Square Enix Financial Results Fiscal Year 2025

[CalvinDescoles]

https://www.hd.square-enix.com/eng/i...25q4slides.pdf

So yeah, basically the MMO division is holding everything together for Square Enix. But seriously — where does all that money even go? (Rhetorical question, of course… we all know the answer.)

Putting aside the digressions, what these results show is that — despite the disconnect caused by the reception of Dawntrail — it remains a financial success for the MMO section of SE. We yet need to know if it was better or not than Endwalker.

So… what should we think of that?

[TheInsomniac13]

Financial success must not mean that everything is well. Financial profit can also mean that they cut costs even further or managed to make fare more money via the cash shop etc. what ever the details of this numbers are we cannot know but I feel affirmed that any money FF 14 makes get´s sucked up by SE and put into other projects.
Meaning FF 14 Budget remains small forcing the Devs to make cheap design choices.

[All_Nonsense]

Financial success must not mean that everything is well. Financial profit can also mean that they cut costs even further or managed to make fare more money via the cash shop etc. what ever the details of this numbers are we cannot know but I feel affirmed that any money FF 14 makes get´s sucked up by SE and put into other projects.
Meaning FF 14 Budget remains small forcing the Devs to make cheap design choices.

You can see a major change in their operational efficiency between FY24 and FY25 - they must have cut a *lot* of stuff internally in order to have their NetRev go down but their OpRev go up, with increased cash on hand and increased owner of parent attribute. Talk about wrenching down the company. It seems someone with some foresight realized they were running fast and loose and took some major steps to protect the money; good management all in all from a purely operational perspective. There are a few things indicative of upcoming troubles and woes, namely, they only saw an increase in profit from FF14 of 17.35% compared to previous year. It's important to note that FY24 was the tail end of an expansion where it was supposed to be the "most dead" and FY25 saw the release of an entirely new expansion which is when peak player numbers should be expected. In order to maintain healthy income figures for upcoming years, it's important to maintain a healthy player population or - in the absence of this, make up for those missing player sub figures with additional sales through the cash shop or other means. We can expect the second part of that to be their most likely projected path and the one they're planning for. Consider the stark increase in cash shop releases just in the past year - their BI department is likely all over those metrics rn if they haven't already been. I project this simply on the basis of their clear shift towards merchandising, which has been significantly fruitful YoY (at least since FY23). All in all, SE is currently healthy and well at this time (at least financially). Very very interested to see if this is the harbinger of a new SE paradigm, or merely transient in nature.

Obviously this is just my shallow speculation notwithstanding any shifts in industry trends, and is of course merely a thought exercise. Just an interesting little bit of mind gum to chew on. This was fun.

[Drimn]

You can see a major change in their operational efficiency between FY24 and FY25 - they must have cut a *lot* of stuff internally in order to have their NetRev go down but their OpRev go up, with increased cash on hand and increased owner of parent attribute. Talk about wrenching down the company. It seems someone with some foresight realized they were running fast and loose and took some major steps to protect the money; good management all in all from a purely operational perspective. There are a few things indicative of upcoming troubles and woes, namely, they only saw an increase in profit from FF14 of 17.35% compared to previous year. It's important to note that FY24 was the tail end of an expansion where it was supposed to be the "most dead" and FY25 saw the release of an entirely new expansion which is when peak player numbers should be expected. In order to maintain healthy income figures for upcoming years, it's important to maintain a healthy player population or - in the absence of this, make up for those missing player sub figures with additional sales through the cash shop or other means. We can expect the second part of that to be their most likely projected path and the one they're planning for. Consider the stark increase in cash shop releases just in the past year - their BI department is likely all over those metrics rn if they haven't already been. I project this simply on the basis of their clear shift towards merchandising, which has been significantly fruitful YoY (at least since FY23). All in all, SE is currently healthy and well at this time (at least financially). Very very interested to see if this is the harbinger of a new SE paradigm, or merely transient in nature.

Obviously this is just my shallow speculation notwithstanding any shifts in industry trends, and is of course merely a thought exercise. Just an interesting little bit of mind gum to chew on. This was fun.

I wonder how much operational cutting and how many layoffs they had to do to remain profitable, considering how much the player base has shriveled Y2Y.



Yes, the money still looks good, but do you really want the game to turn into a microtransaction hub with bare-bones development? That's kind of what we're looking at right now. The "sound management" seems to be paying short-term dividends at the cost of long-term health. They're going to need to do something different to try to get people buying their games again if they want this to last beyond a few years. Relying on a pretty rapidly-dying MMO to hold the company up is a bad, bad sign, no matter how much organizational wizardry you can use to make it still work financially.

[Oizen]

Why put money back into your money maker when you can make flops? The world needs more shelved mobile games after all.

[MonsutaMan]

I answer rhetorical questions....because a question, is still a question......

A lot of areas.

Expenses, debt.....such as creating an MMO that costed $400,000,000......Along with other costly titles.....This is the belief of many....

"The failure of FFXIV 1.0 was cited as a major reason why Square Enix reduced its projected income for the year by 90%."

https://www.forbes.com/sites/insertc...orecast-by-90/

"Square Enix invested heavily in developing and marketing version 1.0, estimated to be around $400 million USD."

SE has been reckless......
https://tech.yahoo.com/general/artic...142904767.html

XIV nearly destroyed SE, and they are still paying for XIV til this day. Avengers was believed to cost around 185 million, compared to 400 million (XIV)...... XIV not Avengers is SE's costliest flop. It was deemed the most expensive RPG ever. This is how you soak up your money and wonder where the "Profits" went......what is a profit at this point? Hence, no level of success seems to be enough for SE (High expectations....).

[CaptainLagbeard]

It's FF XIV and Gacha carrying the video game side, as pretty much every other game they put out manages to flop... Either by bad decisions or just straight up falling into complete obscurity...

People at SE keep thinking the kinds of games that made them popular in the first place, like your old school Final Fantasies and Dragon Quests just aren't popular with people who played them... Instead, everything for them has to be an ARPG or a Souls-like...

[Atreides]

It's FF XIV and Gacha carrying the video game side, as pretty much every other game they put out manages to flop... Either by bad decisions or just straight up falling into complete obscurity...

People at SE keep thinking the kinds of games that made them popular in the first place, like your old school Final Fantasies and Dragon Quests just aren't popular with people who played them... Instead, everything for them has to be an ARPG or a Souls-like...

Just that at this point most of SE's Gachas have long shut down and continue to do so, it's never worth to get invested in SE's Gachas they have the tendency to end services for those.

[Volgia]

What are we trying to conclude from this PDF, I'm like not smart enough to parse through this.

[Greyhawk]

What are we trying to conclude from this PDF, I'm like not smart enough to parse through this.

That the backs of North America are keeping the Japanese company afloat with revenues from their MMO market, while also taking advantage of their online store sales, yet NA influence with regards to player feedback goes pretty much unnoticed. Before you say, "Oh, they took Reaper from us as feedback!" - Fantastic, one thing out of thousands they ignore and continue to ignore.

The hard truth here is like someone else pointed out - the management of that company is borderline run criminally. Their revenue is down, operating costs are up. That means they are going upside down, breaking their necks on trash that no one is buying, yet they are still producing.