Yoichi Wada resigns as Square Enix CEO

[Eric]

http://www.4gamer.net/games/999/G999905/20130326067/

Square Enix released some really bad numbers to investors today. Wada has stepped down to "make way for management reform". Yosuke Matsuda takes up the post of CEO.

Edit: http://www.hd.square-enix.com/eng/ne...30326_02en.pdf

[SineSwiper]

STOP MAKING MMOs! You're not good at them.

[Eric]

I think companies really need to stop expecting Call of Duty 8-10 million numbers.

Tomb Raider is one of the best games I've played all year, and it shipped 3.4 million in a month and is considered a failure, wtf. ;p

[Julius Seeker]

I was definitely more of a fan of Pre-Wada Square.

[Don]

I don't know why whenever a random exec just says 'today's game are too expensive, need $500 million budget OMG' and people just take it as if it's the truth. As far as I can tell the most expensive part of something is the graphics because that's something you need a lot of manpower to do, but even though technology has advanced what counts as a 'big graphics team' is not growing indefinitely. Back in say FF7 there's a huge section on graphics, and 10 years later it's not like you see the graphics section has 100 times the names just because the graphics have improved by 100 times. I really don't know what the heck they're spending into development where selling 3 million would be considered a failure, though it's not that different from the generic MMORPG that sold 3 million and had a million subs for 6 months but 'totally flopped', even though that'd be something close to $250 million revenue just from these sales numbers. And of course they're saying 'that's because this game is supposed to be the next WoW killer' but WoW's maintenance cost is under $50 million a year even at its height, and it's probably a lot less now.

[Zeus]

Development costs are so high break-even is like 2-3 million copies nowadays, man. It ain't like back in the day where 500k was considered a moderate success. Even on handhelds that's too little anymore

[Don]

Development costs are so high break-even is like 2-3 million copies nowadays, man. It ain't like back in the day where 500k was considered a moderate success. Even on handhelds that's too little anymore

Yeah they say that all the time but the question is why? Is it because a title like Megaman 9 that looks like could be done by one person has a staff of 25 people? But why on earth do you need 25 people to make a game like Megaman 9? It's not like we're seeing ever increasing number of people on the credits page. Big budget games certainly don't have a credits list that's 10 times that of say, Final Fantasy 7, because otherwise we'd be looking at games where you need to scroll for an hour to see the credits after you beat the game.

[SineSwiper]

I think companies really need to stop expecting Call of Duty 8-10 million numbers.

Tomb Raider is one of the best games I've played all year, and it shipped 3.4 million in a month and is considered a failure, wtf. ;p

This reminds me of FOX's constant push for "American Idol" and "House" based viewership numbers for every show they put out. This is what caused all of those cancellations 10 years ago.

Development costs are so high break-even is like 2-3 million copies nowadays, man. It ain't like back in the day where 500k was considered a moderate success. Even on handhelds that's too little anymore

Development cost is a flexible parameter. You can make a game on $10K or $100K or $1M or $10M or $100M. If trying to push for epic Call of Duty numbers isn't working out, then change your damn development model.

[Zeus]

Why are development costs high? Simple: HD graphics and multiplayer. You know how much more volume and detail in the art is required with HD graphics? The complexity of the game design coupled with the HD absolutely sky-rocketed those costs. Add in the fact that mulitplayer seems to be where the real money is and that takes a SHITTON of capital to develop, test, and maintain and it ain't a surprise that costs are so damned high that 2 million in sales is considered a disappointment

Yes, Sine, indie games are being made for $10k. But we're talking about big releases now. It's a big deal for a company to take a chance on a new IP like Dishonored or Assassin's Creed, it costs a lot. But rewards can be damned high too as Creed is showing. You have to keep trying to develop new IPs otherwise the industry will slowly die but it ain't cheap. I truly believe the solution is in tiered pricing. Make a game for $40 that's decent graphics, re-used engine (you'd be shocked that groups within companies don't re-use engines), and the focus is more on design. And you budget accordingly. If it sells well, you can charge more for the sequel. That's actually what happened with Borderlands and Batman and even Katamari and is the real solution to the industry starting to correct its bad habits

[Don]

Just because we've machines that are hundreds of times more powerful than PSX doesn't mean the grahpics team is now that much bigger. You can basically get a rough idea of the game's development cost just by the size of the credits page, especially on something like graphics since it's not like you're going to pay a guy a million dollars an year to do graphics. That's definitely done by people who gets paid in a predictable way.

