Square Enix Just Canceled a BUNCH of Games

There goes all the different shapes in the Project Stategy Series.

Maybe they shouldnt have gone all in on NFTs

More than a decade ago Square enix said that their players didn't want games as a service style games. Fast forward to today, they survived last year canceling however many mobile and GAAS titles and now they're completely rejiggering the whole thing. I'm going to assume a lot of what was canceled were those kind of games.

IMO there's probably a ton of reasons for this: 1. The biggest - they wasted a bunch of money trying to go into NFTs when they were first emerging, and have nothing to show for it because NFTs have always been a scam. 2. As you said, Final Fantasy XVI and VII Rebirth being PS5 exclusive suppressed their sales numbers. There's still just not a ton of PS5s in the wild compared to PS4s. 3. Also as you said, Forspoken and Foamstar. But also, Avenger's, Babylon's Fall, etc. Square NEEDS to rethink their business strategy. Besides Pokemon, they've essentially had a monopoly on JRPGs in the West - 20 years ago, franchises like Persona and Yakuza would kill to sell even a quarter of what Final Fantasy X did. Now, Persona 5 Royal outsold FFVII Remake, and Persona 3 Reload is going toe to toe with Rebirth. Yakuza has grown exponentially with Like a Dragon and LAD: Infinite Wealth. Square aren't the end-all-be-all kings of JRPGs anymore.

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I really have dearly enjoyed Square's low-mid range JRPGs. Bravely Default, Triangle Strategy, OPT/2, the Pixel remasters, these really feel right at home next to the grander releases.

Hand to God, I had no idea Foam Stars even released.

One thing that I hope Squenix does with this is that they get their shit together when it comes to budgeting and resource allocation. When you hear that some of their games sold 4, 5 or 6 million copies within a year and they still consider the games as underperforming it means either you had wild, unrealistic expectations from the game or went so over budget that you needed 8+ million copies just to break even...

Man, shout out to Arlo for his ability to speak on this so coherently in a TopicArlo. It was a high enough quality speech for a main channel video.

4:30 You forgot about Babylon's Fall. But that's okay, so did everyone else.

Heartbroken if this means no more Octopath games. Both of them were fantastic.

After the failure of several live service titles, NFT's crashing and burning, and generally just being unfocused. It just tells me this company is terrible with overall management

It's worth noting that the Super Mario RPG Remake has sold over 3 million units since launch. Granted that these sales are helped by the Mario IP, but this showcases that theres still room in their lineup for smaller scale and cheaper to develop games.

Hopefully it was just Various Daylife 2 and 3 that were cancelled instead of interesting original projects.

Apparently a contributor to this was that even though FF7 Rebirth did incredibly well. It still didn’t meet the numbers they needed. The problem with that was the numbers they wanted surpassed the amount of PS5s actually sold. So either someone at Square can’t do math or I’m missing something.

Don't forget, Square Enix is still committed to NFTs, unlike the rest of the gaming industry that gave up on it last year. Throw that with how, as you said, companies NEVER seem to learn the right thing from a failed project, I suspect bad things to come.

Whoa, whoa Octopath Traveler 1 has sold over 3 million units. I think team Asano games are fine. They don't cost much to make so 1 million copies at least is probably a great return on investment. ROI is far more important than actual sales figures.

Really wish they would pivot to MORE, middle-tier games. This chase after big-budget high fidelity games is so dangerous and often has not produced great games (in my opinion).

To think we could've had this much Arlo content the whole time if it weren't for the gosh darn algorithm! I love this channel!!!

Hard stop whiplash! I'm currently 40 hours into Octopath Traveler II and loving it. Nearly every "Team Asano" game has resonated very deeply with me: Octopath Traveler, Live A Live, Triangle Strategy, even Bravely Default (I've only done Bravely Second End Layer and Bravely Default II, I missed the first Bravely Default). I feel like they are buying Square Enix a lot of goodwill with gamers and selling enough to justify. I'm hoping that we're getting rid of the Forspoken/Babylon's Fall type misfires. But i'm extremely worried that we're gonna see Asano go Indie in the next year or two.