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>The Transaction will assist the Company in adapting to the changes underway in the global business environment by establishing a more efficient allocation of r

>The Transaction will assist the Company in adapting to the changes underway in the global business environment by establishing a more efficient allocation of resources, which will enhance corporate value by accelerating growth in the Company’s core businesses in the digital entertainment domain. In addition, the Transaction enables the launch of new businesses by moving forward with investments in fields including blockchain, AI, and the cloud. https://www.hd.square-enix.com/eng/news/pdf/20220502%20A_Press%20Release_fin.pdf https://www.hd.square-enix.com/eng/news/pdf/20220502%20A_Pre... They are still making incredibly good games (FFXIV, DQXI, Nier, Bravely Default etc.) but for every single good one I swear they make 3 utter shite too + their gacha games are not even that good considering the saturation on the gacha market and what quality games some other companies can make (see Genshin) But at least Naoki Yoshida is on the board of directors + he is producing the next mainline FF game and I think he has the trust of millions of players considering what they did with XIV. So not all hope lost as long as he is at the company.

omoikane 5y ago
For me, Square Enix has been more of a manga publisher than a game company in recent years, and on that front I would say they are doing a pretty good job.
poulpy123 5y ago
That read like a parody
make3 5y ago
For people who don't play MMOs because they're way too addictive, the focus of square on FFXIV has been really disappointing
- jrsj 5y ago
  When you zoom out a little it makes a lot of sense. FF15 and FF13 were both failures, company had serious financial issues before FF14 took off. Hopefully you will get to enjoy FF16, and making that game wouldn’t have been possible without the success of 14. FFXIV also has the least addictive qualities of any MMO I have played in my experience. There’s very little FOMO & you’re encouraged to play at whatever pace you enjoy. Many players just play through the story and treat it as a mostly single player game.
  - brendoelfrendo 5y ago
    I wouldn't call FF13 or FF15 failures from a sales point of view; they both performed strongly. From a "brand damage" point of view, though, they were catastrophic. I think the development of FF16 speaks for itself: they gave the development of a mainline single-player title to Creative Business Unit III, their FF14 studio, because they have a rep for making consistently good content and delivering it on time. Meanwhile, no one expects Nomura to reveal anything about the inevitable FF7 Remake sequel for at least the next 3 years. FF14 is great, though, as a non-MMO player. The community is largely helpful to newcomers, the story content is very accessible and requires little to no grinding, and the game as a whole doesn't gate important plot developments behind high-tier endgame content the way most MMOs do.
    - johnnyanmac 5y ago
      > they gave the development of a mainline single-player title to Creative Business Unit III, their FF14 studio, because they have a rep for making consistently good content and delivering it on time. I think it's simply because the other CBU's are swamped with work. - The old business division (what they called Creative Business units before the restructure 5 years ago) that made FF15 split off into Luminous Studios, and went straight from FF15 DLC into Forspoken - CBU1 (AKA, the Nomura division) handles FF7R as well as Kingdom Hearts. Two huge franchises. Adding another FF onto the pile would be overwhelming - CBU2 is "The Bravely division". I wouldn't be surprised if they get to try their own hand at a Final Fantasy one day, but it would have been too early for FF16. FF16 was likely being worked on before Octopath Traveler. - CBU4 was always a smaller sort of "spinoff" studio. Nowadays they focus more on the mobile market. Very little chance they were ever considered. I don't think Square Enix sees the last few FF games as damaging as fans do. They simply have a lot of work and some teams have more or less room for that work. Funnily enough, it may be a possibility of FF17 having a mobile client given Genshin's success, but this is just random conjecture
    - jrsj 5y ago
      From a sales standpoint alone no, but from a profitability standpoint definitely. A lot of time and money was poured into developing a game engine from the ground up that ultimately ended up not being very good and thankfully is being replaced by Unreal in FFXVI. Crystal Tools was supposed to make development for several games easier & faster, but instead it took more effort to complete than expected & was still difficult to work with after it was complete.
- Longlius 5y ago
  You can basically engage with the entire story of XIV without touching the MMO part at all. Especially now that they're going back and enabling NPC party members for the story dungeons.
  - saithir 5y ago
    That's only for the 4-man dungeons. You still need to run the Crystal Tower raid, for example.
- wink 5y ago
