Square Enix CEO Resigns Over Colossal Losses
- Categories: Games, News
- Date: Mar 27, 2013 02:01 JST
- Tags: Business, Endings, Final Fantasy, Marketing, Shonen Gangan, Square Enix
Square Enix CEO Youichi Wada has announced he is finally taking responsibility for the company’s disastrous financial performance by resigning, after the firm posted a 13 billion yen loss in its most recent fiscal quarter.
He will be succeeded by 49-year-old Yousuke Matsuda, Square Enix’s chief accountant, who is unsurprisingly promising to turn around the company with a program of drastic reform.
Whether Matsuda – who was presumably not without influence over the company’s direction during his 10 year tenure on its board – is any improvement of course remains to be seen.
His public disclosure of owning a mere 200 shares (presently trading at 1,100 yen each) does not seem a huge vote of confidence in the company’s future.
Wada for his part has not commented on his future employment plans, although a face-saving sinecure seems likely to be all he will manage.
Although no discussion of Square Enix’s failings is complete without mentioning Final Fantasy, continued weak performance from just about all of their latest releases – most recently Tomb Raider and Dragon Quest X – seems finally to have made Wada’s position untenable.
As with the recent “resignation” of EA’s CEO, there is also a strong suspicion that whatever the public facade of voluntary resignation, he has been ignominiously sacked.
Also echoing EA, the CEO in question leaves behind a devastated company in his wake, widely reviled by gamers and having a rock bottom stock price – although given the notorious difficulty of extricating a Japanese CEO from their position, the scale of his incompetence likely dwarfs even that of the great helmsman of “America’s worst company.”
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Thank god - This idiot ruined the company. Hopefully the next CEO has something resembling a brain.
that's very frontal, but I have to agree with you and I hope you can tell him directly face to face
I think it has less to do with the games going downhill and more to do with a preferential change their target demographic. The people they're used to selling to have changed, the types of devices have changed, and people's preferences have changed.
If square enix focuses on developing a really good game for Android and iOS they'll get out of this rut rather quickly.
They're already been doing this since the start of the gen (The world ends with you) as have many companies including EA. Mobile development hasn't been the answer to any of their woes. Most games don't break even on Google play or iOS without major backing from a publisher and even then those games don't break even either, or have small profit margins.
It isn't demographic changes so much as its been incompetent management; while they rehash the same franchises over and over again. Not to mention they have archaic pipelines for creating content that keep games in development hell. Couple that with devs like Toriyama trying to "CoD" FF and you've got a recipe for disaster.
What Square-enix really needs right now is a complete shake up in management, and more Devs like YoshiP.
At this point every game has to be built with a multi platform approach in mind from the beggining, efficient coding that will reduce costs of development and porting.
There's no other way, they need to release everything on as many systems as possible.
multi-platform is not the most important, take for example the Apple, They only make SO to Mac platforms. I think that the most important is the quality of the software, if it is not very good, not will be sold. In the last releases, they were good, but not very good.
Then why don't you sit down with your PS1 and play the old awesome games?
Because the quality is poor in comparison with modern games. No one wants to play those old ultra repetitive games. You're probably even afraid of ruining the fond memories of those good old times by playing it again and end up hating it.
Face it, it's us who have changed for the worse. We've probably become tired of those kind of RPGs or we've just become too fucking demanding. Or both...
@9:50
I have played the old FF games MANY times and they are still just as awesome as ever. The recent FF games are still shit in comparison.
Square Enix fucked up when they stopped making the games they wanted and started to try to cater to western audiences. What they didn't realize is that the people in the west that liked their games back then liked them because they were jrpgs and DIFFERENT. Catering to the west was and still is the worst thing they can do.
@09:50
Actually, I do play those PS1 games still. Even ones that I've never played before have been more enjoyable than the newer games. And if you use an Emulator you can improve the graphics quality when you feel like it.
It's a lot like the reason why indie games have been increasing in popularity. They're focused more on doing interesting things with gameplay than spending all their budget on graphics, because they know that's the only way they can compete, and it's been working for them.
Path of exile its a great example of gameplay over grafics, if u compare it do diablo III.
I disagree with that notion. As a person who grew up playing virtually all the games that square enix (when they were squaresoft) had made and once being a huge final fantasy fan, I believe that the quality of the franchise took huge hits. Square let franchises like Brave Fencer Musashi and Xenogears go to the way side only to get stuck in long development cycles to water down their final fantasy product. I'm all for being innovative in your product and not stagnating it but the crap that they've come out with since ff10 has been inexcusable.
final fantasy x was crap
Thank You! Glad somebody agrees. FF X was pretty damn boring in the gameplay department. FF XII had better gameplay even if some of the characters were still just as annoying.
