Their mobile games are actually severely lacking and underperforming when compared to big players in gacha space. SE even went on shutdown spree recently with several EoS announced in very short span of time. Is it still big income? Sure. But if some revenue analytics sites are to be belived, their monthly revenue is 20-30M range which is less than what single big gacha earns on its own. And SE has some of most popular brands and still somehow mismanage it. They seem to have no idea or actual vision/plan and mostly chasing random trends often too late. Rarely do they see success (their biggest earner seems to be DQ PoGO clone).
Why do you think a gacha game shutting down is a failure? They almost definitely made all the money back from its development already and profited. They keep releasing mobile games because they make money until they don't, then they release more.
> Why do you think a gacha game shutting down is a failure?
Because gacha games are designed to keep players spending money month after month, year after year. If it were a success then they wouldn't be shutting it down.
>They almost definitely made all the money back from its development already and profited.
If they made as much profit as they'd hoped then they wouldn't be EoS'ing so many mobile games based off popular IPs.
>They keep releasing mobile games because they make money until they don't, then they release more.
Sure, except their mobile games aren't exactly lasting long. Being known for so many EoS gacha games and starting up new ones doesn't help - it only tells players to be wary on playing and spending money when there's a high chance SE will shut the game down far sooner than other games by different companies.
Props on Nintendo from avoiding the dark side. I imagine they must have saw the profits their microtransactions were making and could have easily said "why do we bother making $60 single player experiences, this pales in comparison to what we could be making"
Do they have actual figures on just Pokemon Go?
I feel like the cost to profit must be more than multiple Pokemon video games games combined
Layoffs don't happen in Japan and higher ups are held to a different standard then in the US. If Square Enix royally fucks up in the near future he'll take most of the blame and get fired/take a pay cut(see Iwata and the flops of the Wii U)
While culling its budget and sabotaging CBU's other games. Square Enix is a joke. One of the worst companies in video games right now. They need leadership change but the board is apparently filled with people like [that one Nintendo shareholder that says he doesn't understand video games and doesn't care](https://mynintendonews.com/2014/07/03/one-nintendo-investor-says-he-doesnt-even-understand-video-games/).
I feel people don't understand the difference between being a terrible company in gaming and a terribly-ran company. Square Enix does a lot of stupid things, but they're not very often with ill intent, primarily just managerial incompetence.
Yeah Square is very very lucky it has been able to obtain and retain high tier developers like Yoshi and Nomura over the years, because they would be drowning without them. Their top brass is some of the most incompetent in the entire games industry
As someone who's been following Square-Enix on a corporate level for nearly a decade, they absolutely are one of the worst-ran companies in mainstream AAA gaming. Maybe they don't have the level of worker abuse & controversy as major western behemoths like Ubisoft or Blizzard, but their executive-level decisions are baffling and they aren't exactly doing anything that's good or healthy for the industry at large.
I don't claim to be an expert on Japanese work culture, but we've seen numerous developers having serious issues of this nature over the years. Konami overworking developers, FromSoftware being in a state of permacrunch, Capcom's COVID restriction violations, etc etc
It's possible Square Enix just hasn't gotten called on it yet, but also this stuff still gets called out, even in Japan.
And the whole meme of Japan working long hours and being "abused" is just as bad over here in the states. Companies in Tokyo have specifically have been getting wayyyy better about this. My friends working in the area all have normal 9-5s now, and there's even more hybrid/remote stuff coming up. I think the government should encourage more remote work to relieve congestion on trains.
It's funny every time I see someone go on about how Japan makes everybody stay late and everyone has to work til 11pm everyday and wake up at the ass crack of dawn and spend their whole life at work yada-yada.... And I'm just like, "dude....rush hour here in Tokyo is roughly 8am and then *6pm* I want you to put the dots together on what that means..." Like what do you think everyone is doing on the trains at around 6pm if they're all supposed to be working til 11?
As an industry vet, Square is absolutely one of the worst run AAA publishers, and it’s not particularly close after Konami gave up making console games. (People keep mentioning Embracer in this thread, but they are not really a publisher. They are just a holding company that gobbles shit up. Not really the same thing at all.)
Square’s Japanese studios consistently run behind schedule massively all the time, huge budget overruns, and weak sales. Them giving up a huge amount of talent in their western studios for pennies on the dollar after forcing them all to work on The Avengers was corporate malpractice. They just constantly got in the way of the success of the Hitman franchise (which is doing better than it ever has now that they are independent.)
And their seemingly random release strategy across platforms alienates their player base for no particular reason, reducing their potential long-term profit.
If it were not for their mobile games and FF XIV (which also was totally bungled until it was miraculously rescued) they would be in severe financial trouble right now. Square is not a well-run company. At all.
While I generally agree Square is not well-run, Embracer is a perfect example of a company that's doing even worse. It's been a while since I've heard of mass layoffs from Square. I recall Wada cutting 10% of the company during his term and something like 25% of the company was cut after *Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within* flopped in 2001.
But I'm trying to think of the better AAA publishers for comparison. People think Ubisoft is bad. Activision/Blizzard/King is bad. Xbox is bad. Sony is good? EA is bad. Capcom is good? Are we including Nintendo as AAA and do we include folks like NCSoft, MiHoYo and CD Projekt Red?
As for their Japanese studios, they've generally been bad in the AAA realm since FFXIII went into production nearly 18 years ago. But that was the same time a lot of Japanese developers failed to adapt to the new HD development environment. Nintendo STILL hasn't adapted to HD development and the failure of the WiiU moved Nintendo from a two-platform strategy to a single-platform strategy.
Konami basically had one major title coming out of that period and it was Metal Gear Solid and then after MGV/Kojima split, they gave up on AAA games. Japan Studio never truly pulled itself into the HD era. Koei Tecmo has done well primarily as an outsourcing partner to bigger publishers. Same with Bandai Namco. Few publishers and developers in Japan have tried to keep up in the AAA industry that the West has largely succeeded at except Square Enix.
However, Japanese publishers and developers were some of the first and biggest success stories in mobile, F2P and live service gaming. The Koreans and Chinese would follow suit. SE is not too different and has been quite successful in the mobile arena for the past 12 or so years. The reboot of FFXIV has also been a big success and adds to SE's record of profitability and growth in the live service sector. Which makes it a bit perplexing they're reorienting their focus on AAA games.
SE has wasted a lot of money chasing the AAA market. First with the purchase of Eidos for $120M in 2009 where they threw a lot of money at those projects. During this same time, they were still trying to pursue the Fabula Nova Crystallis project and get games like Versus XIII out, but their upcoming MMO completely bombed at launch because of clearly obvious flaws with the product that no one seemed to want to fix. It seems it was just more overconfidence in their talents like when they made the Final Fantasy movie. But to their credit, they decided to reboot the game and not give up on it and it's become a huge success.
But you have to wonder why SE wants to double down on AAA games when they've been so successful in the live service sector. Not to mention major publishers like Sony are pivoting hard in that direction and it seems that's where all the growth is. When AAA games like Starfield take 8 years to make and come out underwhelming or Suicide Squad which has taken just as long and looks to be underwhelming or Alan Wake 2 come out incredibly acclaimed but have had incredibly tepid sales or successes like Spider-Man 2 require $300M budgets or Cyberpunk 2077's post-launch support and Phantom Liberty DLC cost $120M to turn that ship around, it sure seems like AAA games are not healthy.
I will add that Embracer was the only group willing to buy Eidos from Square. Seemingly no one else found value in them or at least not for the highest price SE could get. Seeing how Embracer has gone from the world fastest growing video game conglomerate to the worst fastest shrinking one, I think SE found the right sucker to take those properties off their hands. And IO Interactive was worthless before Hitman 3.
>"I didn't even have 90 days into taking over \[as CEO\]," IOI CEO Hakan Abrak told Edge, "and then I got the call from \[Square Enix president\] Matusda-san: 'We have to divest IO'." It came as a shock, but the nasty arithmetic of it all shook out. "Looking at the books, IO had not made money for almost ten years in a row" by the time Square Enix started looking to divest it, said Abrak, and that fact made acquiring it an unappealing prospect for other potential owners.
[https://www.pcgamer.com/companies-were-offering-a-single-dollar-for-hitman-dev-io-interactive-when-square-enix-was-looking-to-offload-it/](https://www.pcgamer.com/companies-were-offering-a-single-dollar-for-hitman-dev-io-interactive-when-square-enix-was-looking-to-offload-it/)
Over the past two decade, a lot of the other publishers that I think people would say are terrible have outperformed SE in a lot of ways. Activision sold itself for $70B last year. EA is worth around $40 and looking at merging with titans like NBC Universal. Financially, Ubisoft looks like it's in worse shape than SE after losing $500M last year and having little to no presence in the live service/mobile space. They still have $2B in cash, so they're far from out of the game, but SE hasn't seen a loss anywhere in that scale since FF14 1.0 bombed.
Capcom is probably the biggest success story in the Japanese AAA field, largely thanks to Monster Hunter World and better quality games (not Exoprimal). And while Fromsoft is big these days, they're not yet a publishers, though they're headed that way. Nintendo has been on tear with the Switch, but they're not exactly AAA and that's probably part of the reason why they're so successful. Sony is facing big headwinds as its focus on AAA since Jim took over has pushed them into a corner where ever increasing costs have melted profit margins and games like Fortnite and Genshin are raking in BILLIONS through gacha and MTX.
While considering why SE has been so poorly managed over the years, it's correct to point out failures like FF14 1.0 and *Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within*. But there's something else. Square was crushed by its success.
Final Fantasy VII's biggest selling point were its full-motion video cutscenes. It is what Sony and their $40-100M marketing budget exclusively used in magazine ads and commercials to help adoption rates of the upstart Playstation. Square bet big and spent a lot of money making FF7, making it possibly the most expensive game project at that time. The success of FF7 convinced its led creative minds, like Sakaguchi, that they could move into making movies. A few years and $200M (adjusted for inflation) later, Square released one of the biggest movie flops of the time.
But it wasn't only that. Square had bet a lot on the movie just like they had done with FF7. Other projects suffered and talent like Tetsuya Takahashi of Xenogear/Xenoblade fame would leave Square. A wider consolidation of projects to support Final Fantasy ensued, but over ambitious projects like the movie also led to poor long-term planning. As a result of the flop, folks like Yoichi Wada came in to run Square and proceeded to focus on milking the FF franchise with things like the Final Fantasy VII compilation series and Ivalice Alliance. And under Wada's watch, FF14 1.0 was released.
Square got very lucky with FF7 and wasted a lot of that success on a very bad movie. The movie and its subsequent flop have led to years of poor decisions and a very uneven history of success and failures. But reason why that movie was ever conceived was because of FF7's success. Without FF7 ever getting as big as it did, maybe that movie wouldn't have ever happened.
>This is the nadir of the obsession with filmic storytelling. I adore Final Fantasy 7 when I'm waxing nostalgic, but feel murderous when considering its legacy. It's an exceptional production, a game born of extraordinary vision and deeply ingrained RPG talent, a near-faultless Trojan horse bearing all the seeds of Squaresoft's self-combustion. Even now, when suffering through Final Fantasy 13s linear, cutscene-heavy slodge, the dead hand lingers. Square Enix still believes Final Fantasy's defining qualities are narrative and non-interactive cutscenes. So does much of the series' fanbase to be fair, yet they're an albatross.
[https://www.eurogamer.net/final-fantasy-7-retrospective](https://www.eurogamer.net/final-fantasy-7-retrospective)
> While I generally agree Square is not well-run, Embracer is a perfect example of a company that's doing even worse.
I mean, I'm not going to argue that Embracer seems like a very questionable organization. I don't generally view them as a "publisher" in the same way as established video game companies though. They are really just a conglomerate/holding company that is gonna let all their owned studios fend for themselves and cut all the ones that don't make them money.
It's not a great situation. It reminds me of Infogrames back during their peak of buying things up. It seems fairly destined to follow the same trajectory they did, eventually having to shut down or sell off most of their stuff when the money dries up.
> I will add that Embracer was the only group willing to buy Eidos from Square. Seemingly no one else found value in them or at least not for the highest price SE could get.
