Square Enix to report record 22.1 billion yen loss
(twitter.com)
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That's basically the cost of a AAA game these days.
So how much of that loss came from Luminous and those non-Japanese studios it got rid of?
On top of that, Squeenix has always been particularly bad with budgeting. A game like Mankind Divided can make millions but it didn't make quite the number of millions they expected so it's a failure.
That's an everyone problem right now. Budgets so freakishly bloated, there's no possible way they could ever profit without literally being the most popular thing of all time.
The mindset seems to be “when we release, it will magically be ‘our turn’ to dominate twitch, YouTube, Twitter, etc., and this will translate directly into big sales numbers”. As if bringing any sufficiently expensive AAA game to market is a guarantee of some level of viral success along the lines of games like BG3 and HD2.
It almost smacks of the labor theory of value; they say “we did everything right, so why didn’t we get paid?” You didn’t get paid because you forgot to make sure that people actually wanted the thing that you spent $100 million and five years making. All that time and money spent doesn’t have inherent positive value.
Guys, I've got a great idea! Y'see, all the runaway hits have been small and/or passionate projects that did something new or explored it in an interesting way. So, what we're gonna do is... Focus test and run everything by committee to create the safest, most generic and least offensive content that was popular 3 years ago.
Furthermore, if we alienate our entire audience, I believe we could quintuple our profits by pandering to the pedo-communists with no money or interest in our product.