>The Transaction will assist the Company in adapting to the changes underway in the global
business environment by establishing a more efficient allocation of resources, which will enhance
corporate value by accelerating growth in the Company’s core businesses in the digital
entertainment domain. In addition, the Transaction enables the launch of new businesses by
moving forward with investments in fields including blockchain, AI, and the cloud.
They are still making incredibly good games (FFXIV, DQXI, Nier, Bravely Default etc.) but for every single good one I swear they make 3 utter shite too + their gacha games are not even that good considering the saturation on the gacha market and what quality games some other companies can make (see Genshin)
But at least Naoki Yoshida is on the board of directors + he is producing the next mainline FF game and I think he has the trust of millions of players considering what they did with XIV. So not all hope lost as long as he is at the company.
"Investments in blockchain, AI, and the cloud" sounds like they have absolutely no idea what they should do, and will spend most of the money paying very expensive consultants who produce delirious slideware about web3 metaverse opportunities.
In the noclip documentary on FFXIV a few years back, Yoshida mentioned that he was considering leaving Square-Enix to make his own games. FFXIV is really good, but Yoshida is the soul of that game. If he left, that would be devastating.
If you haven't seen the noclip documentary, you should. It's on YouTube.
For me, Square Enix has been more of a manga publisher than a game company in recent years, and on that front I would say they are doing a pretty good job.
> but for every single good one I swear they make 3 utter shite too
That describes almost all AAA companies. I think Square takes more heat on this point because they are some of the few studios still investing heavily in the "AA" market. Outside of Avengers, most of the other projects people may point to aren't really the highest budget games to begin with. And those rough releases are something most other studios don't want to risk anymore.
> + their gacha games are not even that good considering the saturation on the gacha market and what quality games some other companies can make (see Genshin)
I mean, the entire market is trying to chase Genshin right now. It's a very arguable point that no mobile game released as of now is as good as Genshin, at least on a technical level.
I understand why. The attraction of mobile is running a relatively low budget (say, "A/AA" level) project and having it profit for a few years until they need to recycle the assets into a new project. A game like Genshin is the equivalent of trying to put GTA V on a phone. Which may be technically feasible now, in 2022, but it'd get you laughed out of a pitch in 2017 or so when Genshin started development
Remember, this would have been right before the Switch launched and had Breath of the Wild show what an ARM architecture was capable of rendering. Most other studios are too risk averse to consider such an endeavor. Console developers especially because they don't want to cannabalize their games with something that plays too closely to their $60 AAA blockbuster.
To me xiv is a horrible game and barely a mmo. Square enix hasnt done good games for a while. TWEWY is probably their only good series but they barely market it. Also their strategy of releasing everything epic game store exclusive on PC is pretty scummy.
>one I swear they make 3 utter shite too + their gacha games are not even that good considering the saturation on the gacha market and what quality games some other companies can make (see Genshin)
I heard from sources that the western department is doing this.
Sources: Are on Twitter, forgot the name. (Yea I know, that I don't need to "believe everything" so please add salt to my statement)
Pretty please can we have the final installment of the Adam Jensen Deus Ex trilogy now. Left us hanging in the middle of what might be one of my favorite neo noir, cyberpunk series because open world story driven games were losing out back then. There's clearly an appetite now given recent releases and their success.
I think Deus Ex is done. A finish to the Jensen story would rely upon Eidos Montreal being able to produce more than one game every 5 years. Since Mankind Divided, they've released only a Guardians of the Galaxy game.
MD was a great game, which was according to Eidos Montreal kneecapped by "Square rushing it out". Human Revolution was an even greater game, but still slightly kneecapped by "Square rushing it out".
Whenever this game is mentioned, I still think about and regret my actions during my first playthrough of the very first mission in the second? game. You have a choice in how to do it and I was lazy and just killed everyone, and IIRC it's revealed that it's a test with your comrades guarding the objective and I felt awful!
The newer tomb raider games are the most AAA games I’ve ever seen. Not saying they’re good, or bad, but every other moment is a handcrafted moment. It sort of works. A lot of it is platforming through crumbling environments. Which is pretty cool. It’s sort of overdone too.
The original Tomb Raider was almost Minecraft-esque. It was composed of blocks of different heights and slopes in a 2D grid. This allowed the developers to create all sorts of scenarios from simple tools to put Lara through and really test all her abilities.
I played through the first "new" Tomb Raider and it was very much "walk on the path marked walkable, climb the ledges/walls marked climbable, shoot the specially marked doors to create a scripted zipline", etc. Oh, and "waist-height walls mean upcoming combat sequence". Based on that I decided to skip the other two. Uncharted was better able to mask the on-rails nature of its experience, at least.
It was believed Square’s choice to put Final Fantasy on PlayStation killed the Sega Saturn, and dented N64 adoption. But this is console war mythos, not sure if anyone really dug into it.
The power of Square once upon a time may have been truly legendary, but who knows for sure?
They have been mismanaged badly and have lost LOTS of money on recent flops. I'll bet the new owners intend to completely write-off substantial chunks of the in-progress work and start clean.