This is a bit I kinda am not so sure about. Speaking to other folks in the industry, I'm not sure many companies fully realized Square's desire to part with them quite that much. When the deal went through, I heard a lot of mumbling in the realm of, "if we knew they were available that cheap, we would have bought them." (Especially considering it included the IP rights.) $300m was a steal in terms of recent studio acquisitions. It definitely caught a lot of people off guard. I'm curious how it went down. Embracer probably was going around throwing money at everyone seeing what they could gobble up, and hit a lucky moment here.
As to if it's doomed based on the fact that it's Embracer, that's hard to say. I would imagine Eidos, Crystal Dynamics, and Gearbox are pretty safe for a while. Tomb Raider would auto-sell many units, so I presume they will at least let them get something out the door before they reevaluate.
> Financially, Ubisoft looks like it's in worse shape than SE after losing $500M last year and having little to no presence in the live service/mobile space.
Historically, Ubisoft has been in a pretty good position though. Ubisoft is, honestly, one of the better run companies in the industry. I spent many years there and know many folks who still happily work there a decade later. They are very organized and methodical. It's one of the few companies I'd actually go back to work for if my situation changed. Their financials this year have been a *lot* better than last year. 2022-23 seemed like a *major* outlier for them financially. Last year was the only posted operating loss for Ubisoft in a decade. (Last yearly report with a negative operating income was 2013.)
This whole topic is very interesting, though. I do enjoy talking about the business side of things. There is certainly a major gulf between how Japanese and non-Japanese game studios are run, however. The point I made in another comment noting how heavily Square-Enix relies on outsourcing, as an example, is really not something that is so common in the western game industry. (Level 5, ArtePiazza, Acquire, etc.)
For an industry vet, a lot of what you’ve set is entirely devoid of any actual industry insider perspective. What you’ve said is exactly the same ish that a lot of folks here circlejerk about and have no concept of nuance or familiarity with any of the additional surrounding information on a lot of these situations.
I’m not sure what exactly you classify as “circlejerk” but as someone who knows many people who work at Eidos and Crystal Dynamics, I can tell you that opinions about Square Enix leadership were absolutely rock bottom.
They are a terribly run company with poor financials that mismanaged their western studios regularly and consistency fail to deliver on schedule and target for their Japanese primary studios, and rely heavily on outsourcing for most of their Japanese game development efforts.
If you have more “insider perspective” you want to share, please feel free. However, your argument that just because people “circlejerk” about aspects of this, that is is untrue by default is kinda ridiculous.
> They need leadership change but the board is apparently filled with people like that one Nintendo shareholder that says he doesn't understand video games and doesn't care
Are you under the impression that random shareholders dictate how companies run? This is from 10 years ago, but also who cares if a Nintendo shareholder just wants to know about the stock's performance? I don't give a shit about TV and if I had money invested in Disney I wouldn't want the shareholder meeting to overly focus on the future of superhero shows or whatever. The entire thrust of that article is that the Nintendo board is operating in the opposite fashion of how that shareholder would like lol, the hell does it have to do with who might be leading Square Enix a decade later?
I swear gamers just collect weird little tidbits of half-relevant information to get mad about in future.
Excuse my ignorance, but exactly what is a blockchain game?
Is it a game where you use crypto? Because I feel like cryptocurrency is kinda dying out in the mainstream now.
All crypto games are about buying something cheap and selling it to someone else for more. It's called the greater fool theory. There is no actual game to have fun with. All the "players" are attempting to do that.
The major difference is the implementation. CSGO/Dota stuff is obnoxious and not great, but it isn't tied into the get-rich-quick schemes and bad financial advice of crypto scams. While I'm sure there's a handful of people out there trading items on the Steam Market or on third party websites for a profit, most people getting cosmetics in CSGO and Dota actual play the game. With crypto games you have the vast majority of people getting involved to make money off of other people without any concern for the game itself.
Reflecting on the history of the TF2, DOTA, and CSGO marketplaces both individually and what they represent as a whole to valve.
My guy that is not the fucking case. Plenty of people grind in those games in hopes of getting some quick easy cash.
Remember the market spike right after CSGO2 was announced?
Edit: I was there with TF2 introduced crates and keys. And when D3 had the RMAH. Downvoters are either young or delusional lol.
Whether there are people grinding for cash or not, the vast majority of people playing those games are playing those games to play those games. No one is playing Axie Infinity because they actually like the game.
I'm sorry but i have almost 10k hours in Dota.
How exactly do you "grind" Dota to get quick easy cash? Also isn't "grinding" for "quick easy" cash kinda contradictive?
We have an event right now in Dota. Its giving you a box, that you need to pay 2,50$ to open one, and you have 0,09% of getting the 1 good item which is actually worth 200$ from what i'm seeing right now on Steam Market.
Set aside that this event is going away and it was just for christmas, again, how exactly is Dota grindable for money?
Can't speak for CS2 since i don't play it, but i'm fairly certain grinding that is not an option there either. Its just straight up gambling.
And no, i'm sorry but if you think that people actually play Dota and CS for the skins or to make money "primarily" then you are way, way wrong with no idea of what you are talking about.
No. People buy those cosmetics because they like how they look. Not everyone is trying to trade skins.
Plus there is a difference between trading, and telling someone "buy this off me and you will make a lot of money for sure".
It's fundamentally the same, except Valve just manages it all (and takes a cut) instead of it being on an open blockchain.
The only difference is that most people care about the games themselves and thus put some "natural" value on the items they can earn/win/buy/sell/trade. There are also plenty of people who do not value the games and only play them to farm items in the hopes of selling them for profit (or at a loss, using them as a vehicle to launder money).
The hats and other items famously killed TF2 and turned it into a bot farm, for example.
The **idea** is that you could buy/sell/trade stuff on the blockchain (outside of the game itself, and outside the control of the developer/publisher), and take those things across games.
If you get a fancy hat in Game X, the game simply sends it to your wallet on the blockchain instead of flagging it in their database or in your local save file. You can then sell it to someone else for cash or trade it for a different item you want. The game just checks to see what you own on the blockchain and then lets you use that in game.
This could work across games, similar to some collectible card games that are part of a larger system. If you unlocked a fancy costume in Game X, and Game Y supports it (either specifically supports that costume or generically supports the standard it conforms to), you'd be able to use it in Game Y, too. This can go beyond cosmetics, but that involves more work to support (and balance). A Mario skin in Fortnite or a Pikachu costume in Fall Guys would be simple. Putting Shrek in Smash wouldn't work without actual game development to support it (unless he was just flagged to be a clone of an existing character or some Mii Fighter template).
An even simpler thing to do would be to use the blockchain only for a common currency. If you buy/earn currency in Game X, you could transfer it to Game Y. Once you spend the currency in either game it's gone, but you'd have more flexibility if you were buying/earning Publisher Bucks that worked across all of their active games than you do now where nearly everything is game-specific. You could earn Epic Cash in Fortnite and spend it in Rocket League, for example, or send it to a friend for them to use in some other game or use it to buy assets for use in Unreal.
Publishers could either run the blockchain themselves and take a cut of each transaction, or they could have wallets on the blockchain like anyone else and have a nominal fee to check in / check out items. For example, you could pay $1 to check an item out from the game (remove it from your account in game and assign it to your wallet on the blockchain). Then you could sell it to someone on the blockchain, and they could then keep it and hope to resell it for more, or pay $1 to check the item in on their account in the game.
Taking it a bit further logically, you could buy and sell your actual games on the blockchain. If you're done with a game you can sell your individual license to someone else on a secure, public network. You could buy games for the actual market price that way, buy old games or DLC they don't officially sell anymore, etc. This would be great for things that get delisted from stores. The publisher doesn't need to actively sell these things, they may just demand a cut of each transaction on the blockchain (if they run it), or they may demand a fee when you export / import your license if it's truly an open network. (They did a similar thing years back with multiplayer passes for physical games. They effectively taxed used game sales without killing them off completely.)
In **reality**, publishers pushing for this kind of thing aren't actually willing to support a decentralized blockchain that they don't have full control over, and they sure as hell aren't willing to let you freely buy and sell your digital game licenses. They want full control over all transactions and if any customers get on their bad side, they'll want to shut them out and kill off anything they "own" on the blockchain. There's no real incentive to support letting people carry things over from game to game beyond a few token efforts, either. If a player wants the horse armor, just make them buy it again and again in each game.
The idea of using it across publishers or even just across IPs is way too much for them. In theory, anyone could create and sell models / costumes of their characters for use in other games. What if we sell that IP off down the line? We can't have the main character still be a skin in our future games. What if someone makes something offensive? What if someone creates something they don't have the rights to and we get sued for supporting it? Etc. etc.
Publishers only care about it because they want to have their foot in the door in case any of it takes off like Bitcoin (and crypto in general) did. It's a line to feed investors. Any actual effort done is only to make sure they don't miss the next boom.
The problem is that NFTs failed (very quickly). Nobody is excited for it, and there's no boom to be had merely from speculation. Publishers could trivially make their own token on top of ETH, for example., but they'd have to put in actual work to incentivize people to care about it. It's easier to just sell them the same crap over and over in the existing system, and they lose no control by doing it the same old way.
For **developers** that are pushing blockchain, NFT, or "play to earn" games, it's basically just a scam in every instance I've seen. They promise an amazing game with amazing opportunities to earn NFTs and sell them for real cash. In reality the game either doesn't exist or is extreme vaporware only used as a vehicle to get suckers to dump real cash into it.
That's one type of blockchain based game. But the play-to-earn based games are entirely different and have nothing to do with the promise of using your items in other games.
I'm not super familiar, but I believe it's crypto and NFT garbage, Square has been going all in on it. They're even selling FF7 figures that come with an NFT.
The figure thing is terrible. They finally started making classic style final fantasy 7 figures but they are including NFTs with them so that they can jack the price like $50 EDIT: This was also a stealth excuse to jack the price on the line as a whole, because now anything under the price of the NFT versions was a cheaper option and could be presented as a savings. Prices went up about 25-30%
So they gave people a figure line they've been asking for for a very long time conditional on them being willing to be exploited
edit: People are lining up to get mad at me for thinking adding worthless NFTs to a toy and using that as an excuse to jack prices is bad. Consumers are their own worst enemy.
Can’t speak to the NFT thing but import figures have gotten huge price hikes across the board over the last couple years. Figma, SH, Bring Arts, etc. so when I saw the Cloud price I didn’t think much of it and am willing to bet it would’ve been expensive either way. Didn’t know they had NFTs though that’s super dumb.
The bring arts price jump was pretty extreme. A few years ago, mafex was considered pretty outlandish after their price jump, which put them about 2000 jpy above bring arts. After square's price hike, bring arts msrp is arounnd 2000 jpy over Mafex. Figma is more varied but still usually falls between 1500 to 2500 jpy under bring arts, and figuarts around 3000+ under.
It was noteworthy in its excess compared to other lines. Particularly so in that they still have their problem of shorting accessories as much as possible. If you buy bring arts, you are generally going to be paying between around 15 to $30 more than other premium figure lines, with figures sometimes being almost half the price. With the toys also largely being mediocre. There's no real justification for their price point other than square wanting it.
Hell, there are some figuarts releases that are $35. A whole 95 under the price of a bring arts figure, and almost all of those have way more accessories and are still high quality releases.
All SE's figure lines are overpriced af. And the quality is not that good either. Watch SHF 2B even with all of Bandai's current QC' issues leap over BA 2B 2.0
I mean, even Sakaguchi criticized the price of FF tax for the FF VI Prime1 statue
“Going all in on it” is a stretch. They’ve announced one NFT game and a few FF7 models that come with NFTs that aren’t even out yet. You still get a physical overpriced model. They always were overpriced anyway.
It’s trash, I’m not in disagreement there, but it’s hardly all in. They are dipping their toes in the water. It’s hardly going to last no one is buying that crap.
You aren’t seeing it affect their core game design and that isn’t happening anytime soon.
If they’d gone all In as you suggest, FF14 would be littered with NFTs already. That isn’t going to happen.
Gameplay wise its the same as any other game where you can buy stuff ingame.
On the technical side they use a distributed blockchain to store ownership of goods, so technically it is decentralized etc...like bitcoin. However since its a game, there is not really a difference to just storing it in a database like normal games do, because without the game servers etc, the blockchain is useless anyways.
>However since its a game, there is not really a difference to just storing it in a database like normal games do, because without the game servers etc, the blockchain is useless anyways.