Companies are only as good as their employes. Who of any notably skill is till working for Square Enix?
Honestly, Tetsuya Nomura is one of the few talented people left at that company. A lot of the original FF teams have already left because of mistreatment. The only "Fantasy" type franchise that is still making them any money is the KingdomHearts games (they pretty much print money). If they ever release Versus (which will probably be on PS4) That's an assload of capital right there. Both of those are Nomura's projects, and they're really the only things I care about from that company atm.
I have to agree here. Kingdom Hearts has yet to be ruined though they tried by putting off 3 for so long.
At least most of the side stories we got were actually pretty good.
Versus as well, when it was first announced everyone was more excited by it than FFXIII. They may actually be able to come back a little if they release versus and KH3 fairly soon.
SE is moving to be an all outsource company, so there's the answer. to cheap to keep a payrole.
THQ did the same and see what happened to them.
Assembling a team of talented employees starts with having good leadership. Without that, the best people will not want to work there.
Most of the team that designed their early SFC games is still with the company, believe it or not.
Don't hold your breath. The people responsible for the bad decisions are the same people who will accept this resignation. It's typical corporate politics to fire the CEO in order to appease the investors, while the board of directors can just continue business as usual.
They put an accountant in charge. Are you seriously going to sit there and say it's a good thing Monou...? Explain in any way how an accountant has ever truly improved jack shit from being the head of a company ever. Then take the result of answering that question and apply it to videogame companies.
I would stick with Wada anyday.
what they really needed to do is find an inventinve and creative director and put him in charge then they might be able to descern between an interesting title and the pure shit theve been crapping
Matt Ouimet just led the Cedar Fair group of amusement parks into a net increase in profits of 9.5% with a net decrease in attendance over the last year. He also did this while having an increased capital expense of 6.2% and increased working capital from a deficit of $100mil to positive assets of 3 million in 12 months again with increased capital expense and lower attendance figures. He is former CFO for Disney.
"Hey guys, we've been losing a lot of money in recent years. I say we put the guy who's been overseeing our money in charge!"
Well spoken and 100% agreed.
Why am I not surprised? L-O-L to the max!!!
What the hell is going on with big companies? They have been ruining themselves lately.
Cos they make so much money no one at the top knows shit about games. They think they can run game production same way as mcdonalds.
They lost touch with their base clientele and start thinking they can tell people what to like vs producing what they really want.
True as well.
We jrpg lovers want japenese style rpgs PERIOD. NO fucking gimmicks and westernization.
inflation, exchange rates, global market collapsing, bad economy, recession... Most electronic companies like Sony and Panasonic are on the same boat. Particularly global companies because of exchange rates. They make profit on some part of the world while they sell at a loss on others.
None of this is their fault though, this is just a global change that is occurring due to its global nature. These companies like Sony were so heavily dependant on certain markets like America that when the recession started due to Bin Laden's attack and the raise of price of the petroleum they were one of the very first companies to take the hit because of the bad economy in the US. And in this case Square is a company making big budget games and after FF13, which sold pretty well, all their other games (including FF13-2) have been flops and if it weren't for Eidos games like Tomb Raider and Deus Ex HR selling well in the west the company would be 6 feet under right now.
Well, i'm not surprised, SE has been doing shitty games all the past, what, 7 years?
Whit some exceptions... FF is not on that list btw.
Kingdom Hearts?
Kingdom Hearts is one of the best games ever made.
used to be
go away filipino filth
Yeah!Down with Flips! Down with Flips!
Not by a long shot..
Why does everyone seem to like mickey mouse as some kind of jedi knight hero with little kids running around being emo, and past Final Fantasy character randomly thrown in there, that ruin the only good games Square made by making them even more emo than they were, heck, the last time i started my Kingdom Hearts save, the game crashed cause all the characters slit thier wrists after leaving Hot Topic. The only fun parts was building the gummy ships.
FF7 remake = salvation
but S.E is too stupid to know what the fans want...
instead they do more lighting games....
FF7 salvation is their last card, they wll only do it when there is nothing to lose -0-
Why would you WANT a FF7 remake? They will just butcher it. They will make the characters look retarded somehow, they will add shit that will urinate all over what made the original great and probably do a bunch of other stuff that will water it down and otherwise ruin it. No thanks. If I want my FF7 fix I will play the original, thank you very much. S.E. needs to just stop with FF altogether. They have wrecked it beyond recognition. They need to stop beating this dead horse. FF7 was the last good one and everything since has been a steady, down-hill slide away from what made the old ones good.