  In the space of MMOs FFXIV tries to do most things right though. There is hardly any "you must log in every day to progress", you can still experience all the old content at your pace (with some limitations, of course), even the seasonal events are usually done in 10-30 minutes and are available for a whole month. I know, it's easy to just name the things that are done better than in e.g. World of Warcraft, but YoshiP has said repeatedly (and this is very very rare for MMO studios): You don't have to play every day, and if you're done playing the content from the latest patch, go out and play other games, then come back when you like. It's basically the antithsis of FOMO. The only other example that comes to my mind is Guild Wars 2, which is actually some "come back 3 years later and continue where you left off".
MonaroVXR 5y ago
>one I swear they make 3 utter shite too + their gacha games are not even that good considering the saturation on the gacha market and what quality games some other companies can make (see Genshin) I heard from sources that the western department is doing this. Sources: Are on Twitter, forgot the name. (Yea I know, that I don't need to "believe everything" so please add salt to my statement) Source #1: https://twitter.com/Genki_JPN?t=FlkGLMQE4aoCHqod-O68RQ&s=09 https://twitter.com/Genki_JPN?t=FlkGLMQE4aoCHqod-O68RQ&s=09
johnnyanmac 5y ago
> but for every single good one I swear they make 3 utter shite too That describes almost all AAA companies. I think Square takes more heat on this point because they are some of the few studios still investing heavily in the "AA" market. Outside of Avengers, most of the other projects people may point to aren't really the highest budget games to begin with. And those rough releases are something most other studios don't want to risk anymore. > + their gacha games are not even that good considering the saturation on the gacha market and what quality games some other companies can make (see Genshin) I mean, the entire market is trying to chase Genshin right now. It's a very arguable point that no mobile game released as of now is as good as Genshin, at least on a technical level. I understand why. The attraction of mobile is running a relatively low budget (say, "A/AA" level) project and having it profit for a few years until they need to recycle the assets into a new project. A game like Genshin is the equivalent of trying to put GTA V on a phone. Which may be technically feasible now, in 2022, but it'd get you laughed out of a pitch in 2017 or so when Genshin started development Remember, this would have been right before the Switch launched and had Breath of the Wild show what an ARM architecture was capable of rendering. Most other studios are too risk averse to consider such an endeavor. Console developers especially because they don't want to cannabalize their games with something that plays too closely to their $60 AAA blockbuster.
Cloudef 5y ago
To me xiv is a horrible game and barely a mmo. Square enix hasnt done good games for a while. TWEWY is probably their only good series but they barely market it. Also their strategy of releasing everything epic game store exclusive on PC is pretty scummy.
- keeganpoppen 5y ago
  can't agree about xiv-- i've never been an mmo guy, but have absolutely loved playing xiv. the story, esp. w/ Endwalker (the newest expansion) is fantastic. but to each, his or her own, i suppose. :)
  - Cloudef 5y ago
    Probably because xiv isn't really a mmo but single player theme park, with some multiplayer features.
    - SketchySeaBeast 5y ago
      That's what a lot of MMOs are right now. Feels like saying that modern CGI movies aren't really movies because they don't feature actors. Unfortunately the age of EQ, where you grind for hours and hours with a group as the primary way to level, has passed.
    - keeganpoppen 5y ago
      i guess that's true, but my friends and i always kind of hacked the system in a way where we were all leveling in lockstep and stuff anyway. but yeah, the individual quests themselves are mostly single player, with some weird multiplayer affordances (like sometimes if you are on the same quest as someone else you can kind of fight the same mobs / make the same progress). i found all that stuff pretty boring anyway-- the trials, dungeons, etc. are the meat of the game as far as i'm concerned (and they are the ones bookended by the cinematics that deliver the meat of the story).
pavlov 5y ago
"Investments in blockchain, AI, and the cloud" sounds like they have absolutely no idea what they should do, and will spend most of the money paying very expensive consultants who produce delirious slideware about web3 metaverse opportunities.
- elif 5y ago
  Those seem like obvious areas of research for a next generation game developer. Perhaps you are overreacting because of a culturally normative skepticism toward the word "Blockchain"
  - kevingadd 5y ago
