Board 8 > Are Square-Enix the most poorly managed major gaming company?

(+) Yeah! (+)

MenuWars posted...

I'm clearly not up to scratch here, but MH, still great, SF still great, MVC still great, Devil May Cry still great it's just whether you like new Dante/Donte or not.

MH - still prints money with regular game entries.

SF - SF5 honestly flopped. after an initial 1.4 mil, their Feb financials showed it at 1.5 million. meaning it sold about 100k copies in 9 months. it doesn't even have stumps, let alone legs. they're still pushing this but i don't know how much success they expect out of this anymore.

MvC - we'll see, they're milking this for what it's worth right now. generally when you keep doing this sales will diminish returns but who knows, maybe they'll get enough hype.

DMC - DmC was 4 and a half years ago. since then they've re-released it and DMC4, of which DMC4 did better. strong rumor is that they've been working on DMC5 for years and it'll be shown this E3. rumor's supported by the facts that 1) they had Nero and Dante's voice actors doing mocap months ago, and 2) director said he's working on a new game months ago. Donte is a mistake they aren't bringing back in any meaningful way, i think.

i mean... they're running fully on sequels but it's not very strong so far. they lack a stand out that isn't Monster Hunter and their best hope honestly is DMC5 right now. but after that? i don't know what they got.
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Well I meant for Square. Which yea could say that just shows that Square is more fucked but I dunno, they know how sacred that franchise is now so I think they give it the decent amount of devotion it needs.

Also there's been numerous games in between KH2 and KH3
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Square-Enix just needs to go back to Nintendo.
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Didn't Capcom recently say they expect RE7 to eventually hit 10m?
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i'll just again say that Square's mobile division alone says they're less fucked. at least they're doing something in gaming where they make money and can have new IPs. can't even grant that to Capcom or Konami.


also for Capcom analysis, it'd be unfair to leave out RE7, which was successful. still sequel baiting hard as a company but hey, at least it's a very different tone to the series.
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I'm not a Capcom enthusiast so I don't follow the company's sales records as closely as some other developers/publishers, but it's my understanding that Monster Hunter and Resident Evil are their biggest giants on the console gaming front. Both are doing fine, though Resident Evil isn't quite lighting the world on fire anymore. Street Fighter 5 effectively flopped, as Wang said. Could have gone worse, but it could have gone far better. It's the Star Trek Beyond of Capcom. DMC5 rumors are well-founded, yeah.

I like Mega Man X/Zero and Onimusha; that's about it as far as Capcom goes. So I'm not exactly a trusted source on this angle, because they don't make the games I crave anymore. But this is what I recall seeing in GAF posts.
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Wanglicious posted...

also for Capcom analysis, it'd be unfair to leave out RE7, which was successful. still sequel baiting hard as a company but hey, at least it's a very different tone to the series.

What's it at sales-wise right now, again? I forget.
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It's funny how topics like these never discuss Final Fantasy XIV, considering that ever since it re-released it's been Square's most successfull (recent) game by far. The director is a genius and the development process for the series should be a template on how to turn a disastrous failure in a major success. Rest of Square still hasn't learned from it.
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KamikazePotato posted...

It's funny how topics like these never discuss Final Fantasy XIV, considering that ever since it re-released it's been Square's most successfull (recent) game by far.

It's to be expected, really, given Board 8's general trend toward single-player gaming. My own news topics rarely touch FF14 for similar reasons; I just don't have any interest in MMOs. But when I do address the game, I commend it in spades; Yoshida is a genius, just as you've said, and his team has been working very, very hard for a long time.

The turnaround on that game isn't just sensational. It's historic.
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the last topic about final fantasy:

Jeff Zero posted...

iiicon posted...

Final Fantasy XIV is literally the only well-managed Square project.

You ain't wrong.

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RE7 is at around 3-3.5m I think? Well off their target of 10m, but that number is supposedly a really long term target.

They did save FFXIV big time, but the initial failure in the first place felt like classic Square mismanagement. Maybe online requires a different skillset management wise, which is why they can't replicate it with their western divisions.
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iiicon posted...

the last topic about final fantasy:

Jeff Zero posted...

iiicon posted...

Final Fantasy XIV is literally the only well-managed Square project.

You ain't wrong.

haha, truth.
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Yeah, all of us here have a single-player bias when observing company success. I love FF14 and I still only remembered it after reading this entire topic! Good to see it was mentioned in a previous topic though.

voltch posted...

RE7 is at around 3-3.5m I think? Well off their target of 10m, but that number is supposedly a really long term target.

They did save FFXIV big time, but the initial failure in the first place felt like classic Square mismanagement. Maybe online requires a different skillset management wise, which is why they can't replicate it with their western divisions.

FF14 1.0 is probably the biggest example of Square mismanagement of all time, even more so than FF15 taking 10 years to make. They did no market research on what made modern-day MMORPGs popular and funneled tens of millions of dollars into a blender. They even thought that it would be fine if the game was shit when it came out because it could just be patched and people would stay anyway. Their attitude at the time is still baffling.

FF14 2.0 happening the way it did was basically a miracle. There was ONE dude in their company that could have pulled that off and they found him. Yoshida is not only a very competent director, he's also a huge MMORPG fan who understands what makes the genre fun. He conducted a large amount of market research, had his developers play popular MMOs so they would be more familiar with what they should be creating, interacted with the community a lot and listened extensively to their feedback, ect. Unlike anyone else in Square, he made sure to do it all within a reasonable timeframe and budget. And all of these qualities that made the game's revival a success have continued on throughout its entire subsequent run.

There was a time period for a few years where Square's financial reports were more or less carried by FF14. Of course, most of the money generated by that game seems to be funnelled straight into egeregiously long development cycles for other AAA games that won't see the light of day for god knows how long.
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lol wut at the people saying Sega. Sega is easily the best company in modern gaming in both quality and management and you need to learn a bit more about what they've been up to in the last 5ish years if you think otherwise.

Crown for worst managed pretty much has to go to Squeenix, yeah. I'd say Konami for their borderline evil business practices, but as others said, that's a planned effort and played out exactly how they wanted so you can't really call it "bad" management. >_>
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KingBartz posted...

KH2 came out over 11 years ago

I would say KH3 still not being out is certainly out of the ordinary

... if there hadn't been any games in the interim maybe.
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It might be fair to question why their strategy team chose to focus on in spinoffs so much.
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Xiahou Shake posted...

lol wut at the people saying Sega. Sega is easily the best company in modern gaming in both quality and management and you need to learn a bit more about what they've been up to in the last 5ish years if you think otherwise.

I think they might be talking about Sonic, which has had its share of disasters even in recent times. Valkyria Revolution is looking pretty bad too.
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Wanglicious posted...

MvC - we'll see, they're milking this for what it's worth right now. generally when you keep doing this sales will diminish returns but who knows, maybe they'll get enough hype.

UMVC3 was six years ago at this point and company support ended fairly quickly due to Marvel's licensing shenanigans at that time, so people have been pretty thirsty for something new. I don't see that as milking. Its strong grassroots tournament support for all these years might have messed with your perception of that.

I'm hesitant to say that the answer to this question is S-E because while their high profile AAA output has absolutely been mismanaged for the most part, there are so many other things they get right. FF14 is a major win for them. Their mobile divisions have produced multiple successes (including pretty strong leverage of their Taito brands), and they've got a decent set of mid-tier games that people generally like.
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man, didn't realize it was that long ago. then yeah, that's thrown me off.
what also threw me off was the re-release for current gen. PS4 was December 2016, Xbone/PC was March 2017, and now you've got the sequel in September (tentatively).
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