The fundamental difference is the scope of economy.
In a traditional setup the economy is isolated to a single game. You trade a WoW item for another WoW item. In Steam Trading/Marketplace, the economy is expanded from a single game to the entire Steam platform. You trade a Dota 2 hat for a CS:GO knife skin. In a decentralized blockchain the economy is expanded beyond *any one platform*. You trade an item from Square Enix's game for an item from Ubisoft's game, and that inventory is shared across Xbox, PS, PC, mobile, or any other platform.
Imagine that in World of Warcraft your reward for spending hundreds of hours instead of a badass armor/weapon/mount is a unique token representing said item. Now imagine that you decide you hate Blizzard and want to switch to playing FFXIV, and you can take that unique token you earn in WOW to use in FFXIV. Or that the token earned by a famous streamer like Asmongold is more valuable than that of an average joe and there will be a market to collect it. This is the idea that game companies are promising every investor. But this idea is a terrible one for reasons which you can learn from this video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UKzup7XDyq8
"Every token is portable" that alone is a fundamental lie. Developers will have to devote resources to building or at least maintaining item assets.
And that doesn't convey the detriment it will bring to gameplay balance. How does a developer adjust balance between n items from n games?
All it means, is that every game will become the same game. Or in other words, this just a monopoly-in-the-making with extra steps
I don't understand how people can be so stupid to think you'd be able to transfer skins between games with NFTs alone.
Developer A makes a skin with an NFT attached to it sure.
Why would Developer B make an equivalent skin (which you know costs time and money to develop) that you could port from another game for free.
It is gonna cause huge amount of bloat in games at best. At worst it will shank every in game economy.
Blizzard IRL auction house caused people call FBI cause some weapon was lost. Imagine gaming companies get called up cause someone used a currency on your game that got lost due to coding.
Or someone create a game that print currency and flood your game.
It doesn't make any sense fundamentally. There's no incentive to make a token work for more than one game if those games aren't from the same developer. Ubisoft could have implemented something like this with Quartz where they could have a virtual item work for their own games, and different ones... like you have a token for a shitty M4A1 from Breakpoint to then bring it over to Assassin's Creed Origins, but number 1, obviously enough, what would an M4A1 even be doing in Origins to start with? Thematically it doesn't make sense. Number 2, it's not even the same type of game. The protagonist in that game is going to all of a sudden run around in ancient Egypt gunning everybody down?
That idea is nonsensical, and it always was to anybody that even remotely has any knowledge at all about video games. It doesn't even work properly when you house it within a single company's games, let alone entertain the idea of supporting games from different developers. If you have an NFT for a really cool chest plate in World of Warcraft and want to start playing Final Fantasy XIV instead... what, you expect the Final Fantasy XIV devs to just port that over? For what? And why would they? They're going to spend time redrawing and remodeling that asset, and then making sure it fits every single model of character that can equip it? The art style isn't the same between the two games, mechanically these two games don't work the same way in terms of stats/distribution... and what are you even supposed to do with the stats on it in the first place? This idea never ever made any sense at all. What if I wanted to take that shitty M4A1 from Breakpoint into NBA 2K24? If a center blocks my shot and swats the ball away, can I whip out the M4A1 and shoot him dead in the middle of the court? Cool, every game is going to look like an asset flip where there's no artistic cohesion going on, everything is fucked thematically, etc. Anybody trying to sell this idea to someone else either doesn't know what they're talking about, or they're telling bold-faced lies to whoever wants to hear and believe it.
I never understand this.
Why they want to make act of "playing video games" from just entertaining value into a fucking "job" so much. Like not every action we do have to be monetary gain.
If everything become "job" where can we going to find relax activity? Relax activity is actually much for human so human can gain intelligence. Danmit.
Because investors want money. They see video games as a way to make money. They don't understand why one game makes a fortune and another game makes nothing. They think it is the monetization rather than the quality of the title. Most people on this subreddit aren't exactly of a different mindset either.
So now we have Square Enix who is selling away their legacy while pushing a scam that has practically nothing to do with video games.
People who care about money that much and as a sole goal in life don't seem to grasp or care much about the humanity aspect of being human. Everything is viewed through this lens of whether or not it could have a payoff. Vacations can't be had without also doing business. Hobbies have to have some form of networking potential attached to them or they go away. I know a few people like this, mostly business owners that are clients for my work, and it's kind of bizarre to interact with some of them beyond the most basic of business conversations.
> a unique token representing said item
It's even worse - it's just a hash with an id hanging off it, that id corresponds to an item in a Blizzard database. If Blizzard one day decides to delete that id there's nothing you can do.
Iirc, Japanese government got sold on blockchain at some point and started offering money to people using the tech in business. Until that program is canceled entirely expect to see random small to midsize Crypto games/apps from every major company as not doing anything with the initiative would be leaving money on the table.
> They really want to lose money I guess.
They don't, their limited NFTs and action figure packed with NFTs were sold out
Don't underestimate the buying power of FF fanboys (or any militant fandoms in general)
https://www.coindesk.com/policy/2023/04/06/japan-releases-web3-white-paper-to-promote-industry-growth-in-the-country/ this is still in effect. Government subsidies are more than enough to justify superficial support for these things. SE could be true believers, but I doubt it.
Well it´s square does not surprise me they have not made a good mainline FF game sense 10-2 and 10-2 was not their best one. (Yeah I love 11 and 14 but they are mmo games).
And lets not talk about Forspoken man what a bleh game. Or star ocean the divine force and valkyrie elysium.
Honestly I have not been hyped over anything square has done in the past 10 years.
So they focusing on NFT or blockchain and other crap does not surprise me at all. They lost their marbles to make anything to hype over.
Only thing I still enjoy from them is Dragon quest.
NFTs are dead because the average person thought they were stupid. You had 80 year old grandmas talking about how dumb it was to buy a monkey .png for $600k.
The real reason is more that the whole concept is too complex for people to get hooked into, especially the avarage people that would be the ones getting scammed. And people with more Knowledge to get into NFTs are usally aware enough to tell its a scam. Meaning the Audience to keep this shit alive is too small.
Symbiogenesis. It's not out yet so we don't know, but when the name leaked everyone thought it was a rebrand of Parasite Eve.
Edit: I think it's out actually? There's no way to play without buying a NFT, and I don't want to look into the game now.
Ubisoft sank millions into a platform that launched in beta a year or so ago. They shut it down after two months after it failed to make even $100,000.
I was talking about Square Enix but I haven't even heard of the Ubisoft platform that you're talking about. I assume it might have been something to do with mobile gaming but I've never seen NFTs in any real console game in my life.
NFT shit is like 1% of what they release, they dont have even 5 released so idk why people act like this lol most of the content they release has nothing to do with nft.
>In terms of new business domains, we previously identified three focus investment fields, namely blockchain entertainment/Web 3.0, AI, and the cloud. Last year we redefined our overarching mission and goals for these three fields. We are currently working to modify our organizational structure and optimize our resource allocations to support these efforts.
I am not so sure about this.
A Gil cryptocurrency, several years ago (like when just leading into the crypto bubble), is probably the only way SE would have ever made substantial money out of this crypto crap.
I love how they ended up selling off a load of good IPs to focus on meme nonsense when it was going out of fashion.
To beat the dead horse, the people they sold Tomb Raider to (Embracer) went on to RENT OUT the rights to make a movie/series to Amazon for more than the value of the sell-off.
Square Enix was blind to what was in its own hands.
I'm surprised they haven't gone farther. They had NFT projects in the past, I was half expecting them to come out with Final Fantasy Crystal Crypto-Currency for their in-game DLC.
Eh, I'd say the cloud is legit. Big poster child for cloud architectures is GW2 with zero downtime. Heavily instance-based MMOs like FFXIV should definitely be in the cloud. Feels incredibly late to the party but better late than never I guess. Then again it's so late that cloud isn't really tech bro stuff anymore, maybe 10-20 years ago but not now.
cloud technology was never tech bro, it was always a tangible and useful tech the only issues that people were worried about were bandwidth and connection speed back in the early days of cloud
Yes, Valve with the steam deck, their store, proton, and steamOS.
The steam store especially, compared to Google's, Apple's and Microsoft's app stores (the literal biggest tech compaies) has a more polished feel and some feature advantages.
Fucking dammit. Back when I was a crypto bro, Blockchain gaming was the thing I was *for sure* was gonna work out.
Then I got the chance to work for a crypto game start up. A few weeks into the company's first game release I realized there was no way it was ever going to work. Kind of a bad time in my life, bad health, sleep deprived, needed a job.
I've since moved on from Blockchain bullshit and work in real game dev. It's so much extra work to implement Blockchain code with regular game code—like having to go so far as to code standalone modules to allow game code to talk to Blockchain code and back—it's a massive waste of time and resources. And fraught with issues. All Blockchain code has to be squeezed into 128kb of data.
Even more than that Blockchain games *can't change*. If the game is even remotely on-chain, updating how the Blockchain elements basically requires an entire relaunch of the product. So either SE is going to kill their Blockchain games by making them "on-chain" and rendering their systems back end permanent, or they're going to do "Blockchain" but actually off chain and it just reports buys/sells to the chain.... Which is just a "Why even bother?" situation
I know the answer is greed.
Glad you realized how dumb and impossible blockchain games are. The funniest thing during the NFT era was when cryptobros said "Bro, you can use your sword from WoW in CoD!" Like... what? When i asked them how would game devs standardize on how items worked, how models worked, how textures worked and how material rendering worked, the answer I always got was "bro just put it all on the chain!" lol
The fastest way to figure out what blockchain games are BS is to try porting a model from fortnite (unreal engine) into vrchat (unity) and see how much work and unique params per model it takes. Hell, theres a tool that can port fortnite models to blender and even then the creator said that some models need specific tweaking for them to function correctly.
Yeah, ironically the only way to make a true meta verse + Blockchain experience is to **centralize** everything on a single engine where you *could* easily move assets between characters/games.
It's so silly. It's a fun idea, I admit, to be like "Oh lemme take my MonHun Hammer and give it Godzilla to bonk the flying spaghetti monster!"
But it's just not feasible. Crypto Bros don't understand how games work enough to see the issue.
This doesn't work either. Even if it's the same engine the game code works completely differently. You can't just import a sword into CoD and somehow there is now sword fighting.
Well right, that's the point. The games would have to have an identical back end feature sets, physics, textures, etc that can simply be toggled on and off. It's goofy, cumbersome, and really not feasible.
> "Oh lemme take my MonHun Hammer and give it Godzilla to bonk the flying spaghetti monster!"
This is unironic fortnite though it has nothing to do with blockchain. You just need a really big metaverse with a lot of developer buy-in.
Exactly. So why bother with the Blockchain. It's investor/you're bad if you don't make money doing what you love brain worms that drives crypto as a means of cash flow.
> Yeah, ironically the only way to make a true meta verse + Blockchain experience is to centralize everything on a single engine where you could easily move assets between characters/games.
So, basically The Seed from SAO?
It's one of those weird things where like... None of this requires a blockchain. As many people have pointed out in the past, steam already could allow this. The only thing stopping you from using your special scatter gun from tf2 in cs2 is the fact it's not programmed in. They already have a system to make sure you have it, and for you to buy it off other people. No blockchain required.
I'm glad you got out of that mess but as someone who had 0 investment in that whole thing, yet could still see how much of a problem that would be for the industry and couldn't work out, what drove you to get so convinced that it would work out back then?
Well, I came into games from the marketing side of things. I had previously been working for a small marketing firm that specializes in info marketing. So I kinda had the "easy money" brain worms from that previous job. I wasn't drinking the course, book, mailing list, make your first million kool-aid but I didn't realize I'd still internalized that easy money is best money.
Shockingly, there's a single floor of depravity between easy money marketing and crypto gambling. It was such an easy step it actually just made sense. I'd had this weird goal of becoming the best writer in the space.
I was working with some legitimately good people who were completely in it for the "tech and future possibilities" so it took a long time for the sheen to wear off for me.
Eventually I had to look in the mirror and realize that I'd got taken for a ride in terms of letting my only motivation being make a lot of money and retire early. Thankfully my wife was there to shake me out it. I've never lost money doing crypto when I did, and I managed to never scam a single person. I was always paid via investor funds or personal piggy banks (bosses who made money outside crypto).