    Veteran game developer here: What makes "ai" and "the cloud" obvious areas of research for a next generation game developer? Games have had "AI" for decades and we've had neural net hardware on GPUs for years and years now which gets used for things like upscaling, global illumination, etc. "the cloud" has been available for ages and games already use cloud hosting extensively where it makes sense. All I see here are buzzwords and abstract terms that mean literally nothing as an investment unless your goal is to impress investors and specialist press. The blockchain is not going to do anything to streamline game development or improve game quality, all it can do is provide new monetization options... but traditional gacha games already make a truckload of money, so it's questionable whether the cost of moving into blockchain is reasonable for a company like Square Enix that can already rake it in via microtransactions.
    - elif 5y ago
      "games have had ai for decades and the cloud has existed for years" is not a reason why research in those areas is pointless. Your failure to, as you admit, see these topics as anything other than "buzzwords" all but confirms my original opinion of a cultural skepticism.
      - vvanders 5y ago
        I don't think the OP said those things were pointless, only that they are already actively used in industry standard approaches. FWIW I agree with the assessment, the terms are broad, generic and have no specific connotation for gamedev. It's not oriented at anyone in industry since you'd talk about specifics and not the "cloud", "ai", or "blockchain".
philipov 5y ago
They need to fire their loser NFT-deluded president and let YoshiP run the company.
- GuB-42 5y ago
  It is not always a good idea to let productive people run a company. Let YoshiP make games, that's what he is good at. And have someone who knows how to make money be the president, so that he can finance YoshiP games, preferably without too much meddling into the creative process. I am not into NFTs myself but if it makes money that can be invested into good games, by all means, let them do it.
- SketchySeaBeast 5y ago
  YoshiP is killing it with 14. Let's just leave him alone to build great things. Or at least until he gets 16 out first.
- de6u99er 5y ago
  It looks like all CEO's have agreed on legalizing pyramid schemes.
  - sleepybrett 5y ago
    Pyramids are great for the pharaohs.
  - pjc50 5y ago
    Rather like the Jan 6 events, once people get away with one thing they will try another. And another. In this case, enough people have made enough money from pyramid schemes without going to jail that it's becoming hugely popular.
bovermyer 5y ago
In the noclip documentary on FFXIV a few years back, Yoshida mentioned that he was considering leaving Square-Enix to make his own games. FFXIV is really good, but Yoshida is the soul of that game. If he left, that would be devastating. If you haven't seen the noclip documentary, you should. It's on YouTube.
- falcolas 5y ago
  He has since stated that he won't leave FFXIV. Has re-iterated it in the face of the 6.0 launch, since 6.0 wrapped up the main storyline and there were fears of his departure following that.
  - bovermyer 5y ago
    That's great to hear!
    - favorited 5y ago
      He's also the producer for Final Fantasy XVI, which is being developed by his org (Creative Business Unit III).
baby 5y ago
I think a lot of their games are really niche too. Nier is definitely not for everyone.
- bilekas 5y ago
  Nier is easily one of my all time favorites and as much as I try and get friends to play it, it's so hard to explain what kind of game and experience it really is. A great piece of art.
  - smcl 5y ago
    I bought it and got distracted by other games without playing it yet, I need to get back to it! Mostly was inspired by the Consolevania review (which had a truly bizarre opening minute that you might enjoy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X8jeEwL9QUM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X8jeEwL9QUM) edit: I rewatched the review now I totally get why I picked it up, Ryan's enthusiasm is absolutely hilarious and infectious ("It's just perfect as I've ever seen you can ride a fucking boar in it")
- Longlius 5y ago
  I mean, Final Fantasy XIV has something like 1.7 million active players at the moment. That's just people paying a sub at endgame. $25m in monthly revenue at the low-end is pretty impressive for a single game.
- MomoXenosaga 5y ago
  Nier also had a minuscule budget. I doubt they lost a lot of money on that. No it is their Western AAA projects that are hemorrhaging them money.
- robonerd 5y ago
  Few games are for everybody, but Nier: Automata sold millions of copies. The niche of action gamers who like asses is pretty big.
  - morelisp 5y ago
sascha_sl 5y ago
Pivoting further into gambling utilizing their IP has worked reasonably well for Konami.
- needle0 5y ago
  People in the west seem to have become oblivious to the fact that Konami still makes games (and yes, by that I mean traditional video games)-- just that most of their library has become invisible from the POV of the west. Games like Momotaro Dentetsu and Pawapuro are doing plenty well in Japan.
  - johnnyanmac 5y ago
    The enthusiast gamer market is a bit too laser focused on AAA video games at times. They do make console games, but the only ones that give the slight time of day to are PES (or some remasters of games they already like). I believe most of it is frustrated Metal Gear, Castlevania, or Silent Hill fans. Maybe even some old school Suikoden fans.

