Yoshi P - Your next live letter, DT msq and the damage to the brand

[DaveFishnomer]

I don't know where you're getting your financial information. It certainly isn't from the quarterly and annual reports generated by Square Enix. You've probably read about SE dropping a number of projects and taking a write-down against what was already spent. That does not mean SE is losing money. Fiscal year 2024 (which ended at the end of March) still had an operating income that was 3% lower than the previous year. It was still income.

FY2025/3 Q1 has not been posted yet. At a guess, I predict it will be much better than Q1 for the past several years. But we won't know how much better until mid-August, about 6 weeks after Q1 closed (end of Q1 was 30 June).

And again, since SE hasn't announced numbers since the end of May (based on March numbers), all else is speculation at this point.

I don't know where they got it from, but you don't have to be a Google master to find that ff7rebith was a 140m investment from SE but only sold 2m copies. If you assume each copy was 60$, that's a profit of around 20m, so it's not a loss, but it definitely has not done well.

While we don't have a lot of info about the sales of FF16, it was a 300m investment and sold 3m copies in its first week but dropped fast. Assuming it sold 5m copies overall at 60$ a pop, that would be 300m, so breaking even at best, so ya, that is most likely a loss here.

Now, for Dawn Trail, the data is not out yet, but End Walker sold 2.5m in preorders alone, so let's take that as a benchmark. As of June 2024, there were 1.4m end game characters. Let's assume some duplicates and say there were 1m individual players here.

Totaling these numbers, that would be 150m in pre-orders and 15m a month from subs, not including fantasia addicts, moogle station store sales, and additional retainers, so even if SE spent 300m (doubt) on DW, it would take them a few months to close the gap.