Square Enix looking to develop more best-selling IPs
I know some of us here have been proclaiming this for years, but this is getting out of hand. Certainly Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest were the flagship titles of Square and Enix, and it made sense for both of them to retain that title when the companies were united, but
doesn't 8 flagships kinda defeat the concept of the word to begin with?
I know its generic to say "making games for the sake of sales is wrong", but too many people in gaming forums nowadays will defend the most unethical and redundant decisions because "they're a business". However, making games for the sake of appealing to a large consumer base requires "safe" game design and reliance on established tendencies. This leads to stagnation which ultimately prevents a firm as well as its industry from growth.
In the PSX days, when Square was constantly churning out new IP's (and ideas) to support long established franchises like FF, Front Mission, and the Mana games, do you know what happened? They received considerable injections to their stock by Sony, they released a feature film and eventually signed a deal to make games with Disney. Okay, the film was a disaster, but they tried new things and this undoubtedly lead to them surviving to the point where they could merge with (or get respectfully bought out by) Enix and become the major publishers they are today.
Wada needs to step down. Hiroyuki Ito needs his own development team and efforts should be made to reconciliate and facilitate the Quest team (I heard Hiroshi Minagawa was involved in some weird game on the wii/DS...WTF!?).
Sorry for the long rant, and to most of us on EoFF this is redundant, but I defended them a year or two ago b/c they were still making fun games.
In any case, I hope one of these IP's is Legacy of Kane