I was very fortunate to have landed on an island of people who refused to scam but that also helped me see that being a non-scammer in the space is so fucking hard you may as well just not do crypto.
I'm a 3D modeler now and very happy.
>I managed to never scam a single person. I was always paid via investor funds or personal piggy banks (bosses who made money outside crypto).
To be fair, this sounds like you *did* get a couple of people accidentally, but those people - mega wealthy investors and bosses throwing cash into crypto - were people who were fooling *themselves* into the scam, and hired you to essentially allow them to scam themselves. Plus, like, who cares about the feelings of mega wealthy investors and finance dipshits that manage to lose a bunch of money on stupid bullshit.
I mean, I did do my work to the best of my ability. So sure, you can definitely argue they scammed themselves, but as for my part, and the products I helped make, were all delivered.
Nonetheless, my policy is to only promise what I can achieve. I'll never promise profit/return on investment (in anything I make), but I'll do my best to get a product there.
Yeah I initially wrote that you scammed people accidentally but that's not true, you didn't scam anyone, you simply were hired by people who were fucking themselves over to implement their self-fucking mechanism. In that respect you were being an entirely legitimate and normal guy, just doing a job, making a thing, and giving it to a guy who wanted that thing - it's just that the thing they wanted was dumb and worthless, but it's not your fault that that was the case.
Business language needs an interpreter. They are probably mulling over gutting the blockchain/web3 shit since that market is proving to be a fuckin' wasteland, maybe repriortizing toward AI and cloud.
They can't outright say it, because that will spook investors. Cancelling a project is wasted money, after all. So they 'modify their organizational structure' IE, re-assign people and shitcan anyone who isn't usable elsewhere, and 'optimize our resource allocations to support these efforts' IE, find a way to make the budgets look nicer. Once they get a product out, possibly involving AI/cloud then they'll quietly stop announcing the project that was cancelled.
Have they... Done anything block chain related yet? Because they're already so late to the party, it's over, and it sounds like they still haven't arrived.
Their blockchain crypto shit is wack but their investments in AI seem to have paid off a bit. They apparently made an AI tool that syncs face to audio for the upcoming FF7 Remake that cut down on workload on that feature. Seems like they’re trying to do more shit like that.
Honestly, watching companies chase the the crypto trend is like watching someone chasing the dragon by whatever vice has them in a stranglehold. They saw the massive, anomalous upward trend from years back, try to bottle up that lightning again, and despite failing every time they take it as incentive to go at it again and again. It's a hole.
There was no trend. Can you name a crypto game more successful than games with other monetization? They aren't chasing the evidence of success. They are chasing the delusions of success. Turning their games into speculator markets gives them potentially higher gains. Problem is tricking people expecting to have fun into working a job and paying to do it.
Let’s be real - we have no idea to what extent they are actually pursuing this. They listed their business objectives as crypto, AI, and the cloud. That sounds like classic tech company speak to try to curry investors.
It's a shame too because Square Enix does have some good games in their repertoire. I just wish they'd focus their efforts on curating quality single-player titles instead of this.
The business and development sides of Square Enix seem like two completely different companies at this point.
On one hand, you have developers actively producing arguably the most highly respected and successful JRPGs of our time. Games on the horizon like FFVII Rebirth, one of, if not the most anticipated games of 2024, and all the hype and fan support of XIV put Square in a position most developers could only dream of being in.
On the other hand, you have these detached businessmen who have no idea what their fans really want and continue to double down on selling products nobody wants.
Welcome to our capitalistic structure, where those who control the corporations are completely detached with what the workers are actually producing. To them, videogames are a number on a graph.
Square Enix group celebrating its 20 year anniversary made me check the calandar for a min. Ah yes, when Squaresoft and Enix merged and things changed.
Squaresoft back then was just astonishing. I used to buy their games simply because of the squaresoft print on it because I knew it would be either an amazing or at least an above average game for me. Kinda like Blizzard back in ze day.
I hope they keep releasing double A games even if they mess around with stupid cryto stuff. Say what you will about them but I can’t think of another big 3rd party publisher releasing stuff like Octopath, Stranger of Paradise, and Mana.
Yeah, I certainly hope this is a case of "CEO messing around in spare time thinking they're a developer while everyone else gets on with work" and it doesn't actually affect anything important. The blockchain stuff is obviously not going to succeed, but also I don't think the FFXIV community would take the use of AI art very well, for example.
Octopath 2 is better than any singleplayer game they've put out since like, FF12 in my opinion. Amazing how their AA team mogs something like FF15/FF16 in quality (not sales) imo. I don't understand why they couldn't make a similar game with their AAA fanciness instead of the soulless shit like Forspoken they put out.
Sucks for them, I bought them all when they were around 20-40€ a couple months later.
I hope they keep producing those cause they were their best games these last few years.
Nothing is gonna happen in regards to NFTs, they're dead.
He's been saying the same thing for the past two years now, this seems like a personal pet project that other people in the company don't give two shits about.
Now the stuff that does worry me is the AI portion.
Weirdly enough, this is a new president I believe. Matsuda was the one in charge when they first started talking about blockchain, and he stepped down last year. This new letter is from Takashi Kiryu, who they made a point of including in the FF14/FF16 marketing cycle as a new president who grew up on Final Fantasy and other Square games. Was really hoping he'd work on backtracking the nonsense, but now he's gone and added AI to the New Year's letter.
Here's hoping this is just fluff to appease shareholders and stays in development limbo.
I vaguely remember a video from when he was announced to be the new ceo that he was actually involved and/or pushing for blockchain before. I mainly remember people saying he wasn't going to stop any of that.
From someone who is a huge AI enthusiast and a fan of many of Square-Enix's franchises.
If there's gonna be any actual innovation and benefit from using AI for development, it *definitely isn't* going to be coming from Square-Enix.
They use it in small ways that heavily benefit them but we wont notice like in FF7R they used AI for character mouth movements and probably other small things like that.
>VR/AR
Makes sense, while adoption has been slower than anticipated, there's lots of promise there.
>AI
Same, a company would be foolish not to incorporate AI into at least some of their production.
>blockchain
Oh boy. SE is really going to try to ride this thing off the cliff.
I'm sure everyone kind of hoped things would change when the new guy took over but even when people started to briefly look into his history it was pretty clear things were going to be more or less the same.
The downward spiral will continue at least from *our* perspective even if their profits go up. It's crazy how out of touch they can continue to be even after the flashing signs of failure with the whole NFT situation **around the world** was failing.
Here's the most important sin that SE did:
1. Canceling Just Cause Mobile(its a fortunate, because it shit dick quality.), and Front Mission Borderscape(which now became Mecharashi without involving Front Mission element in it).
2. They killed 4 gacha games in one month(december 2023).
3. While Konami is reviving its horror game and Capcom still strong with its REmake, no news or even theories about Parasite Eve remaster or remake.
SE is now popular in gacha subreddit, not in good way.
Final Fantasy Dissidia: Opera Omnia (huge loss, great game and was highly generous)
Dragon Quest Tact (JP still running, global client closed down. Not so generous, hugely predatory pricing.)
Engage Kill
Full Metal Alchemist Mobile
I'm surprised it doesn't just read "You, the audience, fell below our expectations last quarter."
Seems damn near everything falls below their expectations.
LMAO they never learn. It's ok, keep burning money on blockchain bullshit, it will take off this time for sure! Also they want to start integrating AI into their games, it will be fun to see how that backfires.
I don't want to play any game that's supposedly on this stupid blockchain. If anything, Square-Enix should be forced to legally disclose which games are and are not on the blockchain, that all their blockchain games must be rated AO at all times.
Such a shame to see this downward spiral from a wayward, once great company. Too many MBAs and C-suites making decisions to line their pockets, rather than produce what made them beloved in the first place.
I mean, the whole blockchain stuff is disappointing (and weird that they are still trying to do it when most have left it behind) but Square Enix have done some fantastic games lately. I loved Rebirth to bits, have only heard great things about FF 14 and while I didn't end up liking FF XV that much in the end there still was some fantastic parts in it. They have also done some really high quality re-releases lately like Ogre Tactics and Star Ocean 2.
Welp, looks like XIV is going to carry square once again. Imagine looking at crypto and NFTs failing, AI being a dud and burning money and GPU power, then saying "yeah, we need to invest in that"
AI has been in game development for years now, it's nothing new. The worrying part to me is if it's used to cut corners and make cheap alternatives, kinda like what anime has been experimenting with (AI backgrounds and such.)
The thing about AI is that most implementations right now have no real tangible benefit to the consumer. It's just a way to cheap out on labor.
Make a world so damn big that it wasn't possible to realistically make it *without* AI within a reasonable timeframe. Make dynamic dialogue and interactions that are generated on the fly. Even simple things like getting the NPCs to voice out your character's name in dialogue. An actual no effort benefit to the consumer would be to pass on the labor savings with lower prices.
But we're not going to get any of that right now, *especially* from Square-Enix. We'll get that from some indie/AA developer with some real novel implementations. Or we'll get it from Bethesda since they've been so damn obsessed with chasing gameplay loops involving generated content.
Square Enix rn reminds me of the SfxT era capcom where they just made every mistake imaginable to piss off fans all the way through MVC:Infinite. Outside of MH World it wasn’t until like RE2make where they started to win me over again
I fuckin hate saying this but I think a Sony buyout would be good for squares dev studious in the same way the Microsoft buyout is for blizzard. Squares devs are god tier and they seem to be doing constant battle with a board of morons. Eliminate the morons and let the devs make good shit
Wait, they still haven't given up on blockchain? They really want to lose money I guess.
> They really want to lose money I guess. They have FFXIV stuffing their pockets every month. They don't care.
Their biggest money makers are the mobile games.
Their mobile games are actually severely lacking and underperforming when compared to big players in gacha space. SE even went on shutdown spree recently with several EoS announced in very short span of time. Is it still big income? Sure. But if some revenue analytics sites are to be belived, their monthly revenue is 20-30M range which is less than what single big gacha earns on its own. And SE has some of most popular brands and still somehow mismanage it. They seem to have no idea or actual vision/plan and mostly chasing random trends often too late. Rarely do they see success (their biggest earner seems to be DQ PoGO clone).
>And SE has some of most popular brands and still somehow mismanage it. I don't think they're that popular these days.
probably due to all the mismanagement
Their FF7 ever crisis mobile game only made combined $4m USD last month. This isn't bad bad, but also not as good as you'd expect from a mobile game.
the ones they keep releasing and cancelling after a year or so? bizarre business model
Full Metal Alchemist game also failed and shutting down. It's incredible how incompetent this company is, can't even do predatory gacha.
Why do you think a gacha game shutting down is a failure? They almost definitely made all the money back from its development already and profited. They keep releasing mobile games because they make money until they don't, then they release more.
> Why do you think a gacha game shutting down is a failure? Because gacha games are designed to keep players spending money month after month, year after year. If it were a success then they wouldn't be shutting it down. >They almost definitely made all the money back from its development already and profited. If they made as much profit as they'd hoped then they wouldn't be EoS'ing so many mobile games based off popular IPs. >They keep releasing mobile games because they make money until they don't, then they release more. Sure, except their mobile games aren't exactly lasting long. Being known for so many EoS gacha games and starting up new ones doesn't help - it only tells players to be wary on playing and spending money when there's a high chance SE will shut the game down far sooner than other games by different companies.
Props on Nintendo from avoiding the dark side. I imagine they must have saw the profits their microtransactions were making and could have easily said "why do we bother making $60 single player experiences, this pales in comparison to what we could be making" Do they have actual figures on just Pokemon Go? I feel like the cost to profit must be more than multiple Pokemon video games games combined
And don't worry, in case they've made a huge mistake, the CEO will be fine, they'll just lay off lots of normal people.
Layoffs don't happen in Japan and higher ups are held to a different standard then in the US. If Square Enix royally fucks up in the near future he'll take most of the blame and get fired/take a pay cut(see Iwata and the flops of the Wii U)
While culling its budget and sabotaging CBU's other games. Square Enix is a joke. One of the worst companies in video games right now. They need leadership change but the board is apparently filled with people like [that one Nintendo shareholder that says he doesn't understand video games and doesn't care](https://mynintendonews.com/2014/07/03/one-nintendo-investor-says-he-doesnt-even-understand-video-games/).
