Originally published at: Square Enix reports massive loss of income | Boing Boing
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That’s great, but I definitely don’t know what they’re offering or what Embracer Group are…11 operating groups including gamecon hardware in that last one. Perhaps if there were a simple FHD 01:47:28 Twitter Video I might know what they released lately and what’s in the pipe. What about Unrandy Disfidia or whatever the one with the 36 year olds was. Also the social contract calls for them to be puttering about Hawaii in amazing innovative (and probably dyed but natural component yeah) hairdos if not 10’ parking permits and other carried items…
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As a result of fucking around, they’ve found out
I suspect that’s kind of backwards - given the length of a game development schedule, they’ve known for a while that their finances were dire, thus moves like selling off IPs and getting into NFTs - they were acts of pure desperation. They were probably hoping for a big hit with Forspoken, but it didn’t happen (no one sets out to make middling games). Not that being better than middling guarantees anything - Guardians of the Galaxy was, from everything I’ve read, a good game, but it still lost a lot of money.
People like to get mad at game publishers for their attempts to weasel more money out of gamers with DLCs and “games as services” and now NFTs, but the fact is that game publishing is extremely precarious, and questionable revenue streams can make the difference between existing or not. Games cost a lot to make - many, many orders of magnitude more than they did in the late '80s, where the upper limit for retail game prices got set - competition is fierce (so the sales figures for most hit games are the same as the top games in the '80s), and the only consistent way to stand out is to spend a quarter billion dollars on making and marketing the game. Except you’ll almost never make that back unless it’s a sequel to a mega-hit. Profit margins can be thin for a “hit” game, and a failed game can leave a company in a (multi-) hundred million dollar hole.
This is why we’ve seen massive consolidation in the industry - a whole lot of studios and publishers have gone under, and the lucky publishers that managed to score a number of mega-hits had the cash to buy up studios and IPs to get big enough to spread out their risk even more, to be able to release multiple AAA games without the possibility that one of them would fail and take down the whole company.
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There’s a backlog of Square Enix games that I want to play, but haven’t gotten to yet, including the FF VII remake, Octopath Traveler, and Guardians of the Galaxy (which was included in their IP sale, apparently). It looks like Octopath Traveler II is coming out this month, too. So many good games, not enough time.
Another part of their sale was the studio Crystal Dynamics, which is involved in the Perfect Dark reboot. I am excited to see how that one shakes out.
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they offer ip, which is what embracer buys. they own gearbox, aspyr, thq, 3d relams, dark horse, and lots of others.
i think the idea is, buy up troubled companies with good ip and skim profit off licensing, or maybe resurrect some old ip with new games
square seemed already to be in that mode resurrecting ff7.
i think the ceilings at headquarters must be extra tall to accommodate. those at their cafe look to be
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