Rogers, the CEO of Square Enix in the Americas and Europe, suggested to Game Informer that the direction of developer Crystal Dynamics' Tomb Raider reboot was a contentious issue within Square Enix.
"I'm not saying it split the company, but in many ways when you're trying to reboot a franchise that's got the history of Tomb Raider, it does divide opinion," Rogers told Game Informer. "We took it in a very fresh direction. I think that at the end of the day, the accolades that we got with Tomb Raider (2013) were great. At the time, not everyone felt that way."
Microsoft has "been close friends of Tomb Raider since the reboot," said Rogers. "So, the evolution of this relationship deepening with the timed exclusive is a very natural one for us, but a tough decision."
Square Enix is shifting its strategy to aggressively pursue multiplatform releases and focus on quality over quantity.
Yup, it's official. FFXVI and FFVII Rebirth didn't sell as much as they expected.
Hopefully the next Nintendo system isn't a potato and it can contribute to FF sales in future as well, in addition to PC releases. If this ensures the long term health for SE and franchises than like FF and KH then I'm all for it.
Adding Nintendo and PC customers is the best way to increase sales and long term success. Not going to get that from Xbox.
Final Fantasy VII Rebirth publisher Square Enix has declared a $140m loss based on a shakeup of its internal development pipeline.
What are they doing over there? Sounds like they canceled something big. I read a rumor a while back about ff9 remake . Here "Final Fantasy IX has gone through a very challenging development, the game is still in progress but may undergo changes drastic enough that we won't hear about it for a couple of years."
This could be one of the reasons if the rumor is true. That was Silknight i don't know how credible he is but it's something and it would make sense.
I hope IX is still on the cards
Just a straight up remake which they expand a little bit nothing over ambitious
If IX dosent happen then VI and VIII will never be thought of.
What are they doing? Sales are falling and the costs are out of control. Big releases need to be absolute sales home runs now, and Final Fantasy sales have stagnated.
Now we know why Square didn’t fall over themselves to remake the original FF7 all these years ago. It certainly wasn’t a license to print money, at least not with what the expectations were. Each of these full on remakes drains an enormous amount of company resources for a razor thin profit margin.
They lost the magic in the remakes. And the story is incomplete. The original FF7 is still way better. The Remake / Rebirth are just fan service. Like an Anime/Manga with "optional" filler content. FF7 had pretty much zero filler, it was paced extremely well, and still today flows much better than the grindy story and spongey enemy battles in the remakes.
If they released it at once on all platforms, they would have made all of their money back. Could have been on to an FF8 or 9 remake. Ready to cash in again on nostalgia like Capcom. This is their fault for trying to milk the title.
Once I head they were breaking it up into parts, I lost all interest.
I hope people understand usually when a loss is declared it means a game which had been in development got cancelled. For example Sony Santa Monica before GOW-PS4 had cancelled a project which Sony had spent 7 figures on
As far as square is concerned they release a bad game once a year. Forspoken anyone?
For those making comments on remake not selling well, I hope y’all realize that Sony is the only reason this remake is happening. If Sony didn’t fund it the remake wouldn’t be happening. Just like Konami didn’t want to remake SH2 because development costs of 100 plus million
I'm waiting for them to release the complete edition bundle, but it's definitely on my list.
Not rocket science. Compare sales numbers, development cycles, and budgets to the previous gens. We are all collectively burning up the industry from the inside out. Expectations are ludicrously high now for every release and sales are dropping for even the most prestigious of series.
We used to be satisfied paying $50-60 for a game that took 1/100th the budget and staff to make. Now gamers feel cheated if they have to pay the same for a game that took 100x the budget. We may be reaching the end of the line for this model of gaming.
@tiredgamer I think your point is one that ppl don’t understand and you hit it on the nose .. some gamers don’t want to take accountability but it’s some of the gamers fault the industry is where it’s at .. we as gamers set the standards for the industry not the shareholders , ppl forget that the shareholders and the industry want and need OUR Money. Both the Xbox and PlayStation are seeing a drop in hardware , the industry is very stagnant right now.
Speaking to Square:
Turns out their mismanagement wasn't related to the western studios they dumped to Embracer, but their own fault.
With regards to Xbox - a good way to kill your brand is to pull support on high quality titles and only dump B and C-tier titles to it
With regards to PC - Epic Games Story exclusivity for any duration and piss-poor optimization will hurt you.
With regards to FF Pixel Remasters - y'all messed up by barely releasing them on physical, like wtf that was free money!
And lastly, you don't help a franchise by releasing a mainline title that undermines every title that came before it. FFXVI was a DMC-like with bottom-of-the-barrel side quests and I can't imagine that helping Rebirth at all considering its marketing is directly tied to how big that game is.
Sony is getting their best titles and with the most polish, so what about it? Nintendo gets their top properties too, for titles that can run on Switch hardware.
It's the other fanbases that get the second- and third-class treatment from Square. If that's due to agreements with Sony, that's not a Sony issue but a Square one for accepting those terms. Sony is doing its best to look out for Sony.