Goofy combat systems, silly looking characters, strange, busy-work leveling systems, nonsensical plots, lazy world design and the worst of all...sequels! Final Fantasy games should NOT have sequels!
I used to want them to make a true sequel to Crono Trigger but now I dread it. They will just hike their kimonos on it and cover it in piss like everything else they've done these days. And no, Chrono Cross was not a faithful sequel. (no, really...it wasn't. it was also a urine soaked mess)
Take off the blinders Square fanboys. Square is DEAD and gone. We now have SquareENIX and they don't make final fantasy games. They make mediocre JPRGs under the Final Fantasy name.
Why I want a FF7? Easy, so I can play a same game in high definition, PS3 graphic..
I know they can butcher the game, but if the FF7 HD remake is that bad I can always jump back to play the old one anytime.
Asking Square Enix to remake a FF7 HD is risky,it is either we get a great FF7 HD or a bad FF7 HD that lose its root..
Still, I am willing to take the risk, seeing SE doing alright with their recent remake(FFX/FFX2 HD PS3/Vita trailer look great), and there are still chances the game end up fantastic.
SE is expert in gorgeous graphic, so I am not too worried about FF7 remake, as the main challenging part is to rebuild the engine, character model and environment. The dialog, plot, old school turn based combat, characterize is already top notch in old FF7.
If SE decide to only rebuild the graphic and keep the other things the way they are(and I think they should), FF7 HD remake have a potential to be a great game.
That's because Chrono Cross was never meant to be a sequel... They did share about as much things as Demon's Souls did with Dark Souls, maybe even less.
I don't understand FF fans with this. The way SE is now, if I was an FF7 fan I'd believe they'd totally screw up a remake of it at this point.
they did not learn the quote "customer always right"..
When they decide to go the way that dismay customer, not fulfilling customer request, and the deal is gone. We customer are paying no more, no money flow inside for SE, which lead to them losing 13 billion yen..
Not shocking at all.
I'm kind of worried that they're replacing him with a mere accountant. If money is the only thing the CEOs care about, then I guess a accountant makes sense. But as gamers, we loved and felt that squaresoft had flourished most when it was run by the team with the computer science, engineering, literature/mythology backgrounds of : Masashi Miyamoto, Hironobu Sakaguchi and Hiromichi Tanaka. A mere accountant will not be enough to satisfy our need for immersive and beautiful worlds littered with allusions to our own through the role play of the development of heroes.
That's what you get for being a .... square ba dum tsss
Maybe release Kingdom Hearts 3 and stop being faggots about it. Once that comes out, THEN your grace will be saved.
Also, DRAGON QUEST 1-3 PORT TO THE IPAD. I will buy them all instantlyyyyy.
Even if Square Enix decides to remake FF7, it won't be as well receieved as they think it will be. It may still be a big hit but it won't reach the same level of financial success as COD, World of Warcraft or League of Legends.
Judgeing by there ps2 and up rpgs, I would expect them to totally screw ff7 royally.
Agreed, If FFVII was to have any chance it would need to keep the original atmosphere and story. Characters need to stay in Anime form. VA's should be picked from those who voice actual Anime's
I could so see Yuffie being voiced by Rie Kugimiya, that alone would attract all of the Japanese audience and any Westerner who knows anything about Anime.
Full HD towns down to the smallest detail and a Fist person view for the towns so you can really feel involved in the story. That is all. everything is copy and paste.
the characters already have established voice actors, and yes, they are quite well known ones in the anime scene (takahiro sakurai and maaya sakamoto for starters). stop trying to get kugimiya into fucking everything.
all they need to do is to stick with original character design, and stop makin ff7 characters more gay.
I doubt a FF7 remake would be a big hit or even sell in big numbers. It is easy to talk nostalgia on the Internet and how cool something would be like this. But when all is said and done, people's taste in video games is constantly evolving. The older crowd will talk about how cool it would be, then end up fickle about actually buying it & putting in the time to play. The youngin's won't care at all about it. I remember playing Twisted Metal a TON on Playstation. I was stoked when they made a new one for PS3. I bought it. I played it for about an hour total. I regrete buying it. Nothing worong with the game that I could see in the hour I played it. I just realized I am not into it anymore. You can't go home again.
Why the hell are you comparing online multiplayer games to a remake of a single player game? That makes no sense.
It's not about single player games or multiplayer games. It's about what makes the most money in today's market.
Im so glad games developers don't see it that way or everyone would just be making COD clones
well, thank goodness they didn't think like u, or i'll have to connect to the internet every time i need to play a game... oh wait, blizzard already did that shit
A FF7 remake would just ruin everything, imo.
you seem to be confused about the relative relevance of those franchises in different markets