A big investment fonds lists all issues of SQEX

A very interesting analysis:
https://www.3dipartners.com/wp-conte...-en-202512.pdf

They list things like:
* Fragmentation of the Development Portfolio
* Deficiencies in Platform Selection
* Deficiencies in Product Design
* Deficiencies in Advertising and Promotion
* Lagging Sales of Legacy Titles from Core IP

And they complain about high operating costs, and that there are only very vague management strategies etc.


Cheers

they should make gacha amiibos for the next mainline FF game where you need to gacha for the summons and there should be different rarities like there's only 1000 bahamuts but 100000 chocobo summons it would really drive up sales i think

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Originally Posted by Ajisaii

they should make gacha amiibos for the next mainline FF game where you need to gacha for the summons and there should be different rarities like there's only 1000 bahamuts but 100000 chocobo summons it would really drive up sales i think

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Eww. No thank you.

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Originally Posted by Larirawiel

A very interesting analysis:
https://www.3dipartners.com/wp-conte...-en-202512.pdf

They list things like:
* Fragmentation of the Development Portfolio
* Deficiencies in Platform Selection
* Deficiencies in Product Design
* Deficiencies in Advertising and Promotion
* Lagging Sales of Legacy Titles from Core IP

And they complain about high operating costs, and that there are only very vague management strategies etc.


Cheers

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SE has been in overall steady decline since around 2006. There has been some minor roller coastering along the way, but it's still been a downhill run overall. Honestly, none of this surprises me. I just wish the board would take note of it and actually attempt to course correct instead of using mobile game strategies and NFTs thinking they will somehow save the company when nobody wants that garbage. It's resulted in incredibly sloppy and disjointed development with blatantly bad games. They need to stem the bleeding but really all they've accomplished in their attempts is opening new wounds.

Have care about the ones who did bring those issues up:

Their goal isn't to fix or preserve SE ... but to take it over, saddle it with debt, sell the assets then book it. It is all about getting the most money out of this, even if that means collapsing the business if that suits their goal.

These people aren't your "allies" or "bros". They aren't going to "fix Final Fantasy", whatever your gripe may be with it.
They are the ones wanting to squeeze the company so hard, that even blood would come out of a stone.

But it's interesting how the budget allocation is, especially on Forespoken vs XVI.

We can crap on Forspoken all day, but it was just one game in an industry wide trend to appeal to specific audience that is very vocal and engaged with the industry, but ended up a minority of core gamers and resulted in flops from major developers and publishers all over the world. I would argue Dawntrail has aspects that are designed to appeal to that same type of player, too, but that gamer primarily sticks to indie and "cozy" games.

SE is just one of the many major game development houses that have trend chased for so long that the core appeal of them is muddied. Most of us think of SE as previously being the gold standard of high fidelity JRPGs, meanwhile they're making action games and Splatoon knock-offs with the fidelity of those games and wondering why they aren't making money, and their JRPGs still do really well.

Why not name the player type / audience clearly instead of beating around the bush?

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Originally Posted by RedLolly

We can crap on Forspoken all day, but it was just one game in an industry wide trend to appeal to specific audience that is very vocal and engaged with the industry, but ended up a minority of core gamers and resulted in flops from major developers and publishers all over the world. I would argue Dawntrail has aspects that are designed to appeal to that same type of player, too, but that gamer primarily sticks to indie and "cozy" games.

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There wasn't a real demand for that. It was at best being artificially pushed by heavily moderated social media and gaming journalists who don't actually represent gamers in any way. The main reason to point and laugh at stuff like Forspoken is because companies went all in on a trend that didn't actually exist.

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Originally Posted by CaptainLagbeard

There wasn't a real demand for that. It was at best being artificially pushed by heavily moderated social media and gaming journalists who don't actually represent gamers in any way. The main reason to point and laugh at stuff like Forspoken is because companies went all in on a trend that didn't actually exist.

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Pretty much.

