Square Enix has finally publicly expressed its dissatisfaction with the commercial performance of Final Fantasy 16 and Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth, admitting that neither game met its earnings expectations.
During the financial results briefing held on May 13 but only released today, September 18, Takashi Kiryu, president and representative director of Square Enix, said: “In the HD games sub-segment, we released many new titles, including such important titles as Final Fantasy 16 and Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth, but unfortunately, profits did not meet our expectations.”
Kiryu suggested that Square Enix has cannibalized sales of its Final Fantasy games released in the fiscal year ending March 2024.
“We recognize that the Digital Entertainment segment continues to have challenges,” Kiryu admitted. “The HD Games subsegment has not improved its profitability, posting operating losses in each year of our previous medium-term plan. In addition, we have not managed our portfolio of titles across the company as well as we could have, which I believe resulted in missed opportunities due to cannibalization between our own titles.”
Square Enix released Final Fantasy 16 in June 2023, followed by Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth a little over half a year later in February 2024. Final Fantasy 16 and Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth were released as PlayStation 5 exclusives, with Square Enix has The company has already released sales figures for Final Fantasy 16, but has not yet released figures for Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth, the second game in the Final Fantasy 7 remake trilogy.
The company has already announced a major overhaul of its business as it struggles to stay profitable. It has a up-to-date multiplatform plan that includes PC and potentially Xbox and Nintendo’s next console (Final Fantasy 16 released on PC this week). But it has also canceled a number of games and, as Kiryu revealed, has taken steps to better curate its games.
“For the HD games subsegment, sales of individual games will remain a key variable, but we believe we will be able to control this variability to some extent by carefully selecting our resources over the next three years,” Kiryu said. “While also working steadily to improve our profitability, we intend to offset the weakness of SD games to achieve overall profitability.”
Square Enix has extended some of its development timelines, “partly due to the enormous amount of time it takes to develop HD games, and partly because we felt we needed to rethink how to best deliver some of the titles we were working on to our customers,” Kiryu revealed.
Final Fantasy isn’t the only Square Enix series struggling. Its Splatoon-style game, Foamstars, also flopped and has since gone free-to-play.
What’s next for Square Enix? Square Enix has Kingdom of Hearts 4the third game in the Final Fantasy Remake trilogy and Dragon Quest 12 in progress. In January, Final Fantasy 16 producer Naoki Yoshida said maybe it’s time for the younger generation to lead the franchise and take the lead on Final Fantasy 17.
Wesley is the UK News Editor for IGN. Find him on Twitter @wyp100. You can contact Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.