Multiplayer isn't anything special beyond another feature in a game. Doom 2 has multiplayer and it works fine. Diablo 3's multiplayer mode is no more complicated than Diablo 1's, as both game have the single player game and you happen can have more than you in it. Okay so various factors scale based on number of players but that's literally something you can figure out on a single page of spreadsheet. Maybe the security of the server is complicated but that's a feature. If you have secure servers maybe you don't have something else (say, fun, in the case of Diablo 3). There's no especially high overhead for doing multiplayer compared to any other feature you might do that'd be attractive. If you've a budget FPS, Doom 2 level of multiplayer could be sufficient. If you're aiming for something bigger, yeah you'll need more money and that's your choice to aim for something bigger.

[SineSwiper]

Just because we've machines that are hundreds of times more powerful than PSX doesn't mean the grahpics team is now that much bigger. You can basically get a rough idea of the game's development cost just by the size of the credits page, especially on something like graphics since it's not like you're going to pay a guy a million dollars an year to do graphics. That's definitely done by people who gets paid in a predictable way.

Counterpoint: Ending credits to Scott Pilgrim:



All 14 minutes of it.

[Don]

Or you can look at a game like Megaman 9/10 which looks exactly the same as a game made 20 years ago but has like 5 times the staff. It's almost like one of those RPG plot where the ancient technology of how to make games without a ton of money was lost and now we're stuck with expensive bloated games. I'm guessing if they need to remake Super Mario World now it's going to cost $50 million too.

[Zeus]

Just because we've machines that are hundreds of times more powerful than PSX doesn't mean the grahpics team is now that much bigger. You can basically get a rough idea of the game's development cost just by the size of the credits page, especially on something like graphics since it's not like you're going to pay a guy a million dollars an year to do graphics. That's definitely done by people who gets paid in a predictable way.

Multiplayer isn't anything special beyond another feature in a game. Doom 2 has multiplayer and it works fine. Diablo 3's multiplayer mode is no more complicated than Diablo 1's, as both game have the single player game and you happen can have more than you in it. Okay so various factors scale based on number of players but that's literally something you can figure out on a single page of spreadsheet. Maybe the security of the server is complicated but that's a feature. If you have secure servers maybe you don't have something else (say, fun, in the case of Diablo 3). There's no especially high overhead for doing multiplayer compared to any other feature you might do that'd be attractive. If you've a budget FPS, Doom 2 level of multiplayer could be sufficient. If you're aiming for something bigger, yeah you'll need more money and that's your choice to aim for something bigger.

Have you ever talked to anyone who's made a game? This isn't an opinion of mine, this is simply the reality of game development as explained to me by my friend who works in the industry

[Don]

Just because we've machines that are hundreds of times more powerful than PSX doesn't mean the grahpics team is now that much bigger. You can basically get a rough idea of the game's development cost just by the size of the credits page, especially on something like graphics since it's not like you're going to pay a guy a million dollars an year to do graphics. That's definitely done by people who gets paid in a predictable way.

Multiplayer isn't anything special beyond another feature in a game. Doom 2 has multiplayer and it works fine. Diablo 3's multiplayer mode is no more complicated than Diablo 1's, as both game have the single player game and you happen can have more than you in it. Okay so various factors scale based on number of players but that's literally something you can figure out on a single page of spreadsheet. Maybe the security of the server is complicated but that's a feature. If you have secure servers maybe you don't have something else (say, fun, in the case of Diablo 3). There's no especially high overhead for doing multiplayer compared to any other feature you might do that'd be attractive. If you've a budget FPS, Doom 2 level of multiplayer could be sufficient. If you're aiming for something bigger, yeah you'll need more money and that's your choice to aim for something bigger.

