Square Enix Holdings. Has Shed Nearly $2 Billions

Let's hope they double or triple Monthly fee! LOL

Managed by a bunch of holds with black suit, playing monkeys game with the community....

They deserve it, Period !

( ps: S.E, to make money just do a good game, and listen and respect your player base ..... ( See BG3 for advice ) )

but 16 did so well, how could it happen!

SE: still no profit from Outriders
SE: loses $200m on MARVEL games
SE: multiple mobile flops
SE: Forspoken doesn't make back investment
SE: Babylon's Fall bought by 3 people

You: FINAL FANTASY SIXTEEN

I agree. I predict Sony buys Square-Enix for about $4-6 billion in the next few years, hopefully doesn't kill FFXI in the process or green-lights FFXI-2 on PS5/PC only.

One can dream....

You forgot selling Tomb Raider

True, flagging confidence from the western market from selling Eidos is a big one

I really wish Square stayed in their lane. Growth is not always good. Make classic story telling games that captivate generations. Considering Generation X +/- a couple years are the biggest gaming hobby spenders, Square should...

Muh three million copies!

Square kinda feels like 2011 Blizzard. Riding on past successes while producing chaff

Square has always been boom or bust! Their failures are just usually of the "fizzle out" kind rather than the "exploding on the launch pad" kind, so they get memory-holed pretty quick. Like, remember The Quiet Man? (No you don't, you liar.) For every FF7R or Nier:Automata, there's a half dozen failures that we never even think about. Who's going to remember Babylon's Fall a year from now?

Even the games that people LIKE often have disappointing returns. I Am Setsuna was kind of fun, and yet the Tokyo RPG Factory division lost millions on it! (And then Lost Sphear didn't help things...)

But SE itself, no matter what happens to the stock price*, is functionally unkillable. They have a giant roster of stuff they can keep rolling out remakes and merch for. They have a bunch of mobile flops, but they try so many that once in a while one is going to land some whales. Their hits end up so big that they only need one or two in any given stretch of time to finance everything else.

Rebirth comes out in about five months. A XIV expansion arrives a couple months after that. XVI will eventually come to PC and Xbox. They're fine. Like, they're idiots who can't stop flushing money away, but they're fine and will continue to be fine. Literally none of this is anything that hasn't happened before, it's just XIV propping up the company instead of XI, now.

It's an indicator of confidence that square will continue to keep doing dumb *** (more dumb ***than good ***)

Pulling investments out of a sinking ship etc

wasn't it just a month ago that every single person here (except draylo) was arguing with me that SE is the most profitable gaming company of all time? (i'm being slightly hyperbolic)

what a difference a months time makes.

The original article that OP is referencing is talking about the stock price, which is falling because SE made less money than they hoped. They're still quite profitable, in spite of their best efforts.

That Q4 report is gonna be some ugly ***, though.

i think the problem here is that SE was already starting to slip with all the stupid ***they have pursued and say they plan to pursue.

they pumped out a main series FF game with all the correct elements (edgy heart throb main character, decent story, above average graphics) and it didn't seem to get the results they were looking for.

that is a bad sign for things to come for this company, thus the stock price slips further.

we need the zimbabwe dollar guy to come tell us that the stock price is up 10000% in zimbabwe dollars

Growth is always a good thing, horizontal growth on the other hand might result in too many chefs in the kitchen. SE should of focused on what they are good at, story telling with high audiovisual fidelity.

I agree, SE isn't going anywhere, they have far too many Golden Geese for that to happen. Worst case is they shed unprofitable divisions, though I suspect internal politics is largely responsible for all the weird crap they put out.

As for share price, it's important but not really something that the higher ups prioritize. East Asian big business has a very different mentality then Western big business in how they view short vs long term results. Western countries tend to focus on short term stock value as that is how "success" is valued and this executives / board members have a fiduciary duty to that value. Eastern companies value stability and long term profitability.

They key difference is that most Western countries, but specifically the US, double tax corporate profit. Net Income gets taxed once at the Federal Corporate tax rate (21%), then at the State tax rate (~8%), then again as distributions from that profit are taxed again as Capital gains (25%). $100 USD of profit is only $54.51 after both taxes are applied. If the company instead spends the money on capital projects / investments / growth, they can avoid that first 21% tax and likely the second, instead focusing on having the share price grow, then the investor only pays the capital gains tax when they sell their stock. Depreciation can also be taken against those capital investments to further reduce the book net income. This is the source of the whole "Evil corporations don't pay taxes" thing. Fiduciary duty requires them to seek the maximum ROI for their owners/investors, and this is the legal way to go about that.