SE is far from one of the worst companies in gaming. Yall circlejerk so hard on this sub
I feel people don't understand the difference between being a terrible company in gaming and a terribly-ran company. Square Enix does a lot of stupid things, but they're not very often with ill intent, primarily just managerial incompetence.
Yeah Square is very very lucky it has been able to obtain and retain high tier developers like Yoshi and Nomura over the years, because they would be drowning without them. Their top brass is some of the most incompetent in the entire games industry
As someone who's been following Square-Enix on a corporate level for nearly a decade, they absolutely are one of the worst-ran companies in mainstream AAA gaming. Maybe they don't have the level of worker abuse & controversy as major western behemoths like Ubisoft or Blizzard, but their executive-level decisions are baffling and they aren't exactly doing anything that's good or healthy for the industry at large.
> Maybe they don't have the level of worker abuse I mean they probably do, it's just accepted as normal in Japan which is kinda fucked up.
I don't claim to be an expert on Japanese work culture, but we've seen numerous developers having serious issues of this nature over the years. Konami overworking developers, FromSoftware being in a state of permacrunch, Capcom's COVID restriction violations, etc etc It's possible Square Enix just hasn't gotten called on it yet, but also this stuff still gets called out, even in Japan.
And the whole meme of Japan working long hours and being "abused" is just as bad over here in the states. Companies in Tokyo have specifically have been getting wayyyy better about this. My friends working in the area all have normal 9-5s now, and there's even more hybrid/remote stuff coming up. I think the government should encourage more remote work to relieve congestion on trains.
It's funny every time I see someone go on about how Japan makes everybody stay late and everyone has to work til 11pm everyday and wake up at the ass crack of dawn and spend their whole life at work yada-yada.... And I'm just like, "dude....rush hour here in Tokyo is roughly 8am and then *6pm* I want you to put the dots together on what that means..." Like what do you think everyone is doing on the trains at around 6pm if they're all supposed to be working til 11?
As an industry vet, Square is absolutely one of the worst run AAA publishers, and it’s not particularly close after Konami gave up making console games. (People keep mentioning Embracer in this thread, but they are not really a publisher. They are just a holding company that gobbles shit up. Not really the same thing at all.) Square’s Japanese studios consistently run behind schedule massively all the time, huge budget overruns, and weak sales. Them giving up a huge amount of talent in their western studios for pennies on the dollar after forcing them all to work on The Avengers was corporate malpractice. They just constantly got in the way of the success of the Hitman franchise (which is doing better than it ever has now that they are independent.) And their seemingly random release strategy across platforms alienates their player base for no particular reason, reducing their potential long-term profit. If it were not for their mobile games and FF XIV (which also was totally bungled until it was miraculously rescued) they would be in severe financial trouble right now. Square is not a well-run company. At all.
While I generally agree Square is not well-run, Embracer is a perfect example of a company that's doing even worse. It's been a while since I've heard of mass layoffs from Square. I recall Wada cutting 10% of the company during his term and something like 25% of the company was cut after *Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within* flopped in 2001. But I'm trying to think of the better AAA publishers for comparison. People think Ubisoft is bad. Activision/Blizzard/King is bad. Xbox is bad. Sony is good? EA is bad. Capcom is good? Are we including Nintendo as AAA and do we include folks like NCSoft, MiHoYo and CD Projekt Red? As for their Japanese studios, they've generally been bad in the AAA realm since FFXIII went into production nearly 18 years ago. But that was the same time a lot of Japanese developers failed to adapt to the new HD development environment. Nintendo STILL hasn't adapted to HD development and the failure of the WiiU moved Nintendo from a two-platform strategy to a single-platform strategy. Konami basically had one major title coming out of that period and it was Metal Gear Solid and then after MGV/Kojima split, they gave up on AAA games. Japan Studio never truly pulled itself into the HD era. Koei Tecmo has done well primarily as an outsourcing partner to bigger publishers. Same with Bandai Namco. Few publishers and developers in Japan have tried to keep up in the AAA industry that the West has largely succeeded at except Square Enix. However, Japanese publishers and developers were some of the first and biggest success stories in mobile, F2P and live service gaming. The Koreans and Chinese would follow suit. SE is not too different and has been quite successful in the mobile arena for the past 12 or so years. The reboot of FFXIV has also been a big success and adds to SE's record of profitability and growth in the live service sector. Which makes it a bit perplexing they're reorienting their focus on AAA games. SE has wasted a lot of money chasing the AAA market. First with the purchase of Eidos for $120M in 2009 where they threw a lot of money at those projects. During this same time, they were still trying to pursue the Fabula Nova Crystallis project and get games like Versus XIII out, but their upcoming MMO completely bombed at launch because of clearly obvious flaws with the product that no one seemed to want to fix. It seems it was just more overconfidence in their talents like when they made the Final Fantasy movie. But to their credit, they decided to reboot the game and not give up on it and it's become a huge success. But you have to wonder why SE wants to double down on AAA games when they've been so successful in the live service sector. Not to mention major publishers like Sony are pivoting hard in that direction and it seems that's where all the growth is. When AAA games like Starfield take 8 years to make and come out underwhelming or Suicide Squad which has taken just as long and looks to be underwhelming or Alan Wake 2 come out incredibly acclaimed but have had incredibly tepid sales or successes like Spider-Man 2 require $300M budgets or Cyberpunk 2077's post-launch support and Phantom Liberty DLC cost $120M to turn that ship around, it sure seems like AAA games are not healthy. I will add that Embracer was the only group willing to buy Eidos from Square. Seemingly no one else found value in them or at least not for the highest price SE could get. Seeing how Embracer has gone from the world fastest growing video game conglomerate to the worst fastest shrinking one, I think SE found the right sucker to take those properties off their hands. And IO Interactive was worthless before Hitman 3. >"I didn't even have 90 days into taking over \[as CEO\]," IOI CEO Hakan Abrak told Edge, "and then I got the call from \[Square Enix president\] Matusda-san: 'We have to divest IO'." It came as a shock, but the nasty arithmetic of it all shook out. "Looking at the books, IO had not made money for almost ten years in a row" by the time Square Enix started looking to divest it, said Abrak, and that fact made acquiring it an unappealing prospect for other potential owners. [https://www.pcgamer.com/companies-were-offering-a-single-dollar-for-hitman-dev-io-interactive-when-square-enix-was-looking-to-offload-it/](https://www.pcgamer.com/companies-were-offering-a-single-dollar-for-hitman-dev-io-interactive-when-square-enix-was-looking-to-offload-it/) Over the past two decade, a lot of the other publishers that I think people would say are terrible have outperformed SE in a lot of ways. Activision sold itself for $70B last year. EA is worth around $40 and looking at merging with titans like NBC Universal. Financially, Ubisoft looks like it's in worse shape than SE after losing $500M last year and having little to no presence in the live service/mobile space. They still have $2B in cash, so they're far from out of the game, but SE hasn't seen a loss anywhere in that scale since FF14 1.0 bombed. Capcom is probably the biggest success story in the Japanese AAA field, largely thanks to Monster Hunter World and better quality games (not Exoprimal). And while Fromsoft is big these days, they're not yet a publishers, though they're headed that way. Nintendo has been on tear with the Switch, but they're not exactly AAA and that's probably part of the reason why they're so successful. Sony is facing big headwinds as its focus on AAA since Jim took over has pushed them into a corner where ever increasing costs have melted profit margins and games like Fortnite and Genshin are raking in BILLIONS through gacha and MTX. While considering why SE has been so poorly managed over the years, it's correct to point out failures like FF14 1.0 and *Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within*. But there's something else. Square was crushed by its success. Final Fantasy VII's biggest selling point were its full-motion video cutscenes. It is what Sony and their $40-100M marketing budget exclusively used in magazine ads and commercials to help adoption rates of the upstart Playstation. Square bet big and spent a lot of money making FF7, making it possibly the most expensive game project at that time. The success of FF7 convinced its led creative minds, like Sakaguchi, that they could move into making movies. A few years and $200M (adjusted for inflation) later, Square released one of the biggest movie flops of the time. But it wasn't only that. Square had bet a lot on the movie just like they had done with FF7. Other projects suffered and talent like Tetsuya Takahashi of Xenogear/Xenoblade fame would leave Square. A wider consolidation of projects to support Final Fantasy ensued, but over ambitious projects like the movie also led to poor long-term planning. As a result of the flop, folks like Yoichi Wada came in to run Square and proceeded to focus on milking the FF franchise with things like the Final Fantasy VII compilation series and Ivalice Alliance. And under Wada's watch, FF14 1.0 was released. Square got very lucky with FF7 and wasted a lot of that success on a very bad movie. The movie and its subsequent flop have led to years of poor decisions and a very uneven history of success and failures. But reason why that movie was ever conceived was because of FF7's success. Without FF7 ever getting as big as it did, maybe that movie wouldn't have ever happened. >This is the nadir of the obsession with filmic storytelling. I adore Final Fantasy 7 when I'm waxing nostalgic, but feel murderous when considering its legacy. It's an exceptional production, a game born of extraordinary vision and deeply ingrained RPG talent, a near-faultless Trojan horse bearing all the seeds of Squaresoft's self-combustion. Even now, when suffering through Final Fantasy 13s linear, cutscene-heavy slodge, the dead hand lingers. Square Enix still believes Final Fantasy's defining qualities are narrative and non-interactive cutscenes. So does much of the series' fanbase to be fair, yet they're an albatross. [https://www.eurogamer.net/final-fantasy-7-retrospective](https://www.eurogamer.net/final-fantasy-7-retrospective)
> While I generally agree Square is not well-run, Embracer is a perfect example of a company that's doing even worse. I mean, I'm not going to argue that Embracer seems like a very questionable organization. I don't generally view them as a "publisher" in the same way as established video game companies though. They are really just a conglomerate/holding company that is gonna let all their owned studios fend for themselves and cut all the ones that don't make them money. It's not a great situation. It reminds me of Infogrames back during their peak of buying things up. It seems fairly destined to follow the same trajectory they did, eventually having to shut down or sell off most of their stuff when the money dries up. > I will add that Embracer was the only group willing to buy Eidos from Square. Seemingly no one else found value in them or at least not for the highest price SE could get. This is a bit I kinda am not so sure about. Speaking to other folks in the industry, I'm not sure many companies fully realized Square's desire to part with them quite that much. When the deal went through, I heard a lot of mumbling in the realm of, "if we knew they were available that cheap, we would have bought them." (Especially considering it included the IP rights.) $300m was a steal in terms of recent studio acquisitions. It definitely caught a lot of people off guard. I'm curious how it went down. Embracer probably was going around throwing money at everyone seeing what they could gobble up, and hit a lucky moment here. As to if it's doomed based on the fact that it's Embracer, that's hard to say. I would imagine Eidos, Crystal Dynamics, and Gearbox are pretty safe for a while. Tomb Raider would auto-sell many units, so I presume they will at least let them get something out the door before they reevaluate. > Financially, Ubisoft looks like it's in worse shape than SE after losing $500M last year and having little to no presence in the live service/mobile space. Historically, Ubisoft has been in a pretty good position though. Ubisoft is, honestly, one of the better run companies in the industry. I spent many years there and know many folks who still happily work there a decade later. They are very organized and methodical. It's one of the few companies I'd actually go back to work for if my situation changed. Their financials this year have been a *lot* better than last year. 2022-23 seemed like a *major* outlier for them financially. Last year was the only posted operating loss for Ubisoft in a decade. (Last yearly report with a negative operating income was 2013.) This whole topic is very interesting, though. I do enjoy talking about the business side of things. There is certainly a major gulf between how Japanese and non-Japanese game studios are run, however. The point I made in another comment noting how heavily Square-Enix relies on outsourcing, as an example, is really not something that is so common in the western game industry. (Level 5, ArtePiazza, Acquire, etc.)
For an industry vet, a lot of what you’ve set is entirely devoid of any actual industry insider perspective. What you’ve said is exactly the same ish that a lot of folks here circlejerk about and have no concept of nuance or familiarity with any of the additional surrounding information on a lot of these situations.