omoikane 5y ago

For me, Square Enix has been more of a manga publisher than a game company in recent years, and on that front I would say they are doing a pretty good job.

poulpy123 5y ago

That read like a parody

make3 5y ago

For people who don't play MMOs because they're way too addictive, the focus of square on FFXIV has been really disappointing

jrsj 5y ago
When you zoom out a little it makes a lot of sense. FF15 and FF13 were both failures, company had serious financial issues before FF14 took off. Hopefully you will get to enjoy FF16, and making that game wouldn’t have been possible without the success of 14. FFXIV also has the least addictive qualities of any MMO I have played in my experience. There’s very little FOMO & you’re encouraged to play at whatever pace you enjoy. Many players just play through the story and treat it as a mostly single player game.
- brendoelfrendo 5y ago
  I wouldn't call FF13 or FF15 failures from a sales point of view; they both performed strongly. From a "brand damage" point of view, though, they were catastrophic. I think the development of FF16 speaks for itself: they gave the development of a mainline single-player title to Creative Business Unit III, their FF14 studio, because they have a rep for making consistently good content and delivering it on time. Meanwhile, no one expects Nomura to reveal anything about the inevitable FF7 Remake sequel for at least the next 3 years. FF14 is great, though, as a non-MMO player. The community is largely helpful to newcomers, the story content is very accessible and requires little to no grinding, and the game as a whole doesn't gate important plot developments behind high-tier endgame content the way most MMOs do.
  - johnnyanmac 5y ago
    > they gave the development of a mainline single-player title to Creative Business Unit III, their FF14 studio, because they have a rep for making consistently good content and delivering it on time. I think it's simply because the other CBU's are swamped with work. - The old business division (what they called Creative Business units before the restructure 5 years ago) that made FF15 split off into Luminous Studios, and went straight from FF15 DLC into Forspoken - CBU1 (AKA, the Nomura division) handles FF7R as well as Kingdom Hearts. Two huge franchises. Adding another FF onto the pile would be overwhelming - CBU2 is "The Bravely division". I wouldn't be surprised if they get to try their own hand at a Final Fantasy one day, but it would have been too early for FF16. FF16 was likely being worked on before Octopath Traveler. - CBU4 was always a smaller sort of "spinoff" studio. Nowadays they focus more on the mobile market. Very little chance they were ever considered. I don't think Square Enix sees the last few FF games as damaging as fans do. They simply have a lot of work and some teams have more or less room for that work. Funnily enough, it may be a possibility of FF17 having a mobile client given Genshin's success, but this is just random conjecture
  - jrsj 5y ago
    From a sales standpoint alone no, but from a profitability standpoint definitely. A lot of time and money was poured into developing a game engine from the ground up that ultimately ended up not being very good and thankfully is being replaced by Unreal in FFXVI. Crystal Tools was supposed to make development for several games easier & faster, but instead it took more effort to complete than expected & was still difficult to work with after it was complete.
Longlius 5y ago
You can basically engage with the entire story of XIV without touching the MMO part at all. Especially now that they're going back and enabling NPC party members for the story dungeons.
- saithir 5y ago
  That's only for the 4-man dungeons. You still need to run the Crystal Tower raid, for example.
wink 5y ago
In the space of MMOs FFXIV tries to do most things right though. There is hardly any "you must log in every day to progress", you can still experience all the old content at your pace (with some limitations, of course), even the seasonal events are usually done in 10-30 minutes and are available for a whole month. I know, it's easy to just name the things that are done better than in e.g. World of Warcraft, but YoshiP has said repeatedly (and this is very very rare for MMO studios): You don't have to play every day, and if you're done playing the content from the latest patch, go out and play other games, then come back when you like. It's basically the antithsis of FOMO. The only other example that comes to my mind is Guild Wars 2, which is actually some "come back 3 years later and continue where you left off".

