix and Eidos.
Personally, I think Square-Enix needs to rearrange their affairs, and get some good development teams in place. Then they need to focus on shipping products in their game division. They should probably get an MMORPG team that works on FFXI and FFXIV, a team that works with external dev companies on handheld games like FFtype0, a two teams that work exclusively on major projects like major FF games and Kingdom Hearts, a small team that just makes sure the company's entire back catalog is on everything ever, and a team headed by the SaGa guy that cranks out mid-budget big idea experiments that could either become a major franchise or make their way into them in bits and chunks.
Enix was primarily a publisher, not a developer (Star Ocean and Valkyrie Profile were developed by Tri-Ace). The merger mostly just brought Square the Dragon Quest name.
However, the Dragon Quest series has long clung to its retro roots, and has had problems reinventing itself for modern gamers (see DQ 9&10), though personally I think they nailed it with 8.
Similarly, Square can't seem to figure out what direction to take the Final Fantasy series in (see every Final Fantasy game since 10).
In the end, I think the two biggest factors contributing to the decline of Square are the departure of Sakaguchi, and the company's recent focus on short term gain by shoveling out a large number of sequels and spinoffs of lesser quality, which has diluted the Final Fantasy brand.
They've milked the Final Fantasy series for what it's worth, and have moved on to Kingdom Hearts. Without a new series to exploit after that, the future of the company is uncertain.
FF and DQ aren't the problem. They sell as good now as they did before the merger. The problem is everything else.
Final Fantasy XI is not a financial mistake, what are you smoking? It took them years but they have been profiting off it awhile.
Star Ocean & Valkyrie Profile are made by Tri-Ace, the same developer who made Resonance of Fate (I LOVE THIS TITLE!!). Square-Enix is just the one who pays the money.
Please remember, Square-Enix is primarily a publisher, NOT a developer! The only game series that SE really develop themselves are Fabula Nova Crystallis (ie. the FF series), and Kingdom hearts. Even dragon quest is not made by them (they took part in it but it's really a five companies project).
>To be fair, Enix made good games.
Did they? Most Enix games were actually developed by other companies, such as Chunsoft (Dragon Quest series), Quintet (Actraiser, Gaia trilogy), Almanic (Wonder Project J, EVO: Search for Eden), Produce (Brain Lord, 7th Saga, Mystic Ark), and tri-Ace (Star Ocean series, Valkyrie Profile).
Enix didn't make Star Ocean OR Valkyrie Profile, Tri-Ace did.
X-2 almost certainly made money.
XI had the highest profits of any FF game.
XIII probably made money, it sold 6+ million copies.
Not sure how any of these are classified as financial mistakes.