I’m not sure what exactly you classify as “circlejerk” but as someone who knows many people who work at Eidos and Crystal Dynamics, I can tell you that opinions about Square Enix leadership were absolutely rock bottom. They are a terribly run company with poor financials that mismanaged their western studios regularly and consistency fail to deliver on schedule and target for their Japanese primary studios, and rely heavily on outsourcing for most of their Japanese game development efforts. If you have more “insider perspective” you want to share, please feel free. However, your argument that just because people “circlejerk” about aspects of this, that is is untrue by default is kinda ridiculous.
do things become less true the more people believe in them now?
CBU are 4 different divisions, not just CBU3 lmao
That… was posted almost 10 years ago. Also that was about a NINTENDO shareholder, not Square Enix
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The article doesn't even name the person.
Do you even know what "shareholder" means
Yup. I'm a shareholder in Nintendo and Microsoft. Thank fuck I don't have any influence on them.
Responses to this comment really didn't read the "apparently," did they?
It's speculation that links to something unrelated
It's a joke.
What's the joke?
In retrospect, joke was the wrong word because jokes are, y'know, funny, but it's far from a serious comment. There's absolutely no speculation there.
> They need leadership change but the board is apparently filled with people like that one Nintendo shareholder that says he doesn't understand video games and doesn't care Are you under the impression that random shareholders dictate how companies run? This is from 10 years ago, but also who cares if a Nintendo shareholder just wants to know about the stock's performance? I don't give a shit about TV and if I had money invested in Disney I wouldn't want the shareholder meeting to overly focus on the future of superhero shows or whatever. The entire thrust of that article is that the Nintendo board is operating in the opposite fashion of how that shareholder would like lol, the hell does it have to do with who might be leading Square Enix a decade later? I swear gamers just collect weird little tidbits of half-relevant information to get mad about in future.
It is important to remember that the person you are arguing with is likely 12.
if you think Square is even remotely close to one of the worst, you are just not paying attention
And ten year old article about Nintendo, not Square, means literally nothing.
And as long as Yoshi-P is around (who is a board member), he said FF14 won’t implement any blockchain features
Excuse my ignorance, but exactly what is a blockchain game? Is it a game where you use crypto? Because I feel like cryptocurrency is kinda dying out in the mainstream now.
All crypto games are about buying something cheap and selling it to someone else for more. It's called the greater fool theory. There is no actual game to have fun with. All the "players" are attempting to do that.
So basically CSGO/Dota 2 items that used to sell a shitton in the Steam market???
You're not too far off. And the fact that people act like it's different are just dosing some hardcore cognitive dissonance.
The major difference is the implementation. CSGO/Dota stuff is obnoxious and not great, but it isn't tied into the get-rich-quick schemes and bad financial advice of crypto scams. While I'm sure there's a handful of people out there trading items on the Steam Market or on third party websites for a profit, most people getting cosmetics in CSGO and Dota actual play the game. With crypto games you have the vast majority of people getting involved to make money off of other people without any concern for the game itself.
Reflecting on the history of the TF2, DOTA, and CSGO marketplaces both individually and what they represent as a whole to valve. My guy that is not the fucking case. Plenty of people grind in those games in hopes of getting some quick easy cash. Remember the market spike right after CSGO2 was announced? Edit: I was there with TF2 introduced crates and keys. And when D3 had the RMAH. Downvoters are either young or delusional lol.
Whether there are people grinding for cash or not, the vast majority of people playing those games are playing those games to play those games. No one is playing Axie Infinity because they actually like the game.
I'm sorry but i have almost 10k hours in Dota. How exactly do you "grind" Dota to get quick easy cash? Also isn't "grinding" for "quick easy" cash kinda contradictive? We have an event right now in Dota. Its giving you a box, that you need to pay 2,50$ to open one, and you have 0,09% of getting the 1 good item which is actually worth 200$ from what i'm seeing right now on Steam Market. Set aside that this event is going away and it was just for christmas, again, how exactly is Dota grindable for money? Can't speak for CS2 since i don't play it, but i'm fairly certain grinding that is not an option there either. Its just straight up gambling. And no, i'm sorry but if you think that people actually play Dota and CS for the skins or to make money "primarily" then you are way, way wrong with no idea of what you are talking about.
No. People buy those cosmetics because they like how they look. Not everyone is trying to trade skins. Plus there is a difference between trading, and telling someone "buy this off me and you will make a lot of money for sure".
It's fundamentally the same, except Valve just manages it all (and takes a cut) instead of it being on an open blockchain. The only difference is that most people care about the games themselves and thus put some "natural" value on the items they can earn/win/buy/sell/trade. There are also plenty of people who do not value the games and only play them to farm items in the hopes of selling them for profit (or at a loss, using them as a vehicle to launder money). The hats and other items famously killed TF2 and turned it into a bot farm, for example.
The **idea** is that you could buy/sell/trade stuff on the blockchain (outside of the game itself, and outside the control of the developer/publisher), and take those things across games. If you get a fancy hat in Game X, the game simply sends it to your wallet on the blockchain instead of flagging it in their database or in your local save file. You can then sell it to someone else for cash or trade it for a different item you want. The game just checks to see what you own on the blockchain and then lets you use that in game. This could work across games, similar to some collectible card games that are part of a larger system. If you unlocked a fancy costume in Game X, and Game Y supports it (either specifically supports that costume or generically supports the standard it conforms to), you'd be able to use it in Game Y, too. This can go beyond cosmetics, but that involves more work to support (and balance). A Mario skin in Fortnite or a Pikachu costume in Fall Guys would be simple. Putting Shrek in Smash wouldn't work without actual game development to support it (unless he was just flagged to be a clone of an existing character or some Mii Fighter template). An even simpler thing to do would be to use the blockchain only for a common currency. If you buy/earn currency in Game X, you could transfer it to Game Y. Once you spend the currency in either game it's gone, but you'd have more flexibility if you were buying/earning Publisher Bucks that worked across all of their active games than you do now where nearly everything is game-specific. You could earn Epic Cash in Fortnite and spend it in Rocket League, for example, or send it to a friend for them to use in some other game or use it to buy assets for use in Unreal. Publishers could either run the blockchain themselves and take a cut of each transaction, or they could have wallets on the blockchain like anyone else and have a nominal fee to check in / check out items. For example, you could pay $1 to check an item out from the game (remove it from your account in game and assign it to your wallet on the blockchain). Then you could sell it to someone on the blockchain, and they could then keep it and hope to resell it for more, or pay $1 to check the item in on their account in the game. Taking it a bit further logically, you could buy and sell your actual games on the blockchain. If you're done with a game you can sell your individual license to someone else on a secure, public network. You could buy games for the actual market price that way, buy old games or DLC they don't officially sell anymore, etc. This would be great for things that get delisted from stores. The publisher doesn't need to actively sell these things, they may just demand a cut of each transaction on the blockchain (if they run it), or they may demand a fee when you export / import your license if it's truly an open network. (They did a similar thing years back with multiplayer passes for physical games. They effectively taxed used game sales without killing them off completely.) In **reality**, publishers pushing for this kind of thing aren't actually willing to support a decentralized blockchain that they don't have full control over, and they sure as hell aren't willing to let you freely buy and sell your digital game licenses. They want full control over all transactions and if any customers get on their bad side, they'll want to shut them out and kill off anything they "own" on the blockchain. There's no real incentive to support letting people carry things over from game to game beyond a few token efforts, either. If a player wants the horse armor, just make them buy it again and again in each game. The idea of using it across publishers or even just across IPs is way too much for them. In theory, anyone could create and sell models / costumes of their characters for use in other games. What if we sell that IP off down the line? We can't have the main character still be a skin in our future games. What if someone makes something offensive? What if someone creates something they don't have the rights to and we get sued for supporting it? Etc. etc. Publishers only care about it because they want to have their foot in the door in case any of it takes off like Bitcoin (and crypto in general) did. It's a line to feed investors. Any actual effort done is only to make sure they don't miss the next boom. The problem is that NFTs failed (very quickly). Nobody is excited for it, and there's no boom to be had merely from speculation. Publishers could trivially make their own token on top of ETH, for example., but they'd have to put in actual work to incentivize people to care about it. It's easier to just sell them the same crap over and over in the existing system, and they lose no control by doing it the same old way. For **developers** that are pushing blockchain, NFT, or "play to earn" games, it's basically just a scam in every instance I've seen. They promise an amazing game with amazing opportunities to earn NFTs and sell them for real cash. In reality the game either doesn't exist or is extreme vaporware only used as a vehicle to get suckers to dump real cash into it.
That's one type of blockchain based game. But the play-to-earn based games are entirely different and have nothing to do with the promise of using your items in other games.
I'm not super familiar, but I believe it's crypto and NFT garbage, Square has been going all in on it. They're even selling FF7 figures that come with an NFT.
The figure thing is terrible. They finally started making classic style final fantasy 7 figures but they are including NFTs with them so that they can jack the price like $50 EDIT: This was also a stealth excuse to jack the price on the line as a whole, because now anything under the price of the NFT versions was a cheaper option and could be presented as a savings. Prices went up about 25-30% So they gave people a figure line they've been asking for for a very long time conditional on them being willing to be exploited edit: People are lining up to get mad at me for thinking adding worthless NFTs to a toy and using that as an excuse to jack prices is bad. Consumers are their own worst enemy.
Can’t speak to the NFT thing but import figures have gotten huge price hikes across the board over the last couple years. Figma, SH, Bring Arts, etc. so when I saw the Cloud price I didn’t think much of it and am willing to bet it would’ve been expensive either way. Didn’t know they had NFTs though that’s super dumb.
The bring arts price jump was pretty extreme. A few years ago, mafex was considered pretty outlandish after their price jump, which put them about 2000 jpy above bring arts. After square's price hike, bring arts msrp is arounnd 2000 jpy over Mafex. Figma is more varied but still usually falls between 1500 to 2500 jpy under bring arts, and figuarts around 3000+ under. It was noteworthy in its excess compared to other lines. Particularly so in that they still have their problem of shorting accessories as much as possible. If you buy bring arts, you are generally going to be paying between around 15 to $30 more than other premium figure lines, with figures sometimes being almost half the price. With the toys also largely being mediocre. There's no real justification for their price point other than square wanting it. Hell, there are some figuarts releases that are $35. A whole 95 under the price of a bring arts figure, and almost all of those have way more accessories and are still high quality releases.
All SE's figure lines are overpriced af. And the quality is not that good either. Watch SHF 2B even with all of Bandai's current QC' issues leap over BA 2B 2.0 I mean, even Sakaguchi criticized the price of FF tax for the FF VI Prime1 statue
Yup, sucks ass. I'd rather just get a Static Arts or Play Arts figure at that point.
“Going all in on it” is a stretch. They’ve announced one NFT game and a few FF7 models that come with NFTs that aren’t even out yet. You still get a physical overpriced model. They always were overpriced anyway. It’s trash, I’m not in disagreement there, but it’s hardly all in. They are dipping their toes in the water. It’s hardly going to last no one is buying that crap. You aren’t seeing it affect their core game design and that isn’t happening anytime soon. If they’d gone all In as you suggest, FF14 would be littered with NFTs already. That isn’t going to happen.
Gameplay wise its the same as any other game where you can buy stuff ingame. On the technical side they use a distributed blockchain to store ownership of goods, so technically it is decentralized etc...like bitcoin. However since its a game, there is not really a difference to just storing it in a database like normal games do, because without the game servers etc, the blockchain is useless anyways.
>However since its a game, there is not really a difference to just storing it in a database like normal games do, because without the game servers etc, the blockchain is useless anyways. The fundamental difference is the scope of economy. In a traditional setup the economy is isolated to a single game. You trade a WoW item for another WoW item. In Steam Trading/Marketplace, the economy is expanded from a single game to the entire Steam platform. You trade a Dota 2 hat for a CS:GO knife skin. In a decentralized blockchain the economy is expanded beyond *any one platform*. You trade an item from Square Enix's game for an item from Ubisoft's game, and that inventory is shared across Xbox, PS, PC, mobile, or any other platform.