MonaroVXR 5y ago

>one I swear they make 3 utter shite too + their gacha games are not even that good considering the saturation on the gacha market and what quality games some other companies can make (see Genshin) I heard from sources that the western department is doing this. Sources: Are on Twitter, forgot the name. (Yea I know, that I don't need to "believe everything" so please add salt to my statement) Source #1: https://twitter.com/Genki_JPN?t=FlkGLMQE4aoCHqod-O68RQ&s=09 https://twitter.com/Genki_JPN?t=FlkGLMQE4aoCHqod-O68RQ&s=09

johnnyanmac 5y ago

> but for every single good one I swear they make 3 utter shite too That describes almost all AAA companies. I think Square takes more heat on this point because they are some of the few studios still investing heavily in the "AA" market. Outside of Avengers, most of the other projects people may point to aren't really the highest budget games to begin with. And those rough releases are something most other studios don't want to risk anymore. > + their gacha games are not even that good considering the saturation on the gacha market and what quality games some other companies can make (see Genshin) I mean, the entire market is trying to chase Genshin right now. It's a very arguable point that no mobile game released as of now is as good as Genshin, at least on a technical level. I understand why. The attraction of mobile is running a relatively low budget (say, "A/AA" level) project and having it profit for a few years until they need to recycle the assets into a new project. A game like Genshin is the equivalent of trying to put GTA V on a phone. Which may be technically feasible now, in 2022, but it'd get you laughed out of a pitch in 2017 or so when Genshin started development Remember, this would have been right before the Switch launched and had Breath of the Wild show what an ARM architecture was capable of rendering. Most other studios are too risk averse to consider such an endeavor. Console developers especially because they don't want to cannabalize their games with something that plays too closely to their $60 AAA blockbuster.

Cloudef 5y ago

To me xiv is a horrible game and barely a mmo. Square enix hasnt done good games for a while. TWEWY is probably their only good series but they barely market it. Also their strategy of releasing everything epic game store exclusive on PC is pretty scummy.

keeganpoppen 5y ago
can't agree about xiv-- i've never been an mmo guy, but have absolutely loved playing xiv. the story, esp. w/ Endwalker (the newest expansion) is fantastic. but to each, his or her own, i suppose. :)
- Cloudef 5y ago
  Probably because xiv isn't really a mmo but single player theme park, with some multiplayer features.
  - SketchySeaBeast 5y ago
    That's what a lot of MMOs are right now. Feels like saying that modern CGI movies aren't really movies because they don't feature actors. Unfortunately the age of EQ, where you grind for hours and hours with a group as the primary way to level, has passed.
  - keeganpoppen 5y ago
    i guess that's true, but my friends and i always kind of hacked the system in a way where we were all leveling in lockstep and stuff anyway. but yeah, the individual quests themselves are mostly single player, with some weird multiplayer affordances (like sometimes if you are on the same quest as someone else you can kind of fight the same mobs / make the same progress). i found all that stuff pretty boring anyway-- the trials, dungeons, etc. are the meat of the game as far as i'm concerned (and they are the ones bookended by the cinematics that deliver the meat of the story).

pavlov 5y ago

"Investments in blockchain, AI, and the cloud" sounds like they have absolutely no idea what they should do, and will spend most of the money paying very expensive consultants who produce delirious slideware about web3 metaverse opportunities.

elif 5y ago
Those seem like obvious areas of research for a next generation game developer. Perhaps you are overreacting because of a culturally normative skepticism toward the word "Blockchain"
- kevingadd 5y ago
  Veteran game developer here: What makes "ai" and "the cloud" obvious areas of research for a next generation game developer? Games have had "AI" for decades and we've had neural net hardware on GPUs for years and years now which gets used for things like upscaling, global illumination, etc. "the cloud" has been available for ages and games already use cloud hosting extensively where it makes sense. All I see here are buzzwords and abstract terms that mean literally nothing as an investment unless your goal is to impress investors and specialist press. The blockchain is not going to do anything to streamline game development or improve game quality, all it can do is provide new monetization options... but traditional gacha games already make a truckload of money, so it's questionable whether the cost of moving into blockchain is reasonable for a company like Square Enix that can already rake it in via microtransactions.
  - elif 5y ago
    "games have had ai for decades and the cloud has existed for years" is not a reason why research in those areas is pointless. Your failure to, as you admit, see these topics as anything other than "buzzwords" all but confirms my original opinion of a cultural skepticism.
    - vvanders 5y ago
      I don't think the OP said those things were pointless, only that they are already actively used in industry standard approaches. FWIW I agree with the assessment, the terms are broad, generic and have no specific connotation for gamedev. It's not oriented at anyone in industry since you'd talk about specifics and not the "cloud", "ai", or "blockchain".

