Square Enix Revises Earnings Forecasts For Major Loss

[FilthyDisco]

Square Enix has so much money, i'm sure they could give a shit less.

[Nuru]

Square Enix has so much money, i'm sure they could give a shit less.

Exactly, they are showing their Retained Earnings for the Fiscal Year, and not their Capital for the entire time they've been a business. This is how FFXIV is being funded, directly from the excess revenue they have been saving, aka Capital Account.

[Abriael]

Considering that they list clearly "revitalizing our major MMO titles" (Page 14) as a key point for growth, it's obvious that no. FFXIV is not in trouble.

Reading the whole financial report tends to be better than reading just some alarmist article written by some poor writers that are just looking for hits on their websites.

[Nuru]

Considering that they list clearly "revitalizing our major MMO titles" (Page 14) as a key point for growth, it's obvious that no. FFXIV is not in trouble.

Reading the whole financial report tends to be better than reading just some alarmist article written by some poor writers that are just looking for hits on their websites.

That goes to show that you can't base anything off of reviews unless it was your own review. :P In other words, "You can't knock it til you try it."

[Abriael]

That goes to show that you can't base anything off of reviews unless it was your own review. :P In other words, "You can't knock it til you try it."

It's not even a matter of reviews, really (while most journalists are not even nearly through enough with their reviews of normal games, let alone MMORPGs), the problem is that financial reports are long and boring, and require some knowledge to be interpreted. Which means that journalists will read them as they want, putting only the data that fuels the "big headlines", and ignoring what counters their theories.

The funniest part is that some went as far as hypotesizing that the lack of listing of FFXIV for PS3 for the 2012 lineup means that it won't be released, when it says *clearly* just over the listing that it includes "only previously announced" titles.

Sometimes the lack of reading ability of some people (or their intentional will to mislead their readers) baffles me completely.

PS: an actually interesting tidbit is that they spell their intention of digitalizing their catalog titles, which could pave the way for a release of FFXIV on steam. Re-releasing on steam as soon as the title is solid would be a very sound move on their part.

[Nuru]

It's not even a matter of reviews, really (while most journalists are not even nearly through enough with their reviews of normal games, let alone MMORPGs), the problem is that financial reports are long and boring, and require some knowledge to be interpreted. Which means that journalists will read them as they want, putting only the data that fuels the "big headlines", and ignoring what counters their theories.

The funniest part is that some went as far as hypotesizing that the lack of listing of FFXIV for PS3 for the 2012 lineup means that it won't be released, when it says *clearly* just over the listing that it includes "only previously announced" titles.

Sometimes the lack of reading ability of some people (or their intentional will to mislead their readers) baffles me completely.

Oh okay, i get what you mean. It does suck that it drives some people to believe whatever is said and its not even true.

My friends told me about this yesterday and how this was bad news for FFXIV. After I asked him where he got his info from (Kotaku), I took it with a grain of salt and explained to him, the real deal.

Now just imagine how many other people believe the same story he did. =/

[Abriael]

Oh okay, i get what you mean. It does suck that it drives some people to believe whatever is said and its not even true.

My friends told me about this yesterday and how this was bad news for FFXIV. After I asked him where he got his info from (Kotaku), I took it with a grain of salt and explained to him, the real deal.

Now just imagine how many other people believe the same story he did. =/

LOL kotaku. That site is seriously the scum of internet journalism. They spin their "news" so hard that it makes me laugh everytime i can be bothered to read one of their articles (which I'm doing more and more rarely, since it's a painful thing for anyone that has any writing experience or just a brain).

Bet the article was written by Brian Ashcraft. Every single piece of his that involves square enix is so full and drooling of seething hate that I wonder if some executive at SE hit on his wife or bludgeoned his dog. He doesn't even make the slightest effort to hide his bias. Seriously, one of the worst and most integrity-lacking internet writers I ever seen.

Every writer on kotaku has similar biases towards this or that producer (the bias Luke Plunkett displays against Sony is even worse than Ashcraft's against SE for instance), and loves to write hatemongering articles against them.
It always baffles me how any editor in chief with a brain can even think that allowing such crap on his site is anywhere acceptable.

[Cairdeas]

It's not even a matter of reviews, really (while most journalists are not even nearly through enough with their reviews of normal games, let alone MMORPGs), the problem is that financial reports are long and boring, and require some knowledge to be interpreted. Which means that journalists will read them as they want, putting only the data that fuels the "big headlines", and ignoring what counters their theories.

The funniest part is that some went as far as hypotesizing that the lack of listing of FFXIV for PS3 for the 2012 lineup means that it won't be released, when it says *clearly* just over the listing that it includes "only previously announced" titles.

Sometimes the lack of reading ability of some people (or their intentional will to mislead their readers) baffles me completely.

PS: an actually interesting tidbit is that they spell their intention of digitalizing their catalog titles, which could pave the way for a release of FFXIV on steam. Re-releasing on steam as soon as the title is solid would be a very sound move on their part.

STEAMWORKS PLZ.

That being said. I've love it if they could get the old PC versions of games on steam especially Edios old cateloge.

FF7 on steam? FF8? Legacy of Kain, Soulreaver, Tomb Raiders, etc. All the old classics. They could release it as a "Square Edios Collectors Pack" where for 50 bucks you get FF7, FF8, All the LOK, SR, Thief, TR, and DE games together.

[Cendres]

Considering that they list clearly "revitalizing our major MMO titles" (Page 14) as a key point for growth, it's obvious that no. FFXIV is not in trouble.

I was going to post this good thing I went back to see if anyone had already! Yeah XIV is just fine folks it's not being abandoned this isn't NCsoft.. *cough*

[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