Square Enix’s major shareholder drops 100-page presentation criticizing how the company is managed, rallies other shareholders
- Thread starter Thick Thighs Save Lives
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DonkeyPunchJr
World’s Biggest Weeb
Why shouldn't they be compared to Nintendo?
Skifi28
Member
Their IPs have never had Nintendo's success. They're not a first party publishers that sells hardware in the 100s of millions and has their own online store that collects 30% of anything being sold on it. They're a fraction of their size in terms of manpower, assets, studios. It's like asking your local hardware store why they can't be more like Amazon. If you use Nintendo as a metric then 99% of videogame companies are failures and should shut down immediately.
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Idleyes
Gold Member
It's hard to fault people for misjudging Larian's status. After all, Baldur's Gate 3 wasn't just an 'A' game, in my opinion, it delivered a full-blown AAA RPG experience. When a studio produces something that epic, it's only natural for people to assume the company's size reflects the game's polish.
Angry_Megalodon
Member
This is Honkai Star Rail, one of the biggest money makers right now. Arknights Endfield coming up next. For some reason, Square decided that their flag ship games should deviate from classic JRPG and become action-adventure games, chasing an audience that was not there.
Final Fantasy should be full JRPG (with complex mechanics and exploration) while Nier/Drakengard could fill the linear, real time action types.
DonkeyPunchJr
World’s Biggest Weeb
You must have a short memory. You act like Nintendo has just always had this insurmountable advantage that nobody could ever hope to match. But the truth is, back in the day, Square-Enix could've almost single-handedly made N64 or GameCube a smash hit by blessing those platforms with their flagship titles. Hell even Final Fantasy XV sold over 10 million copies, more than any game on Wii U.
So yeah, it's definitely fair to ask why Nintendo managed to grow their IPs into these absolute juggernauts while Square-Enix turned into has-beens. It's fair to ask why S-E's peers have performed so much better than they have.
Sethbacca
Member
They could make easy easy money simply by moving old 2d rpgs from the NES/SNES/PSX era into HD-2D updates with some QOL improvements. Minimal cost and all upside. The pixel remasters were nice and all but if they want to bring a majority of modern kids into the fold they're gonna have to drape it in modern graphical standards at a minimum.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.
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Poppinfresh
Member
Honestly, the pixel remasters should have all been HD-2D updates.
No need to update the gameplay, just update the graphics to the HD-2D standard.
Sethbacca
Member
I have no idea about game dev, but im assuming these old tiny games could probably be ported with minimal effort by tiny teams. But what do I know.
Skifi28
Member
Usually one makes a comparison about now, not 20 years in the past. Google was once a small company operated from a Garage. Every company should be compared to Google to gauge their success. "Why didn't your company grow like they did over the past 25 years? Be more like Google"
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Poppinfresh
Member
If they can port the original Dragon Quest trilogy, they can certainly do the same thing for Final Fantasy
DonkeyPunchJr
World’s Biggest Weeb
Yeah except Square-Enix weren't a tiny startup 20 years ago. They were juggernauts with some of the best (if not THE best) IP in the gaming industry. It's absolutely fair to ask what Nintendo (and many others) did right that S-E failed to do. It's not like they didn't try.
Skifi28
Member
As interesting as going back 20 years to see what could have been, that's not what is mentioned in their article. They just talk about the past 3 years specifically and why they aren't like Nintendo's. Sort of going back to the past and redoing everything, they couldn't have been like Nintendo's the past 3 years for all the reasons I already mentioned, maybe in an alternate universe, making the comparison terrible.
rodrigolfp
Haptic Gamepads 4 Life
DonkeyPunchJr
World’s Biggest Weeb
Yeah fair enough but they're asking why their revenue growth and profit margins are worse than Nintendo, Capcom, Bandai Namco, and Konami over the last 3 years. That's not the same thing as asking why they're not as big as Nintendo in absolute terms.
And BTW Capcom and Konami both have higher net profit margins than Nintendo. Capcom, Konami, and Bandai Namco have all had greater revenue growth than Nintendo over the last 3 years. So Nintendo is not an especially high bar in those metrics.
Loomy
Thinks Microaggressions are Real
At the time, yeah. This was a game changer.
Roman Empire
Member
I'll give it a full read later.
Northeastmonk
Gold Member
Last time I enjoyed FF was back with XII. I was on XIII's hype train, but that was such a linear mess. I didn't even bother playing it in English. I can't stand how they show off classic FF and then release slop. I'd much rather them remaster or remake a game than to trust them with a new one. I use to adore Squaresoft. The Remake has been good, but FF7's story is just being milked. They haven't made any good original ideas besides DQ, which is more faithful to why fans enjoy it than FF is. I felt like DQ3 needed onscreen enemies on the map.
Part of me really dislike games like Dissidia where they bring back all their classic characters and then their mainline FF series sucks. I can't stand Lightning, Noctis, or Clive. Not to mention how boring Kingdom Hearts III's dialogue was. I almost questioned why KH even matters besides the aesthetic.
Part of me really dislike games like Dissidia where they bring back all their classic characters and then their mainline FF series sucks. I can't stand Lightning, Noctis, or Clive. Not to mention how boring Kingdom Hearts III's dialogue was. I almost questioned why KH even matters besides the aesthetic.
BigBeauford
Member
Well if they want to sell more games and get the attention E33 receives, then drop all the dopey anime shit and start making games that aren't for the kids left standing at the dance hall punchbowl.
thicc_girls_are_teh_best
Member
And that's all I needed to read. Dismissed. Not wasting the rest of my time reading that, knowing how those firms operate.
thicc_girls_are_teh_best
Member
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.
Yep, 100%. Which is why I stopped reading as soon as I saw they were an activist investor group. These are the kind of firms that destabilize publicly traded companies so they can pump up the stock value, get rich quick, then dip before everything comes crashing down.
It's these types of firms that were trying to buy influence in Nintendo to "massage them" for a buyout or takeover from Microsoft in the future (ValueAct, who were acting as a Microsoft proxy as admitted by Phil Spencer & Matt Booty themselves in leaked internal memos). They offer nothing of value to the industry other than quick cheap money and doing the bidding of shady corporations.
Paulistano
Member
It's very uninspired, that desert music is a pile of trash.
cireza
Member
FF VII characters were ugly as sin back then, but it is this game that brought the money. Afterwards, starting with VIII, they became an absolute juggernaut.
DonkeyPunchJr
World’s Biggest Weeb
The funniest thing is that Final Fantasy and DQ have the oldest fan bases of all. Famitsu did some survey in Japan re. the average age of the fans of all these different games series. FF and DQ had the highest average age: 42.
Remember that next time some weeb tries to defend infantile anime crap by claiming it's for a younger audience lol
Idleyes
Gold Member
lyan
Member
half of this juggernaut almost went out of business back then
Loomy
Thinks Microaggressions are Real
Graphically - graphics technology - and overall visual presentation of FF7 was borderline unmatched at the time. That opening cutscene transitioning seamlessly into gameplay with the pre-rendered background was mind blowing to experience. And I'm saying this as someone who ranks FF7 as the 3rd or 4th best FF game.
Astray
Member
Most of their suggestions are actually salient and on-point.
cireza
Member
I am going to disagree here. 95 and 96 had both Panzer Dragoon games released on Saturn with already tons of excellent CG and elaborated universe. CG was everywhere on 32 bits consoles.
I don't find that FF VII went beyond anything we had already seen. The ugly SD characters felt totally out of place over the realistic backgrounds, and depending on the CG scene, they actually changed the design with sometimes the realistic character designs. This game is an absolute mess.