Kintaro said:
Final Fantasy XIII has sold over 6 million copies so far. Its sold faster than any other FF ever in the US.
Sorry, but Wada's job is well intact. Even with FFXIV's sales. In the end, if they can turn the game around and gain a decent userbase, they will still end up profiting.
I'm not saying SE hasn't slipped, but Wada isn't going anywhere.
More to the point, people don't realize just how long Wada has been President and CEO. He was President and CEO of Squaresoft before the merger and he oversaw the glory years on the PSX with FFVII, which broke Final Fantasy out of Japan and made it the worldwide franchise it is today. He oversaw the successful PS2 years with FFX, my favorite of the modern era, and FFXI. It should not escape anybody's notice that after the Square-Enix merger, even though Wada was the President and CEO of the company that was acquired, he retained the top post. Enix basically acquired Squaresoft through a stock swap because Squaresoft's value was in the toilet after the spectacular theatrical failure of Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within. Nevertheless the acquirers saw fit to keep the acquired President and CEO for the merged company.
Say what you will about Squenix's missteps in the HD consoles era, and to be perfectly honest, SE's screwups are pretty much in line with the screwups made by the other big Japanese game publishers this gen. Wada has kept his job for a decade and a half because he actually did know what he was doing. It's fashionable to bash FFXIII but it did sell more than 5 million copies worldwide, making it the single most successful Japanese-developed console title this generation. FFXIV did manage to eke out 600k sales despite almost universally terrible word-of-mouth and reviews. And we still have FF Versus XIII in the pipeline. And for anyone who cares, Crisis Core and Dissidia both sold well and Dissidia Duodecim is in the pipeline.
The malaise which has infected JP developers this past decade has hurt Squenix as badly as the other big companies. The brain-drain from Squenix has been tremendous, starting with Hironobu Sakaguchi leaving, and followed out the door by Nobuo Uematsu, Yasumi Matsuno, and Koichi Ishii (Mana series). After Uematsu left, his fellow composers Hitoshi Sakimoto (FFXII) and Masashi Hamauzu (FFXIII) also left the company. Right now, Squenix is using a famous character and scenario designer (
belts-and-buckles Tetsuya Nomura) and a famous scenario writer (Yoshinori Kitase) as executive leadership of product development teams. No, that isn't good, and it reflects in the products Squenix is making these days. Oh, right, the other guy who's leading a development team is Akitoshi Kawazu, famous for making one of the worst games Squaresoft ever released (Unlimited Saga), and his team has been consistently producing shitty games this whole decade for the DS and Wii, namely the Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles series.
No, things are not good at Squenix, and it's hard to blame Wada for everything, even though it's always easy to point a finger at the CEO. Wada is surrounded by people who obviously don't know what they are doing because the people who do know what they are doing have all quit the company. And it's not as if Wada isn't fully aware his Japanese development staff are seriously stuck in second gear and failing badly at this generation, because he has overseen the acquisition of Eidos Interactive to form Square-Enix Europe. The first test of the new East-West Squenix will be Deus Ex: Human Revolution, in development at the new Eidos Montreal studio made up mostly of people who were tired of Ubisoft Montreal and quit. It's a 3-continent collaboration, with Squenix Japan's Visual Works studio supplying cutscenes and additional story work, Square-Enix Europe/Eidos supervising the project, and Eidos Montreal doing the development and scenario design. Squenix is pretty far ahead of the curve in the current movement among the Japanese developers in trying to collaborate with Western developers and DX:HR will be the make-or-break project for this new paradigm.
