Square Enix says more and more games either crash and burn or find big success "as players throng to a handful of major titles"
From Forspoken to Foamstars, Square Enix is still taking risks
After a whole lot of highs and lows across its recent publishing catalog, Square Enix is acknowledging to investors that games make up a risky business without much of a middle ground between colossal hits and tremendous failures.
"As a result of digitization and other technological advances, consumer game content is increasingly sold via downloads rather than physical packages," Square Enix says in its latest earnings report. "Monetization methods such as free-to-play, microtransactions, and subscriptions have also given rise to a greater diversity of business models outside the confines of traditional one-off sales. As such, the consumer game market continues to grow. New releases tend to be met with either marked success or marked failure as players throng to a handful of major titles."
That stance is, admittedly, a pretty obvious one given how often we hear about the riskiness of AAA development, but we've spent the past several years watching Square Enix slowly catch on to some things that seem pretty obvious from an outside perspective. It wasn't that long ago that the publisher realized it needed to get better at marketing after it kicked a bunch of JRPGs out the door with near-zero hype. It's also not easy to look at the contrasts like the fast-selling Final Fantasy 16 and the "lackluster" sales of Forspoken without turning into an armchair financial analyst