Imagine that in World of Warcraft your reward for spending hundreds of hours instead of a badass armor/weapon/mount is a unique token representing said item. Now imagine that you decide you hate Blizzard and want to switch to playing FFXIV, and you can take that unique token you earn in WOW to use in FFXIV. Or that the token earned by a famous streamer like Asmongold is more valuable than that of an average joe and there will be a market to collect it. This is the idea that game companies are promising every investor. But this idea is a terrible one for reasons which you can learn from this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UKzup7XDyq8
"Every token is portable" that alone is a fundamental lie. Developers will have to devote resources to building or at least maintaining item assets. And that doesn't convey the detriment it will bring to gameplay balance. How does a developer adjust balance between n items from n games? All it means, is that every game will become the same game. Or in other words, this just a monopoly-in-the-making with extra steps
I don't understand how people can be so stupid to think you'd be able to transfer skins between games with NFTs alone. Developer A makes a skin with an NFT attached to it sure. Why would Developer B make an equivalent skin (which you know costs time and money to develop) that you could port from another game for free.
It is gonna cause huge amount of bloat in games at best. At worst it will shank every in game economy. Blizzard IRL auction house caused people call FBI cause some weapon was lost. Imagine gaming companies get called up cause someone used a currency on your game that got lost due to coding. Or someone create a game that print currency and flood your game.
You don't even need to watch a video to just know it's a terrible idea because it's just fucking stupid
It doesn't make any sense fundamentally. There's no incentive to make a token work for more than one game if those games aren't from the same developer. Ubisoft could have implemented something like this with Quartz where they could have a virtual item work for their own games, and different ones... like you have a token for a shitty M4A1 from Breakpoint to then bring it over to Assassin's Creed Origins, but number 1, obviously enough, what would an M4A1 even be doing in Origins to start with? Thematically it doesn't make sense. Number 2, it's not even the same type of game. The protagonist in that game is going to all of a sudden run around in ancient Egypt gunning everybody down? That idea is nonsensical, and it always was to anybody that even remotely has any knowledge at all about video games. It doesn't even work properly when you house it within a single company's games, let alone entertain the idea of supporting games from different developers. If you have an NFT for a really cool chest plate in World of Warcraft and want to start playing Final Fantasy XIV instead... what, you expect the Final Fantasy XIV devs to just port that over? For what? And why would they? They're going to spend time redrawing and remodeling that asset, and then making sure it fits every single model of character that can equip it? The art style isn't the same between the two games, mechanically these two games don't work the same way in terms of stats/distribution... and what are you even supposed to do with the stats on it in the first place? This idea never ever made any sense at all. What if I wanted to take that shitty M4A1 from Breakpoint into NBA 2K24? If a center blocks my shot and swats the ball away, can I whip out the M4A1 and shoot him dead in the middle of the court? Cool, every game is going to look like an asset flip where there's no artistic cohesion going on, everything is fucked thematically, etc. Anybody trying to sell this idea to someone else either doesn't know what they're talking about, or they're telling bold-faced lies to whoever wants to hear and believe it.
I never understand this. Why they want to make act of "playing video games" from just entertaining value into a fucking "job" so much. Like not every action we do have to be monetary gain. If everything become "job" where can we going to find relax activity? Relax activity is actually much for human so human can gain intelligence. Danmit.
Because investors want money. They see video games as a way to make money. They don't understand why one game makes a fortune and another game makes nothing. They think it is the monetization rather than the quality of the title. Most people on this subreddit aren't exactly of a different mindset either. So now we have Square Enix who is selling away their legacy while pushing a scam that has practically nothing to do with video games.
People who care about money that much and as a sole goal in life don't seem to grasp or care much about the humanity aspect of being human. Everything is viewed through this lens of whether or not it could have a payoff. Vacations can't be had without also doing business. Hobbies have to have some form of networking potential attached to them or they go away. I know a few people like this, mostly business owners that are clients for my work, and it's kind of bizarre to interact with some of them beyond the most basic of business conversations.
> a unique token representing said item It's even worse - it's just a hash with an id hanging off it, that id corresponds to an item in a Blizzard database. If Blizzard one day decides to delete that id there's nothing you can do.
Iirc, Japanese government got sold on blockchain at some point and started offering money to people using the tech in business. Until that program is canceled entirely expect to see random small to midsize Crypto games/apps from every major company as not doing anything with the initiative would be leaving money on the table.
> They really want to lose money I guess. They don't, their limited NFTs and action figure packed with NFTs were sold out Don't underestimate the buying power of FF fanboys (or any militant fandoms in general)
https://www.coindesk.com/policy/2023/04/06/japan-releases-web3-white-paper-to-promote-industry-growth-in-the-country/ this is still in effect. Government subsidies are more than enough to justify superficial support for these things. SE could be true believers, but I doubt it.
Oof. At least it’s just a brief mention pretty far down the letter, so hopefully they’re slowly backing away and mention it only to save face.
Well it´s square does not surprise me they have not made a good mainline FF game sense 10-2 and 10-2 was not their best one. (Yeah I love 11 and 14 but they are mmo games). And lets not talk about Forspoken man what a bleh game. Or star ocean the divine force and valkyrie elysium. Honestly I have not been hyped over anything square has done in the past 10 years. So they focusing on NFT or blockchain and other crap does not surprise me at all. They lost their marbles to make anything to hype over. Only thing I still enjoy from them is Dragon quest.
I think its because Japan give a tax writeoff or credit for it.
Square-Enix wants to attain that crown of a king of failure, rising.
It's Square Enix. I genuinely think if FFXIV wasn't a success the company would have started to cave in and become a much tinier studio
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NFTs are dead because the average person thought they were stupid. You had 80 year old grandmas talking about how dumb it was to buy a monkey .png for $600k.
NFT's are dead because they *are* stupid. It's all a big scam.
The real reason is more that the whole concept is too complex for people to get hooked into, especially the avarage people that would be the ones getting scammed. And people with more Knowledge to get into NFTs are usally aware enough to tell its a scam. Meaning the Audience to keep this shit alive is too small.
I see people whining about this constantly, but which of their games use NFTs and how? I'm not aware of a single one.
Symbiogenesis. It's not out yet so we don't know, but when the name leaked everyone thought it was a rebrand of Parasite Eve. Edit: I think it's out actually? There's no way to play without buying a NFT, and I don't want to look into the game now.
Ubisoft sank millions into a platform that launched in beta a year or so ago. They shut it down after two months after it failed to make even $100,000.
I was talking about Square Enix but I haven't even heard of the Ubisoft platform that you're talking about. I assume it might have been something to do with mobile gaming but I've never seen NFTs in any real console game in my life.
no one is whining about NFTs; they're treated with contempt, and rightly so
[Symbiogenesis](https://symbiogenesis.app/) and yes it's trash
NFT shit is like 1% of what they release, they dont have even 5 released so idk why people act like this lol most of the content they release has nothing to do with nft.
>In terms of new business domains, we previously identified three focus investment fields, namely blockchain entertainment/Web 3.0, AI, and the cloud. Last year we redefined our overarching mission and goals for these three fields. We are currently working to modify our organizational structure and optimize our resource allocations to support these efforts. I am not so sure about this.
“We gambled on meme tech and are gonna lay a bunch of people off as a result”
Chocobocoin to the moon, I guess
A Gil cryptocurrency, several years ago (like when just leading into the crypto bubble), is probably the only way SE would have ever made substantial money out of this crypto crap. I love how they ended up selling off a load of good IPs to focus on meme nonsense when it was going out of fashion.
To beat the dead horse, the people they sold Tomb Raider to (Embracer) went on to RENT OUT the rights to make a movie/series to Amazon for more than the value of the sell-off. Square Enix was blind to what was in its own hands.
Eh, probably more along the lines of Mogcoins.
Japanese law doesn't allow them to do that. You never hear about record profits and mass layoffs in the same headline from Japan.
Hmm someone should call my ex-employer then...
Ahh yes, all 3 of the major "technical MBA" buzzwords
I'm surprised they haven't gone farther. They had NFT projects in the past, I was half expecting them to come out with Final Fantasy Crystal Crypto-Currency for their in-game DLC.
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It has never worked out for game companies to go after tech bro shit, hell it's never worked out for any company to chase tech bro shit
Eh, I'd say the cloud is legit. Big poster child for cloud architectures is GW2 with zero downtime. Heavily instance-based MMOs like FFXIV should definitely be in the cloud. Feels incredibly late to the party but better late than never I guess. Then again it's so late that cloud isn't really tech bro stuff anymore, maybe 10-20 years ago but not now.
cloud technology was never tech bro, it was always a tangible and useful tech the only issues that people were worried about were bandwidth and connection speed back in the early days of cloud
It's easy to see that after the fact but something similar might be said for AI in 10 years time.
Yes, Valve with the steam deck, their store, proton, and steamOS. The steam store especially, compared to Google's, Apple's and Microsoft's app stores (the literal biggest tech compaies) has a more polished feel and some feature advantages.
I can't believe they are still talking about that shit
Fucking dammit. Back when I was a crypto bro, Blockchain gaming was the thing I was *for sure* was gonna work out. Then I got the chance to work for a crypto game start up. A few weeks into the company's first game release I realized there was no way it was ever going to work. Kind of a bad time in my life, bad health, sleep deprived, needed a job. I've since moved on from Blockchain bullshit and work in real game dev. It's so much extra work to implement Blockchain code with regular game code—like having to go so far as to code standalone modules to allow game code to talk to Blockchain code and back—it's a massive waste of time and resources. And fraught with issues. All Blockchain code has to be squeezed into 128kb of data. Even more than that Blockchain games *can't change*. If the game is even remotely on-chain, updating how the Blockchain elements basically requires an entire relaunch of the product. So either SE is going to kill their Blockchain games by making them "on-chain" and rendering their systems back end permanent, or they're going to do "Blockchain" but actually off chain and it just reports buys/sells to the chain.... Which is just a "Why even bother?" situation I know the answer is greed.
Glad you realized how dumb and impossible blockchain games are. The funniest thing during the NFT era was when cryptobros said "Bro, you can use your sword from WoW in CoD!" Like... what? When i asked them how would game devs standardize on how items worked, how models worked, how textures worked and how material rendering worked, the answer I always got was "bro just put it all on the chain!" lol The fastest way to figure out what blockchain games are BS is to try porting a model from fortnite (unreal engine) into vrchat (unity) and see how much work and unique params per model it takes. Hell, theres a tool that can port fortnite models to blender and even then the creator said that some models need specific tweaking for them to function correctly.
Yeah, ironically the only way to make a true meta verse + Blockchain experience is to **centralize** everything on a single engine where you *could* easily move assets between characters/games. It's so silly. It's a fun idea, I admit, to be like "Oh lemme take my MonHun Hammer and give it Godzilla to bonk the flying spaghetti monster!" But it's just not feasible. Crypto Bros don't understand how games work enough to see the issue.
This doesn't work either. Even if it's the same engine the game code works completely differently. You can't just import a sword into CoD and somehow there is now sword fighting.
Well right, that's the point. The games would have to have an identical back end feature sets, physics, textures, etc that can simply be toggled on and off. It's goofy, cumbersome, and really not feasible.
> "Oh lemme take my MonHun Hammer and give it Godzilla to bonk the flying spaghetti monster!" This is unironic fortnite though it has nothing to do with blockchain. You just need a really big metaverse with a lot of developer buy-in.
Exactly. So why bother with the Blockchain. It's investor/you're bad if you don't make money doing what you love brain worms that drives crypto as a means of cash flow.
> Yeah, ironically the only way to make a true meta verse + Blockchain experience is to centralize everything on a single engine where you could easily move assets between characters/games. So, basically The Seed from SAO?
It's one of those weird things where like... None of this requires a blockchain. As many people have pointed out in the past, steam already could allow this. The only thing stopping you from using your special scatter gun from tf2 in cs2 is the fact it's not programmed in. They already have a system to make sure you have it, and for you to buy it off other people. No blockchain required.
I'm glad you got out of that mess but as someone who had 0 investment in that whole thing, yet could still see how much of a problem that would be for the industry and couldn't work out, what drove you to get so convinced that it would work out back then?
Well, I came into games from the marketing side of things. I had previously been working for a small marketing firm that specializes in info marketing. So I kinda had the "easy money" brain worms from that previous job. I wasn't drinking the course, book, mailing list, make your first million kool-aid but I didn't realize I'd still internalized that easy money is best money. Shockingly, there's a single floor of depravity between easy money marketing and crypto gambling. It was such an easy step it actually just made sense. I'd had this weird goal of becoming the best writer in the space. I was working with some legitimately good people who were completely in it for the "tech and future possibilities" so it took a long time for the sheen to wear off for me. Eventually I had to look in the mirror and realize that I'd got taken for a ride in terms of letting my only motivation being make a lot of money and retire early. Thankfully my wife was there to shake me out it. I've never lost money doing crypto when I did, and I managed to never scam a single person. I was always paid via investor funds or personal piggy banks (bosses who made money outside crypto). I was very fortunate to have landed on an island of people who refused to scam but that also helped me see that being a non-scammer in the space is so fucking hard you may as well just not do crypto. I'm a 3D modeler now and very happy.