The Embracer Group's portfolio is becoming scary big. They're really scooping up development studios left and right. I appreciate that they're not doing much with them right now, but it makes me concerned for the future.
In comparison to other recent sales of big studios and publishers the price just seems absolutely and insanely low. Gearbox 1.3B, Bethesda 7.5B, Insomniac $230M, Wth is Square thinking.
Letting Eidos and Crystal Dynamics go for about the same price as Insomniac? Wild just wild.
I was never sure how much of the $7.5B is Bethesda vs sister and parent companies . This deal makes it seem like it’s over $7B of it, but there were a decent amt of sister companies making thing.
Epic Games was just valued at $31.5B in their latest funding round last month.
Square always did best Japanese style games, and maybe this lets them focus more on what they're good at.
Eidos is such a good game studio, but I feel Square was just not letting them shine. Crystal Dynamics is also pretty descent, but that Avengers game what the hell happened? I think they're just not the right studio for a game like that.
Now I don't know much about Embracer, but they seem to want to make good quality games, and I'm happy about that.
There's so many hands in the pudding of avengers between SE, Crystal, Marvel, and Disney, and so many industry fluctuations that there's probably no one party at blame. These were dealings happening right at the crux of when Games as a Service was hitting full swing, during production Infinity War became a cultural phenomenon on top of the already existing cultural phenomenon, the fan reaction to the initial avenger faces, a revolving door of talent during production, And ofc some COVID to throw everything in disarray in the 11th hour, but still needing _something_ to take advantadge of the software surge as the movies were being delayed.
it's a perfect storm of business meddling and plain ol' unfortunate circumstance. At this point, I'm just baffled by how lucky Insomiac was to basically time everything just right while under 80% of the same conditions.
I don't think there is a right studio for a live-service game with micro-transactions etc., etc., etc., and I blame Square for taking what could have been a tightly-focused game and making it into something big, bland, and expensive. Not to say that Crystal Dynamics couldn't have done better, just that I think Square is obsessed with making a live service game happen (see also: Outriders; Babylon's Fall) and they're letting that blind drive hurt their studios.
Executives at Square-Enix have been saying for >ten years now that video gaming consoles and AAA games are getting less and less interesting to them, especially in Japan.
If they can release new Deus Ex game that keeps the spirit and best aspects of the first games, uses the best of Cyberpunk 2077, and a dash of the amazingness that was Prey we could have an absolutely EPIC game.
in what way? A huge sprawling turned based JRPG experience, or a big-budget Japanese-style game with a more "universally resonant" style of dialouge and narrative?
If you don't mind some indie jank, Light fairytale[1] is very much a fan's attempt to capture that FF7 feel in the modern day. And then there's Edge of Eternity[2] that tries to do the same with an ff10/12 feel. if you want something more AAA, Yakuza Like a Dragon has that sense of exploration and scope while being a turned based game (but the tone is completely different).
For the latter: well, Sakaguchi still makes games, and his latest one on IOS called Fantasian has been getting praise. Lost Oddessy is an older, Xbox only title that more or less feels like "what if Sakaguchi made his own version of FF13?". not in a thematic sense, but more in the fact that this was a big budget HD game that feels like it was cut from the same cloth as FF12. The downside of his post Square games is the platform availability.
No idea why companies in trouble always fall for the Marvel collab trap. Never seen it actually work out just seems to bleed out the last of the money then completely flop in the marketplace.
My bet is that this is a more useful maneuver for getting acquired by Microsoft than Sony in the current marketplace. Microsoft doesn't need much more "Western IP" (not after Bethesda), but everyone knowns Microsoft needs a much bigger Asian IP footprint as the last big hole in their "global" catalog.
At current TSE prices it'd cost Sony at least 5% of their entire market cap to acquire SE so I think we'd hear a bit more about it if something like that were in the works. A trillion yen is nothing to sneeze at.
Frankly they lost their magic not long after buying Enix. Both companies were amazing, they had some great games for 2-3 years after the merger, then it was just drivel. No I didn't like the dizneee meets final fantasy installments.
[+] [-] haunter|3 years ago|reply
https://www.hd.square-enix.com/eng/news/pdf/20220502%20A_Pre...
They are still making incredibly good games (FFXIV, DQXI, Nier, Bravely Default etc.) but for every single good one I swear they make 3 utter shite too + their gacha games are not even that good considering the saturation on the gacha market and what quality games some other companies can make (see Genshin)
But at least Naoki Yoshida is on the board of directors + he is producing the next mainline FF game and I think he has the trust of millions of players considering what they did with XIV. So not all hope lost as long as he is at the company.
[+] [-] pavlov|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bovermyer|3 years ago|reply
If you haven't seen the noclip documentary, you should. It's on YouTube.
[+] [-] philipov|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] omoikane|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] johnnyanmac|3 years ago|reply
That describes almost all AAA companies. I think Square takes more heat on this point because they are some of the few studios still investing heavily in the "AA" market. Outside of Avengers, most of the other projects people may point to aren't really the highest budget games to begin with. And those rough releases are something most other studios don't want to risk anymore.
