Square Enix Financial Results Fiscal Year 2025

[brinn12]

FFXIV has been following the same formula for a decade, with its lead director encouraging players to try other games when they feel bored, rather than providing more content to keep them engaged. Each new piece of content has required longer patches. It's no secret that the game could fall back to pre-Shadowbringers numbers and still remain financially sustainable for Square Enix.

That said, Dawntrail sales were still a success, despite a significant drop in subscription numbers. Patch 8.0 will mark the first expansion released after a main story flop, which has traditionally been the primary reason players buy the new expansions. Meanwhile, many long-time players have been driven away by changes unrelated to the narrative, such as the removal of long-term grinds and the oversimplification of content and job design. Losing the MSQ as one of FFXIV's key strengths feels like pulling a rug out, and the full consequences of that may only become clear in 8.0 and beyond.

[Hallarem]

I never work in gaming industry, but if it is similar to my experience working in both western and japanese mega corpo then I can understand why Japanese one are failing.

Working in Western corp, we always have a few lines than make profits, not huge but steady profits. Big chunk of those profits will end up in developing new lines of products or even a new market.I work in characterization, and so many project got pile up we have to expand the team in very short period of time, and even set up a brand new hub for R&D. It is always a gamble and one of the organization i worked for end up firing 1/3 of the work force because gamble does not pay off.

Japanese corp, relatively converative, if the products are selling we do little upgrade and push it as improved version. We do put budget into R&D but nothing compare to what I see in Western corp. One of the biggest resistance is "change", quality department hate change, manufacturing department hate change, and higher management hate change. Investment into R&D take years to return a profits, and many higher management are so fear to bring bad news to investors.

YEah the whole saving face thing is huge in Japan. Someone has to take the blame and nobody wants to take the blame, so nobody innovates and change is resisted. The worst companies are so bad, that people tend to hire "professionals" to resign FOR YOU. So they can't be guilt-tripped into working with the companies or blackmailed into doing so again.

[Daralii]

FFXIV has been following the same formula for a decade, with its lead director encouraging players to try other games when they feel bored, rather than providing more content to keep them engaged. Each new piece of content has required longer patches. It's no secret that the game could fall back to pre-Shadowbringers numbers and still remain financially sustainable for Square Enix.

That said, Dawntrail sales were still a success, despite a significant drop in subscription numbers. Patch 8.0 will mark the first expansion released after a main story flop, which has traditionally been the primary reason players buy the new expansions. Meanwhile, many long-time players have been driven away by changes unrelated to the narrative, such as the removal of long-term grinds and the oversimplification of content and job design. Losing the MSQ as one of FFXIV's key strengths feels like pulling a rug out, and the full consequences of that may only become clear in 8.0 and beyond.

Them ceding their main selling point over other actionbar MMOs was definitely one of the business decisions of all time.

[Reimmi]

Can't wait for them to make another failure like forspoken or a mobile game instead of putting 10% of that into ff14 to fix the engine

[Striker44]

FFXIV has been following the same formula for a decade, with its lead director encouraging players to try other games when they feel bored, rather than providing more content to keep them engaged. Each new piece of content has required longer patches. It's no secret that the game could fall back to pre-Shadowbringers numbers and still remain financially sustainable for Square Enix.

I think we've finally reached and acknowledged the extremes people will go to that dev teams faced the simple reality that it is physically impossible to produce enough "content" to keep some people engaged. They can spend 2 years developing a full expansion MSQ with over 60 hours of gameplay, and some people will finish it in a week and then complain there's "nothing to do." Put simply - those people made themselves irrelevant, even when they love to get really vocal. Society has done what it always does - changes - and now the focus isn't on people who want to make MMO's their life, but rather one small part of it complemented by other diversions.

[Zelda206]

They can spend 2 years developing a full expansion MSQ with over 60 hours of gameplay, and some people will finish it in a week and then complain there's "nothing to do."

Except now that demographic has expanded because in Dawntrail, there was very little to do in the expansion because most of it was tied behind cutscenes with less than a handful of 'mini games' between them and even fewer dungeons scattered between THOSE. It felt "long" but what did you actually get to do? It's been pretty sparse across the board; what happens when most of the community says there is nothing to do other than to try to attempt Chaotic for the umpteenth time or face going back to try to pump life into older content and the same thing they've been doing and been seeing grow even more stale (such as Job oversimplification)? I'm not saying you're incorrect with your assessment, but it's expanded beyond the small elite percentage and exploded into the casual side as well, and the most casual side is the visual-novelists.

To that end I'd definitely take Yoshida's delightful suggestion and try another game to sink time into. If people got frustrated enough to not care about their houses anymore, subscriptions would plummet like a Shiva struck out of midair.

