In a November financial briefing picked up on by My Nintendo News<\/a>, Square Enix CEO Takashi Kiryu said that he wants to structure Square Enix “to ensure higher quality from each title by slimming down our lineup.” It's the exact kind of thing CEOs say all the time, and most videogame publishers seem to vacillate between fewer, bigger games and more small games every half decade or so. But based on Square Enix's output over the last few years, a slimmed-down lineup would eliminate most of the publisher's games that are actually worth paying attention to.<\/p>\n Square Enix has had a volatile, well, decade<\/em> in the games business. There seems to be a “throw everything at the wall” mentality over at Square Enix HQ, which has resulted in a few genuinely great and surprising games, and a few pitches so embarrassing you have to wonder how the hell they got the green light. This spaghetti-based idiom can only extend so far, you know, and I think at a few points in the last 10 years Square Enix has thrown some bowling balls straight through the wall of common sense. Final Fantasy 15's strung out development, Forspoken's memed-on writing, Marvel's Avengers' memed-on\u2026 everything. Selling IO Interactive, only to turn around and watch the studio crush it with Hitman 2 and 3.<\/p>\n Balan Wonderworld. Babylon's Fall.<\/p>\n The Quiet Man.<\/em><\/p>\n I am no business genius, but I feel like I could've avoided puncturing my wall with at least a couple of these disasters. Would I have caught Yuji Naka insider trading under my nose<\/a>? Maybe not! But would I have slobbered all over the blockchain<\/a> and NFTs<\/a> at the earliest possible opportunities? I'm going with a much more confident L O L N O on that one.<\/p>\n Square Enix has certainly had some recent wins too, though. Final Fantasy 14 is continuously celebrated; PowerWash Simulator was a surprise hit; Final Fantasy 7 Remake was the smash success Square hoped for, despite what I'd charitably call “some of the worst sidequests I've ever played” and pacing that challenged Peter Jackson's Hobbit movies to a “most padded childhood fave” contest.<\/p>\n I thought Final Fantasy 7 squandered the opportunity to fill Midgar with the characterful stories it deserved, and Final Fantasy 16 apparently followed its lead<\/a>. If these shiny megamillions games were the only ones Square Enix was making, I'd declare its relevance as an RPG studio well and truly over. But in between blockbusters, Square has filled the last few years with a range of lower budget games that actually kinda rock, or are at least interesting<\/em> instead of aiming for maximum mainstream appeal.<\/p>\n Square can't afford to make a game like Final Fantasy 16 without aiming for the broadest possible audience, but that restriction loosens a bit when you're doing an HD 2D remake<\/a> of one of your weirdest Super Nintendo games, a visual novel murder mystery<\/a>, or a dungeon crawler from one of your all-time great designers<\/a> that barely had the budget for graphics.<\/p>\n In 2021 Square Enix finally released good-looking remasters of the classic Final Fantasy games on PC. In 2022 it released three<\/em> strategy games in the span of just a few months, which was a treat but also perhaps exactly the kind of thing CEO Takashi Kiryu would point to to justify making fewer games.<\/p>\n “As our customers' needs and the types of devices available have diversified, we have tried to produce hits by developing a wide variety of titles rather than by focusing only on certain ones,” he said. “I believe that this has resulted in the splintering of our resource pool.”<\/p>\n There's some accurate self-reflection in there\u2014the marketing team certainly could've done a better job promoting Tactics Ogre Reborn, Triangle Strategy and The DioField Chronicle if they hadn't all come out so close together. Likewise Square Enix seems to squander every opportunity to win over PC players between console exclusives, Epic exclusives, and meager ports for its biggest games<\/a>. Kiryu specifically mentioned wanting to bulk up the marketing team, which could be good news for the kinds of smaller, more creative games the company has been releasing to little fanfare.<\/p>\n Some of Kiryu's other statements in the financial briefing seem to directly contradict his line about Square “slimming down” its lineup, to the point that I'm not really sure what his strategy is.\u00a0<\/p>\n![\"Protagonist](\"https:\/\/arcader.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/01\/square-enixs-ceo-suggests-the-company-makes-too-many-mid-budget-games-but-thats-exactly-where-its-doing-its-best-work.jpg\")
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