Those games DO have fans and I absolutely saw the voices that asked for those trends grow and even delight in those games. But you are absolutely correct that it was artificially inflated by how social media is run.

Isn't this the group of finance bros who bought enough stock to have a say and are trying to basically oust the ppl in charge so they can put their ppl in charge? We have seen these groups do this over and over again, ruining company after company gaming, food, retail, etc so they can make as much as quickly as they can, and if that happens it will be the death of SE. Not the chicken little death of SE but the actual one.

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Originally Posted by Valence

Why not name the player type / audience clearly instead of beating around the bush?

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I assume you mean "woke?" Because there's nothing wrong with wanting games to have better representation and be more accessible, but unfortunately that had developers making games that were blander and toothless to try to make it inoffensive and playable by as many as possible.

You know, the creative mistake of making something for everyone means it's meant for no one.

It's no secret that Square Enix has been suffering outside of FFXIV, most of their new titles and ips have been colossal failures. The shareholder who wrote this up would want them to strip FFXIV of even more budget, and quadruple the cash shop output so he can get another yacht. It's not a good thing for FFXIV. Square Enix should focus on making games that are fun and good instead of trying to appeal to global trends.

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Originally Posted by Kelg

It's no secret that Square Enix has been suffering outside of FFXIV, most of their new titles and ips have been colossal failures. The shareholder who wrote this up would want them to strip FFXIV of even more budget, and quadruple the cash shop output so he can get another yacht. It's not a good thing for FFXIV. Square Enix should focus on making games that are fun and good instead of trying to appeal to global trends.

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Well, with dawntrail even FFXIV has been struggling.

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Originally Posted by Kelg

It's no secret that Square Enix has been suffering outside of FFXIV, most of their new titles and ips have been colossal failures. The shareholder who wrote this up would want them to strip FFXIV of even more budget, and quadruple the cash shop output so he can get another yacht. It's not a good thing for FFXIV. Square Enix should focus on making games that are fun and good instead of trying to appeal to global trends.

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Not really. The problem is, SQEX sits on many treasures but they are unable or unwilling to open these treasures. New IPs ala Forspoken failed badly because the games were bad, old IPs like Final Fantasy 16 did not well because they changed too much this alienated the fans etc. Then they have too high costs. I wrote it in another thread, that it is bad, that the game engine is still based on DirectX 11. If you use such an ancient technology, the development costs will grow over time. You cannot use modern development tools and you will run out of skilled developers, who know such an old technology. But this are all management failures accumulated into this 100 pages long report.


Cheers

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Originally Posted by RedLolly

I assume you mean "woke?" Because there's nothing wrong with wanting games to have better representation and be more accessible, but unfortunately that had developers making games that were blander and toothless to try to make it inoffensive and playable by as many as possible.

You know, the creative mistake of making something for everyone means it's meant for no one.

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"There is nothing wrong with representation and accessibility but"

Thanks for clarifying.

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Originally Posted by Valence

"There is nothing wrong with representation and accessibility but"

Thanks for clarifying.

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This lady is starting to try to pick a fight with me because I like the newest version of a Miqo'te face more than the old and it's immediately getting weird.

Read the entire post again.

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Originally Posted by RedLolly

I assume you mean "woke?" Because there's nothing wrong with wanting games to have better representation and be more accessible, but unfortunately that had developers making games that were blander and toothless to try to make it inoffensive and playable by as many as possible.

You know, the creative mistake of making something for everyone means it's meant for no one.

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Let me rephrase and add some detail since you are trying to warp my words.

Creatives in various entertainment industries took the wrong direction with trying to make their products more more accessible and representative.

In gaming, the former had resulted in more games being simplified in various ways to make it easier for outsiders to enter said games and enjoy them, but said games became too easy or boring to established players. (FFXVI becoming a button mashy action game with built in cheat tools is a good example.)

Meanwhile, the later meant we got to see plenty of games focussed on minorities, but most were written with an underlying fear of misrepresenting those same people. In a valiant attempt to try to make only good representation, these characters ended up being very boring, over-simplified, and either were "perfect" in some way and very often looped right back around into being offensive by being a caricature.

