Square Enix Financial Results Fiscal Year 2025

[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.