Quote Originally Posted by HasteInTime View Post

First I have one thing to say of Capcom, SE is not Capcom and vice-versa. While I believe Capcom takes its own time to adapt to the market/current-trends that are on going and it is Japanese based like SE. However, Capcom is uniquely suffering for different reasons entirely I feel than what you or the next may guess. I personally have more faith in their decisions than SE and they are currently restructuring their marketing and staff here in the US where they struggle. They currently think that digital sales trends are now supposed to be their focus since they are losing profit due to lack of extra content and are right to think so if you have been seeing Nintendo's worldwide data for the 3DS EShop vs retail and it's just gaining numbers like crazy for their Eshop having those games sold digitally and they at Nintendo also wish to bring DLC that matters to their customer base.
You missed my point, while I feel Capcom has many problems and if you still trust them not to shoot themselves in the foot after the last few years of terrible marketing decisions and high profile creator defections, then I admire your convictions but don't envy your position.

My reasoning for stating that SE is becoming like Capcom squarely deals with my first paragraph that deals with running a good franchise into the ground with quick rich spin-offs and sequels of questionable quality, something Capcom is pretty much the poster child of the industry for doing this. They have killed Mega Man, Street Fighter, the Capcom Vs. franchise and getting close to finishing off Resident Evil (finally). All the Bravest is a shameless cash ploy by SE and I feel its no different from how Capcom dealt with the DLC patches for SFIV and MvC3 which they turned around and released as full priced games despite marginal differences between installments. The whole ordeal with losing Clover Studios and Keiji Inafune is also a major issue Capcom has been dealing with which is very similar to SE also losing many of their high profile designers/staff because they find the company toxic to work with.

Other than the comparison you made poorly I might say, everything else about SE I feel you said is spot on. They need a leader of vision who is a Game Designer that can figure how to work out a team with powerful ideas and test them for Final Fantasy. I always believed that they need two different teams to handle FF as a "flagship" series so that we get the not just the okay stuff they have been grinding out but also the really great stuff and the best stuff possible on both the MoRPG and RPG on console front. Much like Betehsda does with Obsidian's games Elder-scrolls and Fallout (Yes the first Fallout 3 game was all of Beth together, although Obsidian is Beth too- its where their best and brightest are) on a bi-yearly basis by rotating them and having mostly separate teams that communicate with one another.
The issue here is that technically SE has been doing this since FFVIII to be precise. Kitase's team and then some secondary team that usually involves Ito keep switching off between entries; so Kitase did VIII, Ito did IX, Kitase did X, Tanaka did XI, Kitase/Toriyama did X-2, Kitase did the Compilation, Matsuno did XII, Kitase/Toriyama did XIII trilogy. They have the KH team doing Versus XIII and the Crisis Core team did Type-0. So I don't necessarily believe this

I feel that SE is using the handheld and Cell phone market as their safety net, where they are only catering to Japan itself instead of the world like Capcom or Ubisoft. The time of specific markets has long since passed, its pretty niche to only cater to one kind of crowd these days. I'm also not saying that they should try to cater to the casual either- no just focus on the core players of your audience and sprinkle refined ideas for the hardcore and casual players. Find a balance that works and stick with it. In Ubisoft's case they hire more Devs than they do Marketers and the same with Capcom. In SE's case I feel that there is too much Marketing focus and not enough on the Dev side.
The thing I'm wondering now is if maybe their "core audience" has changed. SE has certainly branched out as both a publisher, manga distributor, and music they don't really need to rely on the big budget titles anymore if their game division can make do just appealing to the Japanese mobile market and building smaller projects and MMOs. Its why I'm both concerned and interested by SE's new proposed marketing/development strategy they just announced. It would be interesting to know if the mobile market may have overtaken the big budget projects in overall profit, which could spell a different future for the comapny.