Square Enix is ​​done with PlayStation exclusivity after profits decline

Square Enix wants an open relationship.

Even though Square Enix and Sony’s partnership dates back several years, something needs to change for the publisher, he realized, and that includes putting its biggest games beyond the reach of a single console.

In its latest earnings release, Square Enix reported a -69.7% year-over-year profit decline, driven in part by the decline of MMOs and mobile, as well as growing operating losses due to high amortization of development costs, even if sales are up slightly. But the company has made it clear that it plans to make the most of these high development costs by releasing versions on more platforms. Square Enix “will aggressively pursue a multi-platform strategy including Nintendo, PlayStation, Xbox and PC platforms,” it says.

Many of Square Enix’s biggest games have been tied to single-platform partnerships, like last year’s Final Fantasy 16 and this year’s Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth, both released on a single system, the PlayStation 5. Even though this console is very popular, Square Enix now understands perfectly that they cannot limit themselves to this strategy, regardless of the type of relationship they have had with Sony.

Some say it makes Sony look bad, but I mean, any of these other companies would do exclusive third-party deals for big games if they could. It really behooves Square Enix to do this for so long for so many big games, and now they realize they finally need to expand for a lot of these titles. However, it’s unclear if this means the games I just mentioned specifically will be available on other platforms.

Even with this new plan, it is likely that the biggest The platform for Square Enix games will mostly remain PlayStation, mainly due to brand association and market share. I’m curious how the Switch 2 will account for this in the near future. And I’m also curious if Square Enix would actually be willing to make some sort of deal with Microsoft to put games on Game Pass. Of course, this amounts to “forgoing sales”, but they had…no sales before this for these games, so maybe it’s worth the huge check Microsoft would write. In both cases, their situation is better than before.

Even though the concept of game exclusivity isn’t going away, virtually everyone in the industry understands that limiting releases to a single console in the face of exploding development costs and the search for direct revenue is a bad idea. idea. Microsoft has been on the cusp of “play anywhere” for some time with day-and-date releases on PC and cloud gaming elsewhere. Now, Sony is also trying to expand its PC release plan (which has encountered some hiccups). Almost no other publisher, Activision, EA, Take Two, Ubisoft, was doing what Square Enix was doing with these huge third party releases for a platform like PlayStation. But not more.

Square Enix goes on to say that they are focusing more on quality than quantity, and as a result a number of games in development have been canceled. We’ll see where this goes and if it means anything for the already released game.

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