East Asian countries tax systems are very different and generally encourage companies to give back to the local population. Japan has a tax credit system that reduces the effective corporate tax rate if they increase salaries by certain amounts, or hire a certain number of people in the local area. Korea is similar but with an even more esoteric system. Don't know enough about Europe to make a comment, but guessing they have insane corporate taxes too. Owners / investors are more concerned about long time stability and profits, they do not plan on selling their shares and thus really don't care what others would buy them for.

https://www.hd.square-enix.com/eng/ir/stock/shareholder.html

From what I can gather, 48.04% of SE's shares are owned by the Fukushima family. They aren't needing money anytime soon and have zero interest in selling the holdings. SE corporate elites will continue playing darts with ideas with the hopes of accidentally making more Golden Geese.

just an insane amount of cope.

if blizzard was in the same situation you all would be frothing at the mouth over the idea of them failing.

SE is in an insane downward spiral, your bias isn't going to change that. not an argument one can win on an FF forum though, way too many mindless fanboy arguments

I totally forgot these two existed.

What a time to be alive. A party oriented, turn based D&D rules game made by a small studio sells 5.2m copies in a month, hits the top 5 Steam concurrent player list, all despite a litany of bugs and problems. Meanwhile, SE cranks out two shiny ARPGs that flop so badly one had service shut down and is no longer available for sale.

Blizzard is an interesting comparison. They too are entirely too large to ever die, for much the same reasons: too many well known and loved franchises, a stable (if showing its age) source of recurring revenue via an MMO, and their hits are big enough to cover any missteps. The difference is that Blizzard doesn't take the shotgun approach that SE does, throwing anything out there and seeing what sticks; they have the broader Activision to do that, so Blizzard itself just sticks to its core IP.

That's a perfectly fine tactic, when your hits hit (Diablo IV made all the dollars), but it leaves you vulnerable if something doesn't (like Overwatch 2 getting review bombed into the Earth's core). The only real threat to Activision Blizzard is that Satan comes up from Hell to claim Bobby Kotick personally, and that makes the stock price dip for a bit.

I mean, there's some qualifiers there. Larian already had a well-tested engine from the Divinity games, has a long history of making very good games of this type, and a ***ton of funding. This wasn't two dudes in a garage.

i don't think SE is too large to die.

they will be acquired or sold for parts in the next 5 years.

Activision bought Blizzard and we got less good Blizzard out of it. Enix bought Square and we got a more Square and Enix games out of it.

Blizzard and Activision have negative Western optics and can't stay out of the news. Square Enix has good optics or at least obscured because we are ignorant of how things go down in Japan.

Both are too big to fail at this point. Neither will give it to you like you wanted it back in the old days.

Most importantly, this game is still in maintenance mode and is being handled for preservation of income...I mean players...so it's unlikely it's going anywhere other than the direction it's been going without a large shift.



If they are acquired, they don't die. They won't be sold for parts.

Oh, absolutely, they had a lot of people working on it for sure and a ton of funding/staff/etc, but on the scale of size, they are tiny compared to companies like SE. That's less of what surprises me, though

I think I'm less surprised about who made it and more about the nature of the game. It's interesting how a company like SE with a long history of turn based games early on is emphasizing this ARPG approach, resulting in two massive flops (arguably 3), while a turn based D&D rules game is breaking records and was a huge hit despite a multitude of flaws and issues. I understand there are multiple contributing reasons for this: surge in D&D popularity the last few years, Baldur's Gate as a brand (even though it's been 23 years since 2, people are playing 3 now that weren't born when 2 came out), ability to build on existing IP, etc, but I'm not sure those factors alone are enough to explain how successful it is. I never would've thought a game like BG3 would have been as popular among various demographics as it has been especially given the mechanics of gameplay.

I've said it before and I'll say it again, the gameplay mechanics aren't what have made people love Bg3. It's the depth of the writing, the characters, how immersive and real they made a world where you can cast magic spells and *** bears kill dragons feel. The detail and commitment they made into releasing a (mostly) complete video game in the year of our lord 2023.

