Square Enix Revises Earnings Forecasts For Major Loss

[Vanas]

Square Enix announced revised earnings expectations today. The company says that it will incur a net loss of 12,000 million yen for the previous fiscal year. Its previous forecast from February 3 listed a modest net profit of 1,000 million yen.

The revision is due to extraordinary losses, in part from a "tightened selection standard" for games. This will result in 4.5 billion yen in losses related to development cancellations. A press release announcing the revision did not share specifics beyond this.

The company will also incur a "loss on disaster" of approximately 0.6 billion yen related to the Tohoku earthquake. This is for closures and restoration of amusement facilities.

As these are all extraordinary losses, revisions to the company's forecasts for its other areas weren't as extreme. Sales forecasts are down from the original 130,000 million yen to 125,000 yen. Operating income expectations are down from the forecast 8,000 million yen to 7,300 million yen.

Source:
http://www.andriasang.com/e/blog/2011/05/12/square_enix_earnings_revision/
link to official PDF :
http://www.square-enix.com/eng/news/pdf/110512.pdf

Could this mean trouble for XIV?

[gifthorse]

None of that made any sense to me so it would be rather presumptuous to infer disaster from it. But what I can say for sure is OMG THIS IS DA END OF DA WORLD RUN 4 UR LIVES!!11

[Radaghast]

DEY TOOK OUR JUBS

[Sonic_the_Hedgehog]

Well time to kill XIV so most of the trolls can migrate to the XI boards.

[rainfish]

Aren't they having an "end of world" event coming up?

[Bled]

SOMETHING is coming!

THE END IS NEAR!!!!

[Sonic_the_Hedgehog]

Well if they do decide to shut down XIV, just release a MMO modified version of FFXII and I will buy it on day one.

[Augury]

Actually... SquEnix kinda had this one coming, and it's really the producer's faults for the disasters of XIII and XIV in particular. Even worse, with the horrific reaction to XIII, they insist on TWO sequels for it and they made a Dissidia title FEATURING XIII characters. What SquEnix doesn't grasp so well is that FF Fan and Anime Fan as stereotypes don't cross contaminate as much as they hoped, and while the corn-ball anime jRPG that was XIII was ambitious in it's own rights, it was a FAILURE, and trying to promote it anymore is just insulting to those of us whom tried to like it, but just found it to be a FAILURE, and got over it. SE has lost a massive portion of it's demographic because it has abandoned us, much in the same fashion as CAPCOM's Inafune, and they could

a) Learn from the bad experience and try to leave it in the past as a mess that will be viewed as enjoyable in the ironic sense (like bad 80s action flicks)

or...

b) Promote the shit out of it in spite of the fan base having bad reactions to it. Most of us don't like playing a game that's a direct line with the 5 man band, an AI dependent battle system, and is only visually appealing if you think human beings are all poorly defined manikins whom ride motorcycles and have pointless drama (or hair which looks like roadkill dyed pink). The formula sucks, and if it never happens again, it's easy to overlook (especially if XIV is salvaged)

[Aizm]

Actually... SquEnix kinda had this one coming, and it's really the producer's faults for the disasters of XIII and XIV in particular. Even worse, with the horrific reaction to XIII, they insist on TWO sequels for it and they made a Dissidia title FEATURING XIII characters. What SquEnix doesn't grasp so well is that FF Fan and Anime Fan as stereotypes don't cross contaminate as much as they hoped, and while the corn-ball anime jRPG that was XIII was ambitious in it's own rights, it was a FAILURE, and trying to promote it anymore is just insulting to those of us whom tried to like it, but just found it to be a FAILURE, and got over it. SE has lost a massive portion of it's demographic because it has abandoned us, much in the same fashion as CAPCOM's Inafune, and they could

I was under the assumption that even though the majority of people disliked XIII, it was still a financial success. Besides, the other XIII games (Agito which is now Type-0, and Versus XIII) are not sequels, but merely based off the fabula nova engine. XIII-2 is likely proof enough that XIII turned a profit, no? And although I've not seen figures for the units sold/shipped for Dissidia, its a huge stretch to say they detracted players by including ONE character from XIII.

And I'm pretty sure that this article is not anything new. Didn't they revise their earnings for the last fiscal year shortly after XIV's release, noting they would take a major loss? Yoshi-P himself discussed this in a letter, saying XIV's near future is safe because SE independently funds this (maybe all?) project rather than seek investments externally.

EDIT: Here's some financial info pulled from wiki:

In March 2010, Square Enix stated that Final Fantasy XIII was the fastest-selling title in the franchise's history.By April of the same year, American game sales for the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 reached an estimated 800,000 and 500,000 units respectively. As of May 18, 2010, Final Fantasy XIII had shipped 5.5 million copies worldwide.

I wouldn't call that a failure

[yukikaze_yanagi]

/care.Funny op, your first post it's a "SE trouble". You have a brilliant career in ffxiv forum