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Square Enix: Forspoken Sales Were Lackluster, Many Small and Mid Games Underperformed

"Game with a AAA budget but garbage game design, doesn't meet sales target."

Publisher:

Surprised Meme GIF
 

Toots

Gold Member
Just bought Forspoken cause it was more or less 50euro€$ with the lastest psn sale.
Played a few hours (im off to kill the first tanta) and it has nothing to do with the demo. It is much more beautiful (i play rt+120hz) and much more fluid.
The story is garbage, the heroin is crap, and there is a lot of dumb dialogue, but it has this japanese rpg feel to it, with quirky characters and dumb fetch quests. Side content reminds me of FF7 remake side missions. And traversal is really fun, and again the world is quite beautiful (at least twice as beautiful as the demo build, what were they thinking releasing it???)
The story is really garbage tho. There's a guy who's mind is half rotted by the blight which turn everything to shit. His whole ordeal is akin to dementia. It is really hamfisted. I'm pretty sure one of the taletless writer at squenix had someone close to him who suffered this tragic illness. And he really wanted to put his experiences in the game. There are moments during dialogues with the dude and his interactions with his daughter (who spent like 20 years thinking he was dead when he was just chilling half a mile from where she was the whole time - talk about shitty story) that sound so anecdotal while trying to be profound, i was facepalming on my couch. I too have someone whom i hold dear suffer dementia, the loss of cognitive abilities, the inability to remember his own familiy, and finally dies. I know how extremely hard it is for everyone involved. I'm not trying to be a dick. It is just done so talentlessly done it boggles my mind that someone so incompetent could find himself in a position to do it. And i'm willing to bet my cock and balls that it was an occidental writer who's responsible for that, and that he/she is very proud of him/herself.
 
I would rather they reduce the number of games they release and focus on a select few titles. Just put as much staff and as much time as possible on making Final Fantast 16, Final Fantasy Remake 2, Dragon Quest 12 as good as they possibly can be. I feel like they are throwing as much out as possible to hedge their bets, to not be in a situation where one o two failures will put them under, but to me that just shows a lack of confidence in their products.
 

Woopah

Member
Suuuuure, it was all the 'rebeeewwwwwers' fault!

Sassy Red Wine GIF by Married At First Sight
They are saying SE had too high expectations, not that reviewers are to blame.
I would rather they reduce the number of games they release and focus on a select few titles. Just put as much staff and as much time as possible on making Final Fantast 16, Final Fantasy Remake 2, Dragon Quest 12 as good as they possibly can be. I feel like they are throwing as much out as possible to hedge their bets, to not be in a situation where one o two failures will put them under, but to me that just shows a lack of confidence in their products.
I think the idea of having mid sized AA titles between the FF/KH/DQ mainline titles is the right approach. The issue is that most of their mid sized titles lately have not been good.
 
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NickFire

Member
Even if there were no technical issues the game was going to underperform in my opinion. The dialogue in the big reveal trailer kind of screamed that they were targeting a younger demographic. Maybe my kids and their friends are outliers, but it is really hard for single player games to grab and hold their attention. Pretty much never happens without something big to draw them in, like big IP they care about (Starwars, Spiderman, GTA, etc.). So at least in my house, the person most interested in these type of games wouldn't even consider it because of the annoying dialogue, and the people who I think were the target audience never even considered it for 1/2 a second.

So yeah, my opinion is based purely on anecdotal evidence, but it seemed they were chasing an audience that just does not exist in the numbers they thought it did.
 
They are saying SE had too high expectations, not that reviewers are to blame.

I think the idea of having mid sized AA titles between the FF/KH/DQ mainline titles is the right approach. The issue is that most of their mid sized titles lately have not been good.
But I think they are linked. The output of Square Enix is massive. They put out games like EA. They don't have unlimited resources and we are seeing that with their latest releases. They clearly can't do quality and quantity. When they have a mid size success like Octopath Traveller they should add that to their triple AAA Catalogue and make a big budget version of it and gradual phase out the failures. Thre is no need for a company the size of Sqare Enix to have more than 4 to 5 games in development. I think Ubisoft has realized this.
 

Woopah

Member
But I think they are linked. The output of Square Enix is massive. They put out games like EA. They don't have unlimited resources and we are seeing that with their latest releases. They clearly can't do quality and quantity. When they have a mid size success like Octopath Traveller they should add that to their triple AAA Catalogue and make a big budget version of it and gradual phase out the failures. Thre is no need for a company the size of Sqare Enix to have more than 4 to 5 games in development. I think Ubisoft has realized this.
Ubisoft put a lot of focus on big AAA games and the cost and complexity of that have put them in serious trouble.

More games like Octopath, Triangle Strategy and Trials of Mana would be good for SE. Quality titles that can be very profitable without selling loads.

If you give Octopath a AAA budget, that means it has to sell much much more just to achieve the same level of profitability.
 

Mayar

Member
If this is true, there is no option for this game to pay off, it is simply unrealistic to sell such a number of copies. Therefore, most likely with a probability of 95% it can already be said with certainty that the franchise is dead.
 

Kvally

Member
Started it up this morning. So far, so good!

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Sucks that Luminous has their copyright on the photos I took :(
 

Ar¢tos

Member
I think it's their version of Stardrew.
Decided to check the trailer.
Switch and PC only, I guess making xbox/playstation ports was too much effort.
Then they wonder why their games don't sell.
Square must be the only multiplatform publisher that has the money and means to release on all platforms but doesn't take advantage of it.
 
This is where I'm at with them. Late ports for exclusivity and half assed efforts when they do get around to it. I ignore almost all their releases at this point.
Same.

Favorite company as a kid and I can’t tell you the last time I bought one of their games
 

TheCed

Member
Voice of Cards: The Voice of Card games are fun, bit overpriced, waiting for a big discount is perfectly understandable. The Second one is the best of the Trilogy
DioField: I usually love War Documentary types of games so DioField satisfied that need, but too much is told off screen and it was clearly meant to be a franchise, I enjoyed it, but I find it hard to recommend.

Of coure, no marketing would hurt the sales.. there were a lot of games competing too.
 

hyperbertha

Member
It's a misallocation of resources. Many mid games like Harvestella, Diofield Chronicles, Various Daylife (and the list goes on and on) simply shouldn't have been made. They could've rolled the budgets of all these shitty games into something with AAA production values with more widespread appeal. There is only so far that pretty Amano-style box art depicting watercolor people standing on cliff sides can take you, when the Metacritic score averages 70.

I don't particularly mind their remasters since they are preserving their series' legacy. Tactics Ogre also sold relatively well and they did a solid job with it (for a change). It was more like a Let Us Cling Together+ with all the gameplay and balance changes. Live A Live was also fantastic and i'm sure the upcoming Dragon Quest 3 HD remake will be too. I think a case could be made that SE should actually invest more into their remasters, since nostalgia is such a big component of their popularity.

We've not seen anything from Parasite Eve for a long time, and having a remaster to refresh a series' relevance in people's minds can open the way for sequel development. I think this is probably why Valkyria Elysium flopped (in addition to it being low budget shite) - they should've dropped a remaster of Valkyrie Profile Lenneth and 2 first, and then released the new entry. That's a little something called marketing that SE need to get re-acquainted with.
Hindsight is 2020
 

Skelterz

Member
I’m convinced that if square-enix released a big budget traditional ATB mainline FF game it would do incredibly well, it’s like they’ve not shaken off there hangover from the Xbox 360 generation, turn based RPG’s fell off a cliff at the start of the HD generation but there back in a big way now just look at the success of Persona 5, Yakuza like a dragon and Dragon Quest XI.
 
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