[Nana_Bear]

...They can spend 2 years developing a full expansion MSQ with over 60 hours of gameplay, and some people will finish it in a week and then complain there's "nothing to do." Put simply - those people made themselves irrelevant, even when they love to get really vocal....

They're never going to please everyone, no one can.

Aside from them NOT trying to "diversify with other games" so much (I understand the fear of having main income off ONE big thing, but they've not found a strong backup yet, IMO, and they throw too much money into those things), I think what they need to do is to look at what their major strengths have been in FFXIV.

Different people will say different things are their favorite, but let's look for a minute at a big clue: what expansion tends to be stated as the biggest number of people's favorite one?

Shadowbringers.

And while there were a lot of great aspects to it, great locations, etc., the biggest hook was that it had a really engrossing story, with some fantastic characters and great character development in already-known characters (eg. the Scions). For many it was the *story* and the *characters* that pulled them along through the game play. Yes I know some people skip ALL cutscenes they can, and some liked other expansions better... but SHB really engrossed the greatest amount of people, from what I can tell. And, unlike several other expansions (especially ARR where they were still finding their way and figuring things out), there wasn't much "run back and forth ridiculously just to give you something to do; most of what we did in SHB had a *purpose*.

I loved some of that in other expansions, but SHB was much tighter with story and character, and the pace wouldn't let you go. Like a good book you just can't put down.

The visual improvements have been fantastic. The back-end work going back and adding in DS/Trust for more and more fights, has helped many. The extra content at times is fun (the EW Manderville questline recruited me; I hated Manderville at the beginning, but by the time we got to EW's I was loving it. That one was a lot of fun!)

I think part of it too is that there's some very long-term problems SE still hasn't addressed---housing and hats/hair for certain races being big ones... and being able to decorate houses, and decorate our characters, IS part of the "side things to do" that a lot of people truly enjoy. (And the lack of response to player outrage over Cosmic Exploration's lack of synching Build Fates to lower population in zone, and added "punishment" for failure of "no Red Alerts/Mech Ops for 8 hours", has enraged a lot of people. Not good.)

So where do they make the most money: with people with short attention spans, or people with longer ones? My bet is the latter.

[Voidmage]

XIV nearly destroyed SE, and they are still paying for XIV til this day.

Given that the MMO branch generated in 2024 alone 304 million $ in revenue according to google and gpt and that Yoshida said in 2021 that FF had become the most successful FF game, I think it’s save to say that this title has long since paid its debt and more.
It also generated hype for merchandise like the Eorzea cafe or the lore books that gave additional money.

Japanese corp, relatively converative, if the products are selling we do little upgrade and push it as improved version. We do put budget into R&D but nothing compare to what I see in Western corp. One of the biggest resistance is "change", quality department hate change, manufacturing department hate change, and higher management hate change. Investment into R&D take years to return a profits, and many higher management are so fear to bring bad news to investors.

Japanese companies are extremely strange and I worked with one before as our supplier. I still remember one of them using a pager.
The country is a weird mix of modern surface and 90s core but companies are almost completely old school.
Traditions that hold back new ideas, a work culture that holds young people and ideas back and work times that are crunch hours and over here we already use ai for specific things.
And black companies are even worse there…

From all I have seen and heard SE is actually a really good company to work in over there and the FF14 side especially seems to be a good working place for their standards.
I think the biggest problem there is actually the sheer size of that company and that things are extremely quickly set in stone which is amplified by their culture.
And even the FF14 devs have a charming but cheap liveletter setup as seen in the last one (probably used an empty closet or something).

[brinn12]

I think we've finally reached and acknowledged the extremes people will go to that dev teams faced the simple reality that it is physically impossible to produce enough "content" to keep some people engaged. They can spend 2 years developing a full expansion MSQ with over 60 hours of gameplay, and some people will finish it in a week and then complain there's "nothing to do." Put simply - those people made themselves irrelevant, even when they love to get really vocal. Society has done what it always does - changes - and now the focus isn't on people who want to make MMO's their life, but rather one small part of it complemented by other diversions.

Society has changed? How? Gaming always had both hardcore and casual players, and when a company charges monthly for their servers, people expect content in both quality and quantity because they value their money. You're speaking like it's impossible for SE satisfy both groups. It's not. Most people here ask for a game catering to both, but I doubt this thought ever crossed your mind.

[Volgia]

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.

I mean... that's probably every company at this point? I'm not an expert in corporate politics / economics tbh, but listening to players and consumers doesn't have much effect on management and whatever the shareholders want.