> + their gacha games are not even that good considering the saturation on the gacha market and what quality games some other companies can make (see Genshin)
I mean, the entire market is trying to chase Genshin right now. It's a very arguable point that no mobile game released as of now is as good as Genshin, at least on a technical level.
I understand why. The attraction of mobile is running a relatively low budget (say, "A/AA" level) project and having it profit for a few years until they need to recycle the assets into a new project. A game like Genshin is the equivalent of trying to put GTA V on a phone. Which may be technically feasible now, in 2022, but it'd get you laughed out of a pitch in 2017 or so when Genshin started development
Remember, this would have been right before the Switch launched and had Breath of the Wild show what an ARM architecture was capable of rendering. Most other studios are too risk averse to consider such an endeavor. Console developers especially because they don't want to cannabalize their games with something that plays too closely to their $60 AAA blockbuster.
[+] [-] baby|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sascha_sl|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Cloudef|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] MonaroVXR|3 years ago|reply
I heard from sources that the western department is doing this.
Sources: Are on Twitter, forgot the name. (Yea I know, that I don't need to "believe everything" so please add salt to my statement)
Source #1: https://twitter.com/Genki_JPN?t=FlkGLMQE4aoCHqod-O68RQ&s=09
[+] [-] poulpy123|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] make3|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ianbutler|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Reubachi|3 years ago|reply
MD was a great game, which was according to Eidos Montreal kneecapped by "Square rushing it out". Human Revolution was an even greater game, but still slightly kneecapped by "Square rushing it out".
[+] [-] stevenwoo|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] oneoff786|3 years ago|reply
SquareEnix felt legendary growing up.
[+] [-] bitwize|3 years ago|reply
I played through the first "new" Tomb Raider and it was very much "walk on the path marked walkable, climb the ledges/walls marked climbable, shoot the specially marked doors to create a scripted zipline", etc. Oh, and "waist-height walls mean upcoming combat sequence". Based on that I decided to skip the other two. Uncharted was better able to mask the on-rails nature of its experience, at least.
[+] [-] kmlx|3 years ago|reply
uncharted, horizon, god of war, last of us etc
[+] [-] acchow|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] baby|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wetpaws|3 years ago|reply
If it is a future of squenix, maybe it would be better for them to stop making games.
[+] [-] Shadonototra|3 years ago|reply
People mix both SquareSoft's success and Enix and their merge
[+] [-] crate_barre|3 years ago|reply
The power of Square once upon a time may have been truly legendary, but who knows for sure?
[+] [-] awill|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] WillPostForFood|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] metalliqaz|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sorry_outta_gas|3 years ago|reply
according to square's leadership anyway
[+] [-] MikusR|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] falcolas|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Tiktaalik|3 years ago|reply
Letting Eidos and Crystal Dynamics go for about the same price as Insomniac? Wild just wild.
[+] [-] skinnymuch|3 years ago|reply
Epic Games was just valued at $31.5B in their latest funding round last month.
[+] [-] gundamdoubleO|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] didibus|3 years ago|reply
Square always did best Japanese style games, and maybe this lets them focus more on what they're good at.
Eidos is such a good game studio, but I feel Square was just not letting them shine. Crystal Dynamics is also pretty descent, but that Avengers game what the hell happened? I think they're just not the right studio for a game like that.
Now I don't know much about Embracer, but they seem to want to make good quality games, and I'm happy about that.
[+] [-] johnnyanmac|3 years ago|reply
it's a perfect storm of business meddling and plain ol' unfortunate circumstance. At this point, I'm just baffled by how lucky Insomiac was to basically time everything just right while under 80% of the same conditions.
[+] [-] brendoelfrendo|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] CodeArtisan|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] johnnyanmac|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Melatonic|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vmception|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ddingus|3 years ago|reply
Anyone doing titles like that anymore?
My wife and I really enjoy a big one and will play one all the way through. Miss that type of experience.
The MMO is completely uninteresting and addictive as hell from what I see can happen to players.
[+] [-] johnnyanmac|3 years ago|reply
in what way? A huge sprawling turned based JRPG experience, or a big-budget Japanese-style game with a more "universally resonant" style of dialouge and narrative?
If you don't mind some indie jank, Light fairytale[1] is very much a fan's attempt to capture that FF7 feel in the modern day. And then there's Edge of Eternity[2] that tries to do the same with an ff10/12 feel. if you want something more AAA, Yakuza Like a Dragon has that sense of exploration and scope while being a turned based game (but the tone is completely different).
For the latter: well, Sakaguchi still makes games, and his latest one on IOS called Fantasian has been getting praise. Lost Oddessy is an older, Xbox only title that more or less feels like "what if Sakaguchi made his own version of FF13?". not in a thematic sense, but more in the fact that this was a big budget HD game that feels like it was cut from the same cloth as FF12. The downside of his post Square games is the platform availability.
[1]:https://store.steampowered.com/app/539330/Light_Fairytale_Ep... [2]: https://store.steampowered.com/app/269190/Edge_Of_Eternity/
[+] [-] whywhywhywhy|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cinntaile|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] WorldMaker|3 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] midislack|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dncornholio|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alliao|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] jbverschoor|3 years ago|reply