Former Square Enix director slams company's lack of vision
Square Enix's strongest performer in last quarter was Sleeping Dogs which shipped 1.5 million units worldwide.
Suzuki, also a former Square president, points out that prior to the merger with Enix, Square's market capitalization was 150 billion yen, compared to its current value of 124 billion yen.
'There is no vision for the future,' Suzuki said, adding that he expects the merger to fail completely. Suzuki also highlights the huge development costs the company faces, claiming that HD gaming is a burden to the company.
Square Enix recently posted a loss of 5.4bn yen (£42.3m) in its latest financial results covering the six months ending on September 30. Although it made an overall loss, the company did see a 6.2% year-on-year increase in revenue, bringing in a total of 61bn yen (£478m) compared to 57.5bn yen (£450m) in the same period in 2011.
The disappointing performance was attributed to a delay to its social gaming service and slow sales of arcade releases. Sleeping Dogs, although also not living up to company expectations, did however manage to ship 1.5 million units.
Currently a director at Sega, Suzuki was a director at Square Enix between 2003 and 2005 and was president of Square between 2000 and 2002.
Square and Enix merged to form Square Enix in 2003. The company also owns British publisher Eidos Interactive and arcade game and hardware publisher Taito Corporation.
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6 Comments
Discuss in the forums ReplyUnfortunatly, it confirms my thought that game studios spend much more money and time making nice GFX that trying to be creative or refining the gameplay. It's more pityful considering that they mostly resuse a ready-to-use game engine (cry engine, Unreal engine, etc...).
3D caraters take time to make, 3D environement take time to make, as well as texture, animation, etc .... everything costing more and more money .... and it has to run well will all those polygons and high res texture .... "Jeez the game has to be released, it costed too much already .... lets throw it as it is, no need to have a finished game or a top-class gameplay".
I'm tired to see always the same gameplays, with just different GFX and a different name on the splash screen.
Everyone who loves FF Would buy it instantly.
ff13x2 was pretty awful ff13 was worse
make a decent game and foke will buy it
sleeping dogs for example nice game sold 1.5mil copys.
Great gameplay and great graphics aren't always exclusive of each other, take Skyrim for example... but often these days you either get one or the other, or a mediocre attempt at achieving both.
I think you're very close to the mark - what I can't understand is how this attitude can prevail when companies like Blizzard, Valve and Bethesda Softworks will take years working on, refining and perfecting a game before releasing it and they are all acclaimed for it as well as being some of the top earners in the industry
Well .... Bli² is a special case, what they did with Diablo is not really acceptable. Ok, they are releasing patches to improve the gameplay experience ... but the game took 12 years and still has been release at a "beta" state. D2 is still far better than D3 IMHO. I play D3 almost everyday, but from my experience with D2 (played it from day 1 to end of 2011) they made the same mistakes they made with D2 when it came out.
D2 was far from perfect, but it improved with time and especialy the LOD expansion. I wasn't expecting a perfect D3, but with the time spent on D3 + the return on experience with D2 ...
12 years for a DX9 game (DX9 is 10+ years old) realsed in a pre beta state is unacceptable. Now the game is better, but still has major gameplay issues that will result in another wave of carater nerfing. Small adjustements are predictable, but what they are doing is almost a full reroll, due to a lack of real testing. When you are Blizzard, when you have their money, when you take 12 years to develop a game .... you have a team of testers spending all their time playing the game in real life situation during the whole dev time.