automaton-media.com
like come on mannnnnn. It reads like an investment group that has no idea about the product, if they want to point fingers at revenue and write off due to cancellations that's all fair but they know f all about game quality.
The Metacritic reviews thing is retarded, but there are a ton of kill shots in this presentation. Like this reads almost like a short seller's report, and it's coming from an investor with %10 stake (which is massive in publicly traded terms).it's a weird slide deck tbh, they compare any releases to MH game to show sales disparity. Which let's be fair, most games are gonna struggle to match whether it's Square Enix or whoever else. Then they pick random negative remarks about games to show their poor quality? I know FF16 has its fair share of haters on here but one of the comments is saying the music is bad
To be fair, Square was always a graphic powerhouse.Just go back to 2D and spend less time developing graphics, and more time developing interesting stories, addictive gameplay mechanics, and deep combat systems. Indie developers are shitting on AAA companies right now because gamers are growing tired of the shallow UE5 slop.
It's weird how they highlight success of MHW over MHX just to shows that consequent titles performed significantly worse twice in the row, dropping back to almost MHX levels.
The big issue posed here is "Why?", why is SE incapable of making new hits in the category when its rivals clearly can under the same market conditions?
Also not good when your rivals are doing far better than you in the same market. Fucking Konami is outdoing them, believe it or not!
Rn this is the category that's keeping them afloat.
MHW and MH Rise have multiple years of catalog sales behind them, the chart was only inclusive of data up to May 2025 iirc.
They're the Japanese Ubisoft.
Sega stagnating, Konami practically pulled out, Nintendo left for quite some time already. CyGames is strong but it always had much stronger slate than classic gaming houses.
How does "quality" (a questionable and subjective take) will help SE with financials?
Tbf, the Japanese mobile game market is very competitive and out of all the JP publishers, the only ones putting out successful mobile games in the past 4 - 5 years have been Cygames (Umamusume: Pretty Derby) and Bandai Namco (SD Gundam G Generation ETERNAL and Gakuen Idolmaster).
The overreliance on the JP market is another problem this report correctly calls out. Other publishers are far less reliant on JP sales than Square is.
And yet all of those guys are outdoing Square in a lot of ways. Both in the HD and SD games categories.
The only mobile JP publisher that isn't as reliant on domestic sales is Nintendo, for obvious reasons (Pokemon is the biggest IP in the world). The rest of the JP publishers I mentioned in my previous reply make most of their revenue from the domestic market, with the one exception being Cygames, since Uma Musume exploded in popularity in the west when it released earlier this year. Even so, half of Uma Musume's revenue still comes from Japan.
FF16 has the worst music of all FF post 7. It's basically hours of minimalistic cinematographic trash.it's a weird slide deck tbh, they compare any releases to MH game to show sales disparity. Which let's be fair, most games are gonna struggle to match whether it's Square Enix or whoever else. Then they pick random negative remarks about games to show their poor quality? I know FF16 has its fair share of haters on here but one of the comments is saying the music is bad
I think so. Isn't their whole MO to buy a bunch of shares, do a leadership shakeup, increase the price, and sell on stock highs?
Is Clive worth the dickriding he gets from the fandom? Whenever i hear about the game he's all i heear about.As a FF series fanatic and evangelist(i even loved and bought at launch ff15)- ff16 was big letdown(yes i completed it and bot of its expack, but again, im FF fanatic, not even ur normal FF series fan), even with my incredible bias i can only give it 8/10 with its crazy amount of huge flaws, and when im talking 8/10 think of it like 8/10 from woke reviewer who calls DA:V "back to form" in their sellout article
It's better, but far from the greatness of older titles.
He is solid most of the time, altho ofc he has some unrealistic story/behaviour thats very weird/opposite to human nature that i dont wanna spoil(maybe in 5 years i would once game is considered old
), but that stuff would never happen irl, game has so many other flaws tho u really gotta be crazy FF fan to look past them and enjoy the game, which i still did but had many immersion breaking/getting annoyed af moments we didnt get in previous mainline FF games(or at least i didnt).
The biggest markets for gacha games are Japan and China and China obviously even harder take for JP publishers.
"Conviniently" report omit comparison in SD games with peers. Just generals words about saturation of market for SE published SD games.
This picture is an average across all games released in 2021-2024, not just SE ones.
They are an "activist investment fund" so all they are tying to do is get someone on the board, cut costs (ie get people fired), maybe load the company up with some debt for "structural improvements", pump up the stock, dump and run.it's a weird slide deck tbh, they compare any releases to MH game to show sales disparity. Which let's be fair, most games are gonna struggle to match whether it's Square Enix or whoever else. Then they pick random negative remarks about games to show their poor quality? I know FF16 has its fair share of haters on here but one of the comments is saying the music is bad
I agree that Square plays way too safe; but yeah, this is some bullshit
Braindead investors. Cherry picking the worst statements they can find on a game that got 91% steam reviews. People love the DQ3 remake lol.
Not only that, every quote here is taken from the same metacritic user review. So they were very thorough and representative. Lmao. They took one 0 review from metacritic and just pulled the worst quotes, clowns.
A user that gave Dragon Age Veilguard a 10 btw.
This.
Be very careful with data and agenda provided by those lads.
If we were back in the PS2 era, the idea that SQEX can't compete with Monster Hunter would be seen as completely laughable.
Yeah I think it's a valid question. Why in the hell doesn't S-E have anything of the same magnitude as Monster Hunter? Or Elden Ring? Or even Clair Obscur? It's like everyone else is beating S-E at their own game.
The fact that Genshin Impact and Honkai Star Rail continue to rake in the cash with 0 from Square is abysmal on its own.
You have to sentences that can't be true in current reality simultaneously - "Quality always improves financials" and "AA and indies have increased significantly recently and offer more quality for your bucks than your typical famous IP".
Yeah, yeah, let's go into delusion bubble and sprout some bullshit with no arguments
They would be long gone if they didn't
