Square Enix Revises Earnings Forecasts For Major Loss

[Rentahamster]

More info:

http://www.andriasang.com/e/blog/201...ada_on_losses/
http://www.nikkei.com/news/headline/...E3E2E2E2E2E2E2

Speaking at an investor's briefing on the 13th (via Nikkei), Wada explained that of the 12 billion loss, about 4.5 billion came from such things as Final Fantasy XIV's reworking and the cancelation of multiple titles. Most of the 4.5 billion was related to domestic development, he said.

"Our game development has become weaker than expected," admitted Wada. "Revamping it will take one or two years."

Wada attributed the poor state of development to weak communication. Creative leads did not pass on his opinion to their subordinates. Additionally, there was trouble with division of labor amongst technical staff, who were protective and would fulfill only their own roles.

The Nikkei article has another quote about FFXIV (rough translation):

延期されたＦＦ14の発売やネット版の課金はいつごろになるのか。

　「いずれももう少し時間がかかりそう。まだ希望段階だが、ネット版については今期中に課金制に移行したいと思う。中国市場への参入はそれ以降になる」

When will you start charging for FF14?

It looks like it will take a little more time. I'm still hoping to move to a pay to play system at the present time. After that happens, we will enter the Chinese market.

Let's hope Yoshi P has the managerial and communication skills to pull this off.

The internal structure over at Square Enix has been a real problem, it seems. I hear that taking the small teams that were responsible for the great Squaresoft games of the late 90s and then merging them into large dev teams didn't really help, since a lot of them retained a cliquish attitude and didn't quite work together that well as a whole.

Additionally, it seems that despite all the problems they had with the development of FF12, they didn't even learn their lesson with FF13.

FF12 postmortem: http://www.1up.com/news/gdc-2007-long-development-final

FF13 postmortem: http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/3...ntasy_XIII.php

This seems to make sense when applied to FF14, because despite all of SE's accumulated knowledge about how to run a successful MMORPG due to its success with FF11, they seemed to throw it all out the window and completely screw up FF14.

Well, here's hoping they can fix this, and fix it soon, although Wada said that it'll take at least 1-2 years. It boggles the mind how things got this bad. You gotta be blind to have not seen this coming.


P.S. SquareEnix, what the F*&@ were you thinking with Front Mission: Evolved. You should be ashamed of yourself. Step 1: Bring Front Mission 5 to the US on XBLA and PSN. Step 2: Make Front Mission 6.

Good job with Tactics Ogre, though. <3