It’s a bad month to be the CEO of a struggling company, it seems. Hot on the heels of John Reccitiello’s resignation as EA’s CEO, Square Enix’s CEO Yoichi Wada has stepped down on account of the “extraordinary” financial loss the company has suffered.
The company is suspected to sustain losses of 10 billion Yen (or $105 million) and as such, Square plans to do a major restructuring of key areas of its corporate layout. Part of the reason that Square is in such trouble is the lower than expected sales of Sleeping Dogs, Hitman: Absolution and Tomb Raider. This is wild considering that both Hitman and Tomb Raider sold more than three million units a piece, but both came in under their forecasted sales targets. Square expected their North American and European sales to hit 14.9 million copies across all three games by now, so they are a good deal under that target.
What do you guys think about this? Is it wild that Square Enix needed to sell 14.9 million copies of these games to stay afloat? What do you think will happen to Square down the line? More Final Fantasy games more often? Will they ditch Western development completely?
Source – Polygon, Square Enix and Eurogamer
I think it’s ridiculous for him to expect those numbers. Instead, should have focused on fixing the mismanagement of the Final Fantasy titles and some of their other failed efforts. Blaming games that sold more than three million a piece is not acceptable.
Didn’t this already happen with the guys behind Kingdoms of Amalur? Unless you have something that can print money like CoD or WoW, you can’t expect to hit those numbers. Sounds like they spent way more money than they should have while making these games.
Those sales numbers are so ridiculous, a boggart wouldn’t even…erm, nevermind. Tomb Raider’s launch month sales look likely to at least hit half of launch month sales for 2012’s best selling launch title, Black Ops 2 – surely that’s about as much as can be hoped for out of any franchise reboot title. Then you have essentially a new IP and a sequel title in the Hitman series, the last of which has sold just over 2 million copies to date as far as I can see. Wild doesn’t begin to cover it.