I've never really been a fan of SquareEnix titles. Famous for its
JRPGs, their titles never really appealed to me. But - if their
popularity was anything to go by - they were good games and Square
Enix leveraged their popularity into some major success. In fact, for
a while the company was on a bit of a buying bender, vacuuming up a
number of other - mostly Western - game development companies,
including Eidos and IO Interactive.

But Square has been struggling recently, despite the release of hit
games Final Fantasy XIV and the Final Fantasy VII remake. It's had to
divest itself of many of the companies it once absorbed, surrendering
many of the valuable IPs. It's recent financial report* showed the
company suffered a quarter-billion dollar loss, even as many of its
competitors prospered.

It's a bit of a wonder that many of Japan's premier studios - Konami,
Capcom, Square - are struggling, despite their owning so many beloved
franchises. Except for Nintendo, all the big names that once dominated
the video game marketplace are treading water at best, if not slowly
sinking into irrelevance: chasing crypto, pachinko, or endless
re-releases of classic games from four console generations back.

And it's just baffling to me that this is happening, because - in the
rare time they do release something new - their games seem to have the
same degree of fun and quality that made these developers so beloved
in the 80s and 90s. So why are they having such a hard time? Have
players tastes changed so dramatically? Are the costs of game
development so much higher in Japan? Is Japan just unable to market to
foreign gamers? Why aren't Japanese studios the biggest names in the
game anymore?

* read some of the details here:
https://www.siliconera.com/square-enix-announces-over-22-billion-yen-in-losses/

On 5/1/2024 11:02 PM, Spalls Hurgenson wrote:
>
>
> I've never really been a fan of SquareEnix titles. Famous for its
> JRPGs, their titles never really appealed to me. But - if their
> popularity was anything to go by - they were good games and Square
> Enix leveraged their popularity into some major success. In fact, for
> a while the company was on a bit of a buying bender, vacuuming up a
> number of other - mostly Western - game development companies,
> including Eidos and IO Interactive.
>
> But Square has been struggling recently, despite the release of hit
> games Final Fantasy XIV and the Final Fantasy VII remake. It's had to
> divest itself of many of the companies it once absorbed, surrendering
> many of the valuable IPs. It's recent financial report* showed the
> company suffered a quarter-billion dollar loss, even as many of its
> competitors prospered.
>
> It's a bit of a wonder that many of Japan's premier studios - Konami,
> Capcom, Square - are struggling, despite their owning so many beloved
> franchises. Except for Nintendo, all the big names that once dominated
> the video game marketplace are treading water at best, if not slowly
> sinking into irrelevance: chasing crypto, pachinko, or endless
> re-releases of classic games from four console generations back.
>
> And it's just baffling to me that this is happening, because - in the
> rare time they do release something new - their games seem to have the
> same degree of fun and quality that made these developers so beloved
> in the 80s and 90s. So why are they having such a hard time? Have
> players tastes changed so dramatically? Are the costs of game
> development so much higher in Japan? Is Japan just unable to market to
> foreign gamers? Why aren't Japanese studios the biggest names in the
> game anymore?

They don't know how to market to foreign gamers because they never had
to really do that. Japan has a huge population and their video games
industry focused largely on Japan itself when it developed games. Not
unlike America sometimes seems shocked that people outside the US are
watching American movies (and funding them...) the video games industry
in Japan was largely self-centered. The success in other nations was a
nice bonus, but one could notice that it wasn't really what they were
after. They were making games for arcades and console gamers.
This has all changed somewhat lately. The demographic shift in Japan has
slowly eaten away at both the arcade market and the home console market,
while people moved to mobile and PCs for gaming (something that just
wasn't a proper thing before).

The pachinko angle is actually understandable. They aren't turning to
pachinko, they are focusing on their core business. Many of the
traditional video game companies in the Japanese industry had their
start in the arcades, and they were producing specifically arcade games,
even before there were video games. Especially pachinko. They never
actually stopped producing them, it's just that this part of their
business did not really make it over to the West. And despite the fact
that pachinko is not technically gambling, it most certainly IS gambling
and there's big money to be made in that everywhere.

Square Enix by the way IS actually a video game company, and unlike
those other companies they didn't have a pachinko business to just come
back to when it went bad. From what I have seen they have been trying to
get into the market though.

On 5/1/2024 2:02 PM, Spalls Hurgenson wrote:
>

> Except for Nintendo, all the big names that once dominated
> the video game marketplace are treading water at best, if not slowly
> sinking into irrelevance: chasing crypto, pachinko, or endless
> re-releases of classic games from four console generations back.

Sony's making a hell of a profit too. 2.4 billion as of last *quarter*

Maybe only the console makers can make a profit.

> And it's just baffling to me that this is happening, because - in the
> rare time they do release something new - their games seem to have the
> same degree of fun and quality that made these developers so beloved
> in the 80s and 90s. So why are they having such a hard time? Have
> players tastes changed so dramatically? Are the costs of game
> development so much higher in Japan? Is Japan just unable to market to
> foreign gamers? Why aren't Japanese studios the biggest names in the
> game anymore?

Yeah, I think tastes have changed. JRPGs just haven't kept up with the
times. Even Japanese don't want turn based rpgs anymore, it's all real
time action now. Going to pachinko is the wrong way to go.

Even with those that aren't JRPG makes, a lot of them are losing their
edge. Dragon's Dogma 2 apparently had only some graphical improvement
and the game is even more barren and bereft of content. Of course the
same can be said of certain big names here *cough* Bethesda *cough*

Of course mobile games really seem the way to go, but you don't need
much to churn out mtx ridden garbage, and maybe the tide is starting to
turn on that.

--
-Justisaur

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