Have you ever talked to anyone who's made a game? This isn't an opinion of mine, this is simply the reality of game development as explained to me by my friend who works in the industry

Sure if I talked to Curt Shilling I'm sure I'll be told why all the money he needed wasn't even enough to launch his game. When you're talking to an industry that is clearly way overspending on the budget of course you wouldn't expect anything other than 'all that money is needed' as a response. It's not like at some point the ancient technology of NES or whatever has been lost to the point now that it apparently costs more to duplicate a game in the NES era (Megaman 9/10) than it did 20 years ago.

Let's take any random aspect, like voice acting. On one hand you're going to have the guys that tell you spending $50 million to resurrect Elvis from the dead so he can do the voice acting is totally worth it, and on the opposite spectrum you got Blizzard whose voice acting is done by a random guys who think they can do voice acting (unless every member of Blizzard's staff happens to be a professional grade voice actor). Well Blizzard probably saves a lot on voice acting by having random developers pretend they can voice acting, and this keeps the costs down. Maybe it turns out it's better to resurrect Elvis for him to do the voice acting, but you can't just always assume the expensive option is supposed to be always the better one and then blame the costs as some kind of inevitable force of nature. You can obviously get voice acting for very, very cheap if you wanted to.

[Zeus]

Graphics are not voice actors. The advancement of graphics has increased the resources require a thousand fold. What two guys could do on the NES takes a team of 50 now. That's a lot of increased costs

[Don]

Graphics requires more manpower as complexity increases but the cost to do graphics also decreases. Final Fantasy 7 was cutting edge in the PSX era. It almost certainly does not take anywhere near cutting edge technology to produce that now (though you wouldn't be able to tell looking at say, Megaman 9). Of course if you push your game way on the cutting edge it can always get arbitarily more expensive. There's got to be a point where you say 'we don't need more graphics than what we got now' and call it a day. I mean the industry would like you to believe that every game out there is just pouring money down the drain because companies really like to fund projects that are total lost causes but obviously everyone thought putting $X into this game means it could sell 10 million copies except it didn't quite work out. You want to be greedy and sell 10 million copies you got to accept the risk.

I can see like some kind of reverse back to the future scenario, where Miyamoto travels 20 years in the future and he'd tell people about how Super Mario World only had a budget of 50 million yen and people will be like Pong Online only cost $500 million DOLLARS and that's only because they were able to resurrect the guy who first did Pong to save on the costs. This whole thing reminds me like how military weapons get inexorably more expensive too and every defense company tell you it's some sort of force of nature stuff gets more expensive, though at least here it's justified by the fact that US wants to fight a war where nobody ever dies on their side which wasn't a standard criteria 50 years ago. Games, as far as I can tell, don't suddenly have some impossible to meet criteria that wasn't the norm 20 years ago. You still want a game that looks decent and plays well. We're not exactly asking for Elvis to be resurrected to do the opening song here for our latest iteration of whatever.

[Eric]

In a recent financial briefing, former Square Enix president Yoichi Wada discussed how Square Enix arrived at their sales forecasts for some of the biggest games they’ve released over the last 12 months. The three titles in question are: Sleeping Dogs, Hitman Absolution and Tomb Raider.

As previously reported, despite high sales, all three games sold below expectations in North America and Europe. Wada shares:

“Let’s talk about Sleeping Dogs: we were looking at selling roughly 2~2.5 million units in the EUR/NA market based on its game content, genre and Metacritic scores. In the same way, game quality and Metacritic scores led us to believe that Hitman had potential to sell 4.5~5 million units and 5~6 million units for Tomb Raider in EUR/NA and Japanese markets combined.

