Square Enix Loses Nearly $2 Billion in Value Since Final Fantasy 16

[Nebelheim]

Thinking back on it, maybe it was writing on the wall that they were legitimately trying to turn FF11 (what they consider a mainline FF game) into a mobile game. Plans ultimately fell through, but the mere thought is kind baffling when you really think about it.

Or because nexon is a horrible mobile game company with predatory practices and made no progress in over 5 years of developing ff11 mobile and square dropped them and decided to keep supporting the pc version for there current players instead.

[Noumenon]

Or because nexon is a horrible mobile game company with predatory practices and made no progress in over 5 years of developing ff11 mobile and square dropped them and decided to keep supporting the pc version for there current players instead.

Sounds like Square Enix with their various FF7 mobile games.

[Catwho]

Sometimes I feel like I'm the only person who liked XVI.... The game was a flawed masterpiece in my book. It had a lot of problems, but when it hit its highs, it was absolutely peak video gaming.

Hell, I'm planning to cosplay Jote (the Attendant) and making my husband cosplay [Redacted] since we've got the perfect height difference to pull them off.

[Atelier-Bagur]

Sometimes I feel like I'm the only person who liked XVI.... The game was a flawed masterpiece in my book. It had a lot of problems, but when it hit its highs, it was absolutely peak video gaming.

Hell, I'm planning to cosplay Jote (the Attendant) and making my husband cosplay [Redacted] since we've got the perfect height difference to pull them off.

You forget that our beloved aveyond is a big fan of the game too.

I also enjoy FFXVI but couldve used more meat and bones in a lot of areas, that many of the previous FF games had. Its a visual feast for sure tho

[Cilia]

The problem wasn't really XVI itself - it was a modest success, but SE wanted a Grand Slam and what they got was a home run. It still hasn't hit PC either, which will help boost sales (though not necessarily profits).

The problem is that SE made a lot of bad business decisions under Yosuke Matsuda. From the investment in NFTs (which are all virtually worthless now), going with the much reviled "Games as a Service" model that doomed XV to being only half-finished, flops nobody asked for like Marvel's Avengers and Forspoken (the former also suffering from the "Games as a Service" model), their projects taking forever to see the light of day and having a boatload of cut content, and how they're now following trends (FFVII:TFS being an attempt to ape the rising Battle Royale genre) instead of making them... people have just lost faith in the company to deliver quality products in a reasonable timeframe. The reality is that Final Fantasy and Squaresoft (not necessarily Enix) had its golden age during the PSX era, with its twilight being the PS2...

The only things they got in the pipeline I'm looking forward to now is the VII Remake stuff and XIV expacks, but really, the losses are a culmination of long-term issues.

[Kaliesto]

If you wanna get technical, the real root of the problem are the investors that are in it for the money on a very much greedy scale affecting Square Enix Corp, and that in turn affects how the games are made.

There is a reason why Gacha mechanics are a thing.

I know these Developers of SE and other companies don't want to talk about it, but they know its the truth.

The only reason I still keep supporting SE Devs and others because I know it was not truly their decision to make, I still appreciate their attempts at making a fun game, and/or adding lore to existing material.

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Not to say all Divisions of SE are like this, but some of them seem more investor/corporate minded in the wrong kind of way.

[Cilia]

Companies have always been beholden to the interests of their investors (shareholders), and those are typically to make money; gacha mechanics are just the most recent (and probably exploitative, being gambling by another name) expression of that.

SE's flagship titles are actually very light to non-indulgent in gacha mechanics (b.k.a. lootboxes), though like all mobile games the ones it produces are very heavy with them.