Games like forespoken and Babylon's Fall didn't die because they were action games. They died because they were soulless, horribly written games with characters as deep as a rain puddle who felt like the people making them didn't give a ***. Mockeries and abominations that weren't worth $70.

Even if this is the case, what's interesting is that they are successful despite the gameplay mechanics. You can wrap up dialogue, choices, characters, and so forth into unpopular gameplay mechanics and people will never experience or play it because they don't want to deal with what it takes to get through it.

The types of mechanics at play in BG3 feel vastly different than other modern titles on that scale and even on easier difficulty settings are not exactly trivial if you fail to understand them. I doubt many people are going in with knowing these unless they played 5e, yet they are taking the time to learn the mechanics and play them, which are more complex than what many modern titles provide or require. Possibly due to the writing/story/etc, I don't necessarily disagree that's a big draw (otherwise games like Solasta would've been popular), but it's somewhat surprising to me that people in 2023 are willing to deal with that on such a large scale when many other titles are driving towards greater simplicity.

I think it's probably a cumulative effect, but even if this is the case, people are still playing it despite it using mechanics that many would have called 'dated' when compared to other similarly popular titles.

The game is also hardly complete and definitely wasn't at release, something that shows as you progress through it. They are fixing it, but it's remarkable to me how many review outlets still rated it so highly in this era despite these flaws.

So I don't necessarily disagree, but I think what shocks me is that people in this era are willing to embrace these mechanics, even if the reason is largely story/dialogue driven.

A big reason that they can deal with it is because people who have no idea how DnD works aren't playing on Tactician mode for their first playthrough. They're probably playing on easy mode to avoid having to use any of the advanced kit and tactics in the game, or at most normal mode where the bosses can be tough but otherwise the game gives you access to so many unlimited full heals and quicksaves that it is very hard to *** it up.

The problem with SE's games often isn't the combat. Their action combat systems have been largely competent and satisfying (even Forspoken has its moments here). It's everything else surrounding that. Barring XVI, they haven't had a banger AAA story with characters worth listening to since Ff7 remake almost 4 *** years ago and that's mostly lifted from a game that's 2 decades old and playing off of nostalgia

Yeah, that wasn't meant as any shade towards Larian. Like, the lesson to learn from Larian is that sometimes staying in your lane is the right call.

The last two mainline FF games have both had some great story beats and some excellent characters (16 in particular has Best Cid, and 15 has a really solid cast all around). The problem is that the stories end up as less than the sum of their parts. I liked both games quite a bit, but they both suffer tremendously from a real tonal shift (15, after you get on the boat, 16, after <redacted, but if you've played it you know what I am talking about>). The end result is stories with good moments but no cohesion (and incredibly dissatisfying resolutions to both games, for me anyway).

Even the "good" examples have concerns: FF7R's story is a fleshed out version of the best part of a twenty year old game. 14's story peaked in Shadowbringers, and while Endwalker itself was good, the 6.x patches have felt like a filler arc that somehow is rushing things AND taking too long.

See, I feel like they actually tried with Forspoken, and that just makes it worse

If you want to see how important writing/execution is to games, the Nier: Automata used repetitive graphical assets with a dull color palette. Technically AAA graphics, but think about how many skeletons they had to rig for it... Maybe like 40? Yet people love the game because the story is a well-written edgelord banger executed well.

As multiple people said in the CBU5 thread, SE just doesn't do compelling storytelling well in-house anymore. Even though theoretically single producers own a project, my guess is that there is too much pressure to produce a product that conforms to a market analyst's opinion of what makes a profitable video game.

The problem is that AAA games are just too expensive to give true creative freedom to some auteur. You wouldn't put a AAA game's budget on black in a casino, which was traditionally how the ROI of creative ventures was viewed when creative control was given to an individual. Data analysis can identify what popular games have in common and predict what your game will bring in if you combine X tropes, but the end of that is a poll tested piece of uncompelling median garbage.

Hopefully it gets cheaper to make games with good graphics and we can spend more of the $ on writing, give more creative control to the producer, and stop playing what an analyst thought would be a popular game.

CBU - Creatively Bankrupt Unit

You can hate the game but really weird to say this.