i was getting at they don't release a FF every year.
Well, they have many IPs. But specifically FF, if you also consider things like remakes, remasters, compilations and mobile games I'd bet they release multiple FF games per year.
They dont have a title that they pump out on a yearly basis was what I was getting at. And that 2.5B was on a high note of covid, and FF14 having a huge resurgence because WOW players left Blizzard for FF14.
On top of their mobile efforts.
This year they continued their operative income growth pattern they already had since several years ago, in the same way that their stocks also have been growing steadily since like a decade ago.
Players leave WoW to FFXIV because they think it's a better game or got bored of WoW, yes. FFXIV is the new king of MMORPG.
They merge their console, pc and mobile gaming numbers under "Digital Entertainment" and don't provide specific mobile numbers, so you can't know if their performance is due to mobile or not. But for this fiscal year they mentioned "The Games for Smart Devices/PC Browser sub-segment saw somewhat weak performances from existing
titles, but its net sales rose compared to the previous fiscal year due to the application of revised revenue
recognition standards."
To you're first question, Square had success on NES and SNES, but more success WW with Sony's distribution of Playstation in outside markets of the US/UK and Japan. Square bought Enix during the PS1-PS2 era because they had the capital during their expansion growth.
During the 8 and 16 bit gen Square and Enix (before their merging) already were the top RPG publishers in console and one of the biggest 3rd party console publishers worldwide in a general even if many of their games were Japan only or some were also released in the west but were super successful particularly in Japan. Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest games already were million sellers, several of their games even sold multiple millions each even in NES.
With PlayStation the console installbase got way bigger, specially in Europe (the biggest PS market). Square Enix were smart on increasing their efforts to not only release more games in Europe, but to localize more to non-English languages. Something key and that by becoming more common in PS than in previous consoles, did help PS grow a lot in Europe. As a result of all this Square sales increased and particularly FFVII sold way better than previous FF games. It was the first JRPG for a huge amount of western players. They got a lot of money and kept growing.
In the case of Dragon Quest they kept selling on PS the 3-4M copies per games they already were selling before, particularly on Japan. They didn't take the FFVII localization efforts with Dragon Quest.
They also had other pretty successful IPs that did particularly well on PS or subseries like FF Tactics. That gen teaming up with Sony they were way more successful than before in general than in the previous ones with Nintendo (remember, there's also the revenue cut etc). So they repeated their partnership in PS2, and in PS3 they had to go multi because they needed extra revenue sources since the development costs skyrocketed but game pricing and sales not, so went multi to get more revenue sources to compensate it.
They already were important before PS, but PS1 and PS2 did push them to a new level helping them become way bigger and more powerful.