“Of course, we want to hedge risk in budgeting these units directly into the forecast, therefore we base the forecast on 80-90% of the total sales potential of each title. However, it is disappointing that our results fell below these marks.”

For reference, Sleeping Dogs has moved 1.75 million copies, Hitman Absolution 3.6 million and Tomb Raider 3.4 million.

Wada says that Square Enix’s revenue model is outdated and that the company’s selling capacity has been “far weaker than we ever imagined” in North America and Europe. As a result, Square Enix are incurring an extraordinary loss in an “effort to sort out items not achieving expected revenue levels, through scrapping those items and terminating production”.

Some of the content being scrapped was in development at studios in Japan. A loss of more than 2 billion yen originates from Japanese studios, where certain productions have already been halted and work scrapped. Additionally, Square Enix say that they recently launched a new division in the U.S. to develop casual games for phones, but were forced to close it down after things didn’t go well. The company expects a 1 billion yen loss as a result of its closure. Total losses resulting from this “Loss on Disposal of Content” at Square Enix amount to 4 billion yen.

A further loss of 3.5 billion yen is expected from “Loss on Evaluation of Content,” where Square will make downward revisions to their prospective yields for every game title and overhaul their business models. A 2 billion yen loss in this regard will come from Japan and 1.5 billion yen from Europe and North America.

Additionally, a company-wide loss of 2 billion yen is expected in relation to re-structuring Square Enix. In total, all of these losses amount to 10 billion yen.

While console game sales were sluggish, social games are showing “solid performance,” Wada says, with continuous growth in net sales. Square expect net sales from their Social Gaming and Others category to reach 20 billion yen in fiscal year 2013. Profit margins continue to improve steadily and Square say that their social game development teams exchange expertise with each other on a daily basis. Over the next year, Square plan to focus on providing social games to China and Korea, and gradually expand to the entire Asian region.

In the wake of the company’s losses, Wada will be stepping down as Square’s president. As previously reported, Yosuke Matsuda will be replacing Yoichi Wada as Square Enix’s new president.

http://www.siliconera.com/2013/04/08/sq ... ming-from/

[Don]

I guess "based on its game content, genre and Metacritic scores" means "If Diablo 3 sold 12 million and everyone hated it surely we can do the same", except that nobody else is Diablo 3.

I mean he might as well ask me and I can make up a random number and that's probably as good as whatever metric they used. Why do developers even pretend there's some kind of pattern to how many game something should sell? Some games sell way more than anyone expected and some games sell way less than people expected. This kind of reminds me the argument for Fermi's Principle on estimating the probability on life in universe being a bunch of totally random guesses that is in no way verifiable is 'at most only an order of magnitude off'. You can't just say WoW doesn't even look like it's that great so we should manage 80-90% of WoW's numbers. It's not even certain you can get 8-9% of WoW's numbers and no game has ever come close to even 50% in the same market. It's one thing to aim high but you can't expect 80% of the most successful game in your genre (and sometimes industry) to come easily.

[SineSwiper]

Seriously, who cares about Squeenix any more? It's a sad fact that they don't have much in terms of interesting IP nowadays. (Or games, for that matter.)

[bovine]

I would give any new Dragon Quest (or the Dragon quest MMO if it even floats out of Japan) a go. I have enjoyed Sleepy Dogs and would recommend the new Tomb Raider. I totally agree that no one cares about most of the junk coming out of SquareEnix, though. Awful Final Fantasies or overpriced iOS ports? No thank you.

[SineSwiper]

FF13 was good, but they seriously need to stop making MMOs. It's not working.

Also, the new Dragon Quests (or Blue Dragon, which is basically the same thing) are just more of the same cookie-cutter JRPG crap. Call me a n00b all you want, but that sort of thing doesn't really interest me any more. The plots are boring as hell, and most of the game plays like a single-player MMO. Making numbers go up or down has been a lot less fun for me as my tastes in gaming have matured.