philipov 5y ago

They need to fire their loser NFT-deluded president and let YoshiP run the company.

GuB-42 5y ago
It is not always a good idea to let productive people run a company. Let YoshiP make games, that's what he is good at. And have someone who knows how to make money be the president, so that he can finance YoshiP games, preferably without too much meddling into the creative process. I am not into NFTs myself but if it makes money that can be invested into good games, by all means, let them do it.
SketchySeaBeast 5y ago
YoshiP is killing it with 14. Let's just leave him alone to build great things. Or at least until he gets 16 out first.
de6u99er 5y ago
It looks like all CEO's have agreed on legalizing pyramid schemes.
- sleepybrett 5y ago
  Pyramids are great for the pharaohs.
- pjc50 5y ago
  Rather like the Jan 6 events, once people get away with one thing they will try another. And another. In this case, enough people have made enough money from pyramid schemes without going to jail that it's becoming hugely popular.

bovermyer 5y ago

In the noclip documentary on FFXIV a few years back, Yoshida mentioned that he was considering leaving Square-Enix to make his own games. FFXIV is really good, but Yoshida is the soul of that game. If he left, that would be devastating. If you haven't seen the noclip documentary, you should. It's on YouTube.

falcolas 5y ago
He has since stated that he won't leave FFXIV. Has re-iterated it in the face of the 6.0 launch, since 6.0 wrapped up the main storyline and there were fears of his departure following that.
- bovermyer 5y ago
  That's great to hear!
  - favorited 5y ago
    He's also the producer for Final Fantasy XVI, which is being developed by his org (Creative Business Unit III).

baby 5y ago

I think a lot of their games are really niche too. Nier is definitely not for everyone.

bilekas 5y ago
Nier is easily one of my all time favorites and as much as I try and get friends to play it, it's so hard to explain what kind of game and experience it really is. A great piece of art.
- smcl 5y ago
  I bought it and got distracted by other games without playing it yet, I need to get back to it! Mostly was inspired by the Consolevania review (which had a truly bizarre opening minute that you might enjoy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X8jeEwL9QUM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X8jeEwL9QUM) edit: I rewatched the review now I totally get why I picked it up, Ryan's enthusiasm is absolutely hilarious and infectious ("It's just perfect as I've ever seen you can ride a fucking boar in it")
Longlius 5y ago
I mean, Final Fantasy XIV has something like 1.7 million active players at the moment. That's just people paying a sub at endgame. $25m in monthly revenue at the low-end is pretty impressive for a single game.
MomoXenosaga 5y ago
Nier also had a minuscule budget. I doubt they lost a lot of money on that. No it is their Western AAA projects that are hemorrhaging them money.
robonerd 5y ago
Few games are for everybody, but Nier: Automata sold millions of copies. The niche of action gamers who like asses is pretty big.
- morelisp 5y ago

sascha_sl 5y ago

Pivoting further into gambling utilizing their IP has worked reasonably well for Konami.

needle0 5y ago
People in the west seem to have become oblivious to the fact that Konami still makes games (and yes, by that I mean traditional video games)-- just that most of their library has become invisible from the POV of the west. Games like Momotaro Dentetsu and Pawapuro are doing plenty well in Japan.
- johnnyanmac 5y ago
  The enthusiast gamer market is a bit too laser focused on AAA video games at times. They do make console games, but the only ones that give the slight time of day to are PES (or some remasters of games they already like). I believe most of it is frustrated Metal Gear, Castlevania, or Silent Hill fans. Maybe even some old school Suikoden fans.