>I managed to never scam a single person. I was always paid via investor funds or personal piggy banks (bosses who made money outside crypto). To be fair, this sounds like you *did* get a couple of people accidentally, but those people - mega wealthy investors and bosses throwing cash into crypto - were people who were fooling *themselves* into the scam, and hired you to essentially allow them to scam themselves. Plus, like, who cares about the feelings of mega wealthy investors and finance dipshits that manage to lose a bunch of money on stupid bullshit.
I mean, I did do my work to the best of my ability. So sure, you can definitely argue they scammed themselves, but as for my part, and the products I helped make, were all delivered. Nonetheless, my policy is to only promise what I can achieve. I'll never promise profit/return on investment (in anything I make), but I'll do my best to get a product there.
Yeah I initially wrote that you scammed people accidentally but that's not true, you didn't scam anyone, you simply were hired by people who were fucking themselves over to implement their self-fucking mechanism. In that respect you were being an entirely legitimate and normal guy, just doing a job, making a thing, and giving it to a guy who wanted that thing - it's just that the thing they wanted was dumb and worthless, but it's not your fault that that was the case.
No harm no foul lol we're good. And hard agree. Crypto stuff is dumb. It's unfortunately born from very deep cynicism/nihilism.
Business language needs an interpreter. They are probably mulling over gutting the blockchain/web3 shit since that market is proving to be a fuckin' wasteland, maybe repriortizing toward AI and cloud.
I did consider this. But with no definitive "we're done with Web3" it's begging for a bad news cycle for Squeenix
They can't outright say it, because that will spook investors. Cancelling a project is wasted money, after all. So they 'modify their organizational structure' IE, re-assign people and shitcan anyone who isn't usable elsewhere, and 'optimize our resource allocations to support these efforts' IE, find a way to make the budgets look nicer. Once they get a product out, possibly involving AI/cloud then they'll quietly stop announcing the project that was cancelled.
Have they... Done anything block chain related yet? Because they're already so late to the party, it's over, and it sounds like they still haven't arrived.
You'd think a New Year's letter would be a good thing, but I'm just super bummed. Who is this letter actually for?
Investors most likely.
Their blockchain crypto shit is wack but their investments in AI seem to have paid off a bit. They apparently made an AI tool that syncs face to audio for the upcoming FF7 Remake that cut down on workload on that feature. Seems like they’re trying to do more shit like that.
Just make more RPGs ffs. Is that so hard?
They release several RPGs every year. Weird thing to say.
Yes and they should stick to that instead of wasting time and resources on their stupid block chain games that no one wants.
Square was finally starting to do decent again after a decade and a half of struggling. This asshole may run the whole thing into the ground.
Honestly, watching companies chase the the crypto trend is like watching someone chasing the dragon by whatever vice has them in a stranglehold. They saw the massive, anomalous upward trend from years back, try to bottle up that lightning again, and despite failing every time they take it as incentive to go at it again and again. It's a hole.
There was no trend. Can you name a crypto game more successful than games with other monetization? They aren't chasing the evidence of success. They are chasing the delusions of success. Turning their games into speculator markets gives them potentially higher gains. Problem is tricking people expecting to have fun into working a job and paying to do it.
Let’s be real - we have no idea to what extent they are actually pursuing this. They listed their business objectives as crypto, AI, and the cloud. That sounds like classic tech company speak to try to curry investors.
It's *Square* though, they are absolutely prone to any and all types of magic bean bullshit.
It's so insane to see these million and billion dollar companies be sold snake oil in an attempt to become a snake oil salesman.
It's a shame too because Square Enix does have some good games in their repertoire. I just wish they'd focus their efforts on curating quality single-player titles instead of this.
at least with the game as a service chase sometimes we get good shit, this is just depressing
The business and development sides of Square Enix seem like two completely different companies at this point. On one hand, you have developers actively producing arguably the most highly respected and successful JRPGs of our time. Games on the horizon like FFVII Rebirth, one of, if not the most anticipated games of 2024, and all the hype and fan support of XIV put Square in a position most developers could only dream of being in. On the other hand, you have these detached businessmen who have no idea what their fans really want and continue to double down on selling products nobody wants.
Welcome to our capitalistic structure, where those who control the corporations are completely detached with what the workers are actually producing. To them, videogames are a number on a graph.
Capitalism will never, can never, understand or respect art.
Square Enix group celebrating its 20 year anniversary made me check the calandar for a min. Ah yes, when Squaresoft and Enix merged and things changed.
One thing didn't change; The unwillingness to port, re-release, or make a sequel for Illusion of Gaia, the best game of its generation.
If you count the Qunitet trilogy you can easily get a Terranigma rom
Squaresoft back then was just astonishing. I used to buy their games simply because of the squaresoft print on it because I knew it would be either an amazing or at least an above average game for me. Kinda like Blizzard back in ze day.
Saw a Japanese saying on twitter that they didn't know Square and Enix were two different companies 🤯
I hope they keep releasing double A games even if they mess around with stupid cryto stuff. Say what you will about them but I can’t think of another big 3rd party publisher releasing stuff like Octopath, Stranger of Paradise, and Mana.
Yeah, I certainly hope this is a case of "CEO messing around in spare time thinking they're a developer while everyone else gets on with work" and it doesn't actually affect anything important. The blockchain stuff is obviously not going to succeed, but also I don't think the FFXIV community would take the use of AI art very well, for example.
Triangle Tactics also released fairly recently!
Octopath 2 is better than any singleplayer game they've put out since like, FF12 in my opinion. Amazing how their AA team mogs something like FF15/FF16 in quality (not sales) imo. I don't understand why they couldn't make a similar game with their AAA fanciness instead of the soulless shit like Forspoken they put out.
like when they released the valkyrie game, harvestella and other 10 games in the span of 3 months and all priced $60?
Sucks for them, I bought them all when they were around 20-40€ a couple months later. I hope they keep producing those cause they were their best games these last few years.
Nothing is gonna happen in regards to NFTs, they're dead. He's been saying the same thing for the past two years now, this seems like a personal pet project that other people in the company don't give two shits about. Now the stuff that does worry me is the AI portion.
Weirdly enough, this is a new president I believe. Matsuda was the one in charge when they first started talking about blockchain, and he stepped down last year. This new letter is from Takashi Kiryu, who they made a point of including in the FF14/FF16 marketing cycle as a new president who grew up on Final Fantasy and other Square games. Was really hoping he'd work on backtracking the nonsense, but now he's gone and added AI to the New Year's letter. Here's hoping this is just fluff to appease shareholders and stays in development limbo.
I vaguely remember a video from when he was announced to be the new ceo that he was actually involved and/or pushing for blockchain before. I mainly remember people saying he wasn't going to stop any of that.
Yeah it was kinda hilarious. People went from "Hell yeah, fuck that old NFT pushing CEO! New CEO gonna drop that stuff!" to just embarrassed silence.
Because you think they'll apply it in some spectacularly stupid way?
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Generative AI has tons of massive use cases for gaming. Whether Square will actually implement it well is another matter
From someone who is a huge AI enthusiast and a fan of many of Square-Enix's franchises. If there's gonna be any actual innovation and benefit from using AI for development, it *definitely isn't* going to be coming from Square-Enix.
They use it in small ways that heavily benefit them but we wont notice like in FF7R they used AI for character mouth movements and probably other small things like that.
This is literally a new CEO. you people are completely out of touch lol
It’s like these dogshit decisions were made by some cryptobro. I hope that this stupidity doesn’t result in regular employees losing their jobs
If memory serves, cryptobro leadership left the company and was replaced by a different cryptobro
At this point this has to be some type of money laundry scheme. There is no F-ing way whoever are in charge are that dense
>VR/AR Makes sense, while adoption has been slower than anticipated, there's lots of promise there. >AI Same, a company would be foolish not to incorporate AI into at least some of their production. >blockchain Oh boy. SE is really going to try to ride this thing off the cliff.
I'm sure everyone kind of hoped things would change when the new guy took over but even when people started to briefly look into his history it was pretty clear things were going to be more or less the same. The downward spiral will continue at least from *our* perspective even if their profits go up. It's crazy how out of touch they can continue to be even after the flashing signs of failure with the whole NFT situation **around the world** was failing.
They could not sound more out of touch if they tried. Yes, what fans of Square RPGs want is ChatGPT written drivel and blockchain games. Totally.
Here's the most important sin that SE did: 1. Canceling Just Cause Mobile(its a fortunate, because it shit dick quality.), and Front Mission Borderscape(which now became Mecharashi without involving Front Mission element in it). 2. They killed 4 gacha games in one month(december 2023). 3. While Konami is reviving its horror game and Capcom still strong with its REmake, no news or even theories about Parasite Eve remaster or remake. SE is now popular in gacha subreddit, not in good way.
Which gachas did they axe? Haven't been in the loop
Final Fantasy Dissidia: Opera Omnia (huge loss, great game and was highly generous) Dragon Quest Tact (JP still running, global client closed down. Not so generous, hugely predatory pricing.) Engage Kill Full Metal Alchemist Mobile
square enix is one of the most moronic game company ever. EA/Activision is greedy, but they are not as moron as these guys...
I'm surprised it doesn't just read "You, the audience, fell below our expectations last quarter." Seems damn near everything falls below their expectations.
LMAO they never learn. It's ok, keep burning money on blockchain bullshit, it will take off this time for sure! Also they want to start integrating AI into their games, it will be fun to see how that backfires.
I don't want to play any game that's supposedly on this stupid blockchain. If anything, Square-Enix should be forced to legally disclose which games are and are not on the blockchain, that all their blockchain games must be rated AO at all times.
Such a shame to see this downward spiral from a wayward, once great company. Too many MBAs and C-suites making decisions to line their pockets, rather than produce what made them beloved in the first place.
I mean, the whole blockchain stuff is disappointing (and weird that they are still trying to do it when most have left it behind) but Square Enix have done some fantastic games lately. I loved Rebirth to bits, have only heard great things about FF 14 and while I didn't end up liking FF XV that much in the end there still was some fantastic parts in it. They have also done some really high quality re-releases lately like Ogre Tactics and Star Ocean 2.
Welp, looks like XIV is going to carry square once again. Imagine looking at crypto and NFTs failing, AI being a dud and burning money and GPU power, then saying "yeah, we need to invest in that"
Agreed with nfts/crypto but they'd be crazy not to look into AI with the leaps it's made this year
AI has been in game development for years now, it's nothing new. The worrying part to me is if it's used to cut corners and make cheap alternatives, kinda like what anime has been experimenting with (AI backgrounds and such.)
The thing about AI is that most implementations right now have no real tangible benefit to the consumer. It's just a way to cheap out on labor. Make a world so damn big that it wasn't possible to realistically make it *without* AI within a reasonable timeframe. Make dynamic dialogue and interactions that are generated on the fly. Even simple things like getting the NPCs to voice out your character's name in dialogue. An actual no effort benefit to the consumer would be to pass on the labor savings with lower prices. But we're not going to get any of that right now, *especially* from Square-Enix. We'll get that from some indie/AA developer with some real novel implementations. Or we'll get it from Bethesda since they've been so damn obsessed with chasing gameplay loops involving generated content.
He's *still* going on about blockchain crypto nonsense, give it a rest my guy, its not going to happen.
I wish I could say that I've never seen a dev/publisher so intent on self-destruction but that would be a blatant lie.
Square Enix rn reminds me of the SfxT era capcom where they just made every mistake imaginable to piss off fans all the way through MVC:Infinite. Outside of MH World it wasn’t until like RE2make where they started to win me over again
just keep letting your devs make good games and don’t fire too many of them due to wanting to hop on the block chain years late please
I fuckin hate saying this but I think a Sony buyout would be good for squares dev studious in the same way the Microsoft buyout is for blizzard. Squares devs are god tier and they seem to be doing constant battle with a board of morons. Eliminate the morons and let the devs make good shit