[Don]

I was never a fan of the Dragon Quest series. I guess it's supposed to be your quasi-hard JRPG where if the boss feels like using his best attack twice in the same round you automatically die with no chance of survival and I guess that's challenging in its own way. I didn't think FF13 was as bad as people say but I thinK they need to stop having every FF completely revolutionalize everything even though FF is pretty much THE generic RPG. FF12 wasn't bad either but it was just too weird with all these systems they add that really didn't improve the game any. Also, assuming FF13 is going to be the next FF7 so you've a franchise built around it before it even came out was pretty dumb

[Zeus]

FF13 was good

*shakes his head*

[Blotus]

They ought to try something really ballsy like have Eidos Montreal make Final Fantasy and Square make Deus Ex.

[Julius Seeker]

I don't know about Dragon Quest X - because the game turned into an MMO RPG which isn't my style of game - but Dragon Quest 9 was awesome! My favourite is still Dragon Ques 5 because it takes place over decades and features multiple generations. Dragon Quest 8 is fairly good too, I didn't like it as much as 5 or 9, but I did like it as much/more than recent Final Fantasy games.

[Oracle]

FF13 was good

*shakes his head*

^^

[Zeus]

They ought to try something really ballsy like have Eidos Montreal make Final Fantasy and Square make Deus Ex.

That's a good idea, actually. They really need to take FF away from Square Japan as it's pretty obvious that they can't do jack themselves anymore. I'd love to see someone else take a crack. Maybe not necessarily a Western developer but maybe a company like Tri Ace who makes the Dragon Quest games. They'd be much more likely to farm out their money maker to someone they already know and can keep a close eye on

Either that or pay Sakaguchi an obscene amount of money and have Mistwalker do it :-)

[bovine]

Give final fantasy to platinum.

[Eric]

Give final fantasy to platinum.

So I'm not the only gaffer here? lol.

[SineSwiper]

FF13 was good

*shakes his head*

What? It was. The gameplay was unique and enjoyable and the story was pretty cool. Sure, it had its flaws, but it was still a good game. Much better than the failure of FF14, and many of SE's other games.

Give final fantasy to platinum.

So I'm not the only gaffer here? lol.

Why? Then the style over substance factor would be shot up into space. See: Bayonetta.

[bovine]

FF13 was good

*shakes his head*

What? It was. The gameplay was unique and enjoyable and the story was pretty cool. Sure, it had its flaws, but it was still a good game. Much better than the failure of FF14, and many of SE's other games.

Give final fantasy to platinum.

So I'm not the only gaffer here? lol.

Why? Then the style over substance factor would be shot up into space. See: Bayonetta.

Although you enjoyed FF13's gameplay, I thought it was pretty terrible. I like what Platinum does with gameplay systems. Bayonetta brought me back into the character action genre, where I thought that it was just sitting there and stagnating in the God Of Wars and Devil May Cries of the time. Their only foray into the RPG genre was Infinite Space and that game is A GEM. I have not one single nice thing to say about FF13. I disliked everything from the battle system to the character designs, the story and the way they tried to appear to make it more accessible by stripping out a lot of exploration and making the first MANY HOURS into a tutorial. Platinum and Grasshopper are the only Japanese gaming companies that I really find to be producing interesting games these days.

My suggestion of Platinum was just a joke, but I would seriously prefer them to make the next Final Fantasy title instead of Square. I would, seriously, like to see them just pass it on to Eidos until Square does some internal housecleaning so they can start making interesting games again.

[SineSwiper]

Although you enjoyed FF13's gameplay, I thought it was pretty terrible. ... I have not one single nice thing to say about FF13. I disliked everything from the battle system to the character designs, the story and the way they tried to appear to make it more accessible by stripping out a lot of exploration and making the first MANY HOURS into a tutorial.

Hmmm... weird. I really don't understand the hate for this game. Too much tutorial? I mean, hell, there were pretty drastic changes to the battle system, and even FF6, The God of Gods That All Shall Bow Down Upon, was still doing tutorial stuff a THIRD through the game. ("Oh hi, guys. We have this thing called Magic, so let's talk about that for a while.")