The industry implosion is continuing. Sky high budgets, prolonged development windows, stagnant sales numbers, and falling currency values (inflation) are wreaking havoc on the legacy industry. AAA games will slowly become the rarity.
Oh I’m with you. What’s worse is they can say, “Well we tried to make this amazing game and spend all this money on, but not enough people showed an interest. So no more of these since we can’t take a hit like that.”
The industry is going to take a dramatic shift. Mark my words on this.
I think there is quite a large portion of individuals like myself who held out on buying it on PS5 because I can get it on PC eventually. To be able to mod the game and also have custom graphical settings to my liking
same
but im not sure if it matters at all. im sure they made sony pay a hefty sum for the 3parter to come on ps5 exclusively. so watever they made in sales, might have come bk in profits for square, but i dont know
and we dont know what "underperformed" even means for square.
Saad from eXputer: "After suffering from massive financial hits, Square Enix & Bandai Namco appear to be turning over a new leaf but I'm still unconvinced."
I was talking about games with some Japanese guys here in Japan, and it seems like around here Bandai Namco has a fame of making low-quality games, with the occasional gem.
About Square Enix, I believe they lack the capacity to improve. They should learn with Capcom (although even Capcom still makes some bad mistakes), but I don't think they ever will. They keep chasing whatever is new at the time (blockchain, AI...) to say "we innovate", without considering the public perception and if these things actually improve the games or not. Them releasing too many small games with no advertising also shows a lack of trust in its own products. Even with their biggest games, like turning FF into an action game with XVI and the very divisive plot changes regarding whispers and timelines in VII Remake, shows them trying to attract a new generation of gamers without understanding what made the series so big in the first place.
I want a true ff7 remake. With thatcsaid I'm way happier with 7 remake then I was with ff16. I'd still prefer turn based but square keep chasing these Lil kids
Man, it is perfectly fine to prefer turn based. Turn based is amazing. But there's zero reason to call anyone who likes action games "lil kids". Liking one gameplay system over another does not make you more mature in any way.
People love the new FF's overall...the problem is the abundance of 7's they release that lose money or make very little like diofield, star ocean divine force, Valkyrie asylum, harvestella, foam stars, etc. Advertising wouldn't have saved those games. Apparently Forespoken had a big Advertising budget but we saw how that went.
Star ocean divine force actually sold well from what I've read not ff type numbers but well enough. Was a dope game to.
Bandai Namco is going to Bandai Namco, I do believe that Square Enix can't change without changing the entire management, they've had these issues for more than a decade and haven't learnt, I have very little faith they can course correct. I'll still buy their better remasters/remakes like Star Ocean 2 though (not FF7R).
Namco is just milking the same Sword Art Online with lack of budget as well as anime IPs that don't go to decent developers like Jujutsu Kaisen and My Hero Academia. Namco deserves their losses and no future Dot Hack or Xenosaga remaster :(.
Square allocated lot of their budget on Forspoken was a mistake. Square always had management issues. Star Ocean 2 was a great remake and I found their recent entries of FF(16 and Rebirth) better than 13 and 15.
I think they were better than 360/PS3 generation where Square went really downhill.
I don’t know why NOW they decide on this, but I guess later is better than never.
The explanation doesn't make much sense:
"It was a big decision for us," Rogers says. "The reboot of Tomb Raider was a fascinating journey for us. I'm not saying it split the company, but in many ways when you're trying to reboot a franchise that's got the history of Tomb Raider, it does divide opinion. We took it in a very fresh direction. I think that at the end of the day, the accolades that we got with Tomb Raider (2013) were great. At the time, not everyone felt that way."
It turns out that Microsoft's support of this new vision for the classic franchise played a part in the timed exclusivity. "One big group that we always felt helped us was Microsoft," Rogers says. "They've been close friends of Tomb Raider since the reboot and reimagining of where we could take Lara Croft and Tomb Raider. So, the evolution of this relationship deepening with the timed exclusive is a very natural one for us, but a tough decision."
Especially when sales numbers for the Tomb Raider reboot were actually better on the PS4 and PS3.
http://www.vgchartz.com/gam...
PS3 - 2.43 million
PS4 - .93 million
Xbox One - .35 million
Xbox 360 - 1.86
VGChartz was the only source I could find for console totals, but clearly, the sales numbers are skewed towards Playstation platforms.
The original reboot sold better on PlayStation platforms. If anything the sequel should've logically been a timed exclusive on PS3 and PS4 for that reason alone. Microsoft however clearly jumped at the chance because they were worried about Uncharted 4 being a huge force against them in holiday 2015, and they didn't think Halo 5 alone was enough to give X1 a fighting chance against PS4.
It's been a year. How long are we gonna go on with the Tomb Raider Xbox timed exclusivity thing? It's coming to PS4 Dec 2016. Got it. Nothing is changing it. Move on.
"Timed Exclusive"
MS support the devs.
That's why we got the amazing dragon age completely for free yesterday in the vault via ea access.
Incredible!!