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December 22, 2014   360, 360, 3DS, PC, PE Network, PE Network Vidcast, PlayerEssence Original Content, PlayerEssence Original Content 1, PS Vita, PS3, PS4, Wii U, Xbox One   11 Comments

What the heck is Wrong with Square Enix?! - PENetwork#6

square-enix

The PE Network tries to make sense out of the company we use to know and love, Square Enix.

Source: PE Nintendo

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Author: Francis@PE (20564 Posts)


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  • Wanderlei777

    Sony infected them with a cancerous corporate culture and they have been slowly rotting from the inside ever since. The Final Fantasy movie and Sony ownership of 30% of SE was the tipping point and its been downhill ever since. It lost them $100 million and almost sunk them in one fell swoop.
    The same toxic corporate culture that killed Sony in the lucrative and prestigious TV, Portable Music and consumer electronics markets. They were a revolutionary company that dominated all of these markets with some of the best products in electronics history. The rise of ignorant shits like Kaz Hirai marked the signal of them losing their grip in these markets. Slash and burn, firing all the engineers that took them to greatness (ironically Samsung and LG hired many of them, so karma is a bitch). They started selling generic cheap Chinese products and putting Sony badges on them. Now all their products are overpriced and features are similar or downright inferior to their cheaper competitors. The company is now worth 1/10 of what it was, has crippling debt, firing people and liquidating assets at an alarming rate and no real profit in a decade.

    • Ryuken13

      You do realize this is a Squeenix article?

      Regardless of the veracity of your statements pulling Sony into this is way off topic.

      • GaughEyad

        Not really. The main reason is that what SE has become today is directly related to what has and continues to happen within Sony. Up until late in the last generation they were basically a Sony second party. Most everything they made was exclusive to their platforms. But as Sony is floundering now because of their own idiotic decisions so too is SE because their entire business has been defined by Sony for so long. And I think that's what's been going on with a LOT of other Japanese developers as well. Sony came along and turned the industry on it's head, and not in a good way.

        Now we're witnessing the fallout from that.

        Of course you could make the argument that he was talking too much about Sony but you simply cannot talk about SE and why they are where they are today without bringing Sony into the discussion. It would be like discussing Rare today while ignoring all of the direct influence that MS has had over them since they bought them. And I know that Rare is owned by MS and that SE is "technically" a 3rd party, though you would have been hard pressed to convince anyone of that before FFXIII was ported to the 360.

        • *NormalGamer*

          Great post. This brings everything full circle.

        • Mario_U

          Besides, Sony did buy out the international rights to publish FF7 when Square's US division closed down. You know, the game that made Squaresoft overnight sell outs to Sony in the first place.

          • alex9234

            That's what I have been saying - people like to hail Sony as some "cool uncle" of the industry, but they were always more sugar daddy than cool uncle. The first thing they did when they entered the industry was loosen quality control big-time, along with bankrolling a bunch of 3rd party exclusives off the N64 along with some multi-million dollar advertising campaigns for those games too. Then in the 6th generation, Sony literally paid R* tens of millions of dollars to make GTA3 & others timed exclusive to the PS2. This theory that Sony somehow kept 3rd parties in check in the 5th gen was most likely because they worked with Nintendo & Sega on design concepts for a while after jumping ship. There was a noticeable decline in the quality of Japanese 3rd party games in the 6th generation, most notably on the PS2. Final Fantasy became bloated and cinematic, Sega ruined Sonic's reputation, sales of Tekken and Ridge Racer began to decline, and Konami shelved a bunch of their classic IPs or just relegated them to handhelds. The best Japanese 3rd party output that came out in the 6th gen were from niche companies used to running a tight ship (Atlus, NIS), developers with a strong vision (Kojima, Kamiya, Mikami), and collaborations with Nintendo on the GBA & GameCube (The Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap, F-Zero GX, the Capcom Five lineup, Tales of Symphonia, etc.). Who do you think wrote the playbook for a big tech conglomerate to be successful in the gaming industry, giving Microsoft more than enough confidence to try and do the same? Sony. Microsoft is using the exact same tactics, but they're being more aggressive because they have even deeper pockets than Sony.

    • *NormalGamer*

      "Sony infected them with a cancerous corporate culture and they have been slowly rotting from the inside ever since."

      Yeah, pretty much. You can say the same for other third-parties like Capcom, Namco, Konami, etc. that Sony infected.

      • alex9234

        I'd say Namco was infected well before Sony came in. They were already on horrid terms with Nintendo after 3rd gen, and a good chunk of their games always seemed to end up on non-Nintendo platforms in the 4th and 5th generations (Mega Drive/Genesis, Saturn, PS1).

  • Ryuken13

    Simply put what happened to Squeenix is what happens to many that become rich and famous. They forgot where they came from and started listening to the wrong crowd.

    • abGZinc88

      Not really, they were rich and famous as Squaresoft but I think when the industry took a massive turn towards more Western tastes, Square-Enix got desperate and like you said, started listening to the wrong crowd.

  • abGZinc88

    What's wrong with them is that they've been tainted by how lucrative and greedy the industry has become, focusing much more on money grabbing tactics rather than actually providing great games. Why did FFXIII get a trilogy despite being what many consider the worst Final Fantasy to date? Because the game sold nearly 8m so obviously they're going to make more of that game to capitalize on sales. Creating things like FF: All the Bravest and teasing us with a sequel to The World Ends With You ONLY to reveal an iOS version just tells us they care more about milking consumers dry than giving us what we really want. Earlier this year they stated how Bravely Default's sales pleased them and made them more confident about bringing more traditional JRPGs to the West yet what did they say about Bravely Second? "We're not sure if we're going to bring this game to the West." I mean dafuq?