I like what Platinum does with gameplay systems. Bayonetta brought me back into the character action genre, where I thought that it was just sitting there and stagnating in the God Of Wars and Devil May Cries of the time.

What? Name two things that were different in Bayonetta that didn't already exist in God of War and/or DMC. The only 3P action title that even attempted to change the way the battle mechanics worked was Ninja Gaiden, and that will remain a shining example of how to do it right. (DMC is still trying to get something like that in their battle engine, but they still aren't thinking like a fighting game.)

[Eric]

Wait what? Platinum's gameplay systems have a ridiculous amount of depth, Bayonetta's combat system is rewarding as hell once you get into the nitty gritty of it and far superior to God of War's which is basically a dumbed down version of Devil May Cry's hack and slash to begin with.

[Zeus]

Give final fantasy to platinum.

My vote is Tri Ace or Game Arts. They have experience working on RPGs and with Square (and making good games) either will be good

[Zeus]

FF13 was good

*shakes his head*

What? It was. The gameplay was unique and enjoyable and the story was pretty cool. Sure, it had its flaws, but it was still a good game. Much better than the failure of FF14, and many of SE's other games.

Fucking Final Fantasy for Dummies. I DESPISED the paradigm system. It was basically severely limiting your options to make it easier for you then forcing you to switch back and forth to provide piss-poor strategy. It was annoying as shit to play.

Story? It was insane and non-sensical....and that's before we talk about by far and away the worst cast of characters in video game (not RPG, all games) history. And I played it for 27 hours (got to Pulse and ran around there for about 5 or 6 hours; on my way to Fang and Vanille's home area or something) trying to force my way through the game since I hadn't beaten a FF since FF9 (awesome game). I literally couldn't take it anymore

Sure it was better than FF14. But that's like sayin' a kick to the face is better than getting stomped on your balls. Don't mean the lesser of evils is by any means good

[SineSwiper]

Wait what? Platinum's gameplay systems have a ridiculous amount of depth, Bayonetta's combat system is rewarding as hell once you get into the nitty gritty of it and far superior to God of War's which is basically a dumbed down version of Devil May Cry's hack and slash to begin with.

Two things. Name them.

[Don]

It's pretty clear Square is trying some kind of 'cinematic experience' or something with its battle system after FF12 and FF13. I don't think it's bad but it definitely didn't accomplish what they set out to do. I can stand it but I don't really see why you want to put something that's really unfamiliar that has no obvious advantages. It didn't help FF13 had a pretty bad cast as well.

[bovine]

Wait what? Platinum's gameplay systems have a ridiculous amount of depth, Bayonetta's combat system is rewarding as hell once you get into the nitty gritty of it and far superior to God of War's which is basically a dumbed down version of Devil May Cry's hack and slash to begin with.

Two things. Name them.

There is no point in humouring your request. If I am able to or fail to name two new things that bayonetta brings to the table, will this make final fantasy 13 any more or less good? By saying that Final Fantasy 13 tried many new gameplay ideas, does this make it a better game?

A game doesn't have to do anything new to be good, it just has to do the things that it sets out to do well.

[Oracle]

FF13 was steaming dog shit (with glitter sprinkled on it).

[SineSwiper]

There is no point in humouring your request. If I am able to or fail to name two new things that bayonetta brings to the table, will this make final fantasy 13 any more or less good? By saying that Final Fantasy 13 tried many new gameplay ideas, does this make it a better game?

A game doesn't have to do anything new to be good, it just has to do the things that it sets out to do well.

In order to do things well, it has to bring something new, even if it is just tweaking things a little. My point is that Bayonetta was basically just a DMC clone with tits and ass, and if you can't actually figure out what was good about it vs. DMC or GoW, then how is it not a clone?

[Oracle]

In order to do things well, it has to bring something new

0_o

Ooooooooo-K

Edit: I didn't even intentionally put the emoticon in, but I think it is appropriate