Former Square boss calls SE out

[Jiro]

Things have been started looking pretty grim for Square Enix in the past few weeks. Dampening the successful updates coming out of Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn are reports that the company posted a half-yearly loss of around US$68 million.

And now, a former Square head honcho has hit them hard.

Vanille and Serah are just as sad as Square Enix must be feeling.

Hisashi Suzuki, former Square Enix president, slammed the 2003 merger via twitter and said the company lacked vision for the future. Pretty harsh words; will they prove true?

[Sources: Kotaku, siliconera]

[Futan]

A lot of people do blame the Enix merger for the "downfall" of SE but I think it's more a combination of JRPGs becoming niche again and the ever increasing cost of creating bleeding edge visuals. Creating the 3D models for these games went from maybe a week(considering it was their first effort at 3D) with VII to months and months with XIII. And then we went from just the characters being 3D in VII through IX to entire worlds being 3D in X and on, increasing development time even more. Basically revenue is decreasing while development costs are increasing.

And while the end users may say it's worth it, the public owners of SE might not agree. Especially when you look at games like Call of Duty which are using the same visuals they did back in 2007 and are getting annual praise for their "HD graphics" and selling record amounts of copies annually as well.

I'll digress though and just say that the Eidos purchase is definitely a step in the right direction for SE. Eidos will offer more penetration to the western market than their current offerings. And we can hope that it will give SE it's own name and fans in the west that might get people wanting to try out their JRPGs.

[Old Manus]

Former SE boss states the obvious; nobody pretends to be surprised

[Bolivar]

Only problem with the '03 merger was the diversion of resources towards spin-offs. Each of the main leads for FFXIII developed 2-3 spinoffs during its development, which led to delays and lack of attention to the main series.

[maybee]

Would it be possible to Square to dump Enix and go independent again ? Just curious thinking here.

Enix isn't really doing much with the Dragon Quest series and if Square could go toe to toe with them during the 90's, surely they can rival them again ?

There is now the Persona series and Tales series. But the Tales series don't always go Western and not everybody likes the Persona games.