Thanks for clarifying (this time, unironically).

The previous post sounded quite different and raised a lot of red flags to me. Happy to see I was wrong.

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Originally Posted by Larirawiel

A very interesting analysis:
https://www.3dipartners.com/wp-conte...-en-202512.pdf

They list things like:
* Fragmentation of the Development Portfolio
* Deficiencies in Platform Selection
* Deficiencies in Product Design
* Deficiencies in Advertising and Promotion
* Lagging Sales of Legacy Titles from Core IP

And they complain about high operating costs, and that there are only very vague management strategies etc.


Cheers

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The result of many years of being all over the place with no real road map. I have no sympathy for the shareholders either they spent years watching things go down the drain glad their pockets are being effected.

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Originally Posted by NanaWiloh

The result of many years of being all over the place with no real road map. I have no sympathy for the shareholders either they spent years watching things go down the drain glad their pockets are being effected.

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Well, their entire plans seemed to be trying to appeal to western gamers, without paying any attention whatsoever to what western gamers want.

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Originally Posted by CaptainLagbeard

Well, their entire plans seemed to be trying to appeal to western gamers, without paying any attention whatsoever to what western gamers want.

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Par the course of the current western live-service/GaaS AAA industry.

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Originally Posted by Arrius

Par the course of the current western live-service/GaaS AAA industry.

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It's almost feels like ignoring gamers is a requirement to be a AAA game dev or publisher these days.

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Originally Posted by Valence

Thanks for clarifying (this time, unironically).

The previous post sounded quite different and raised a lot of red flags to me. Happy to see I was wrong.

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Yes, I genuinely meant no harm there.

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Originally Posted by RedLolly

Yes, I genuinely meant no harm there.

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Don't sweat it Valence just has trust issues since square Enix refuses to fix machinist and act like it's perfectly fine.

I think the funny example is/are people like Shroud who call for more multiplayer games (the Ark Raiders should beat E33/singleplayer games). Now multiply that by 1000x on social media spaces and then have the opposite opinion on the other side. Ends up being an us versus them.

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Originally Posted by MicahZerrshia

Isn't this the group of finance bros who bought enough stock to have a say and are trying to basically oust the ppl in charge so they can put their ppl in charge? We have seen these groups do this over and over again, ruining company after company gaming, food, retail, etc so they can make as much as quickly as they can, and if that happens it will be the death of SE. Not the chicken little death of SE but the actual one.

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You are correct on all of it. This entire thing is disingenuous and has the opposite of the players' interest in mind, these "shareholders" are the type that want for mass layoffs to replace with AI and care little about anything but cutting as much costs as possible. It also outright is misrepresentative on multiple fronts for example the cherry picked metacritic reviews and bringing up Dragon Quest 3 Remake of all things

SE just doesn’t try and think we can just forever accept mediocrity because ah yes this is final fantasy, oh well this is sakagutchi must be good, and doesn’t even consider that this nostalgia driven business model doesn’t work. Don’t get me wrong i am not saying they should kill Final Fantasy or Dragon quest or Octopath Traveler etc but at the same time they have to put effort. They have to make good games (look at capcom since re2 remake… then K O N A M I is reaching their we are so back era with Silent Hill lately). Meanwhile SE is only loosing players and makes very… weird decisions. For example: They just put outfits from a niche game Fantasian in the cash shop. That will NOT make people buy the game, what would definitely instigate more sales is in-game event.
They also keep complaining than 3+ mil sold copies on a platform exclusive title is bad meanwhile we have countless of games who celebrate 1 mil, while being multiplatform.
SE needs to change mentality.

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Originally Posted by CaptainLagbeard

It's almost feels like ignoring gamers is a requirement to be a AAA game dev or publisher these days.

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And if you ignore the gamers, you will propably end up as a McDonalds employee. And complain about it on Twitter or on reddit.



Cheers