Square Enix has a packed year ahead with games like Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth and Final Fantasy 16 releasing. However, it’s coming off a rough year, with titles like Forspoken receiving mixed reactions. The publisher has released an outline from its Results Briefing on February 3rd, 2023 (via RPGSite), where it discussed financial results for Q1-Q3 of the fiscal year ending March 31st, 2023.
Though this is only a week after Forspoken’s launch, president Yosuke Matsuda (who is stepping down in June) revealed that reviews “have been challenging.” “However, the game has also received positive feedback on its action features, including its parkour and combat capabilities, so it has yielded results that will lead to improvement of our development capabilities of other games in the future.
“That said, its sales have been lackluster, and while the performance of new titles with February and March release dates will be the ultimate determinant, we see considerable downside risk to our FY2023/3 earnings.”
Matsuda also spoke about a decline in net sales year-on-year in the HD Games sub-segment. While the “release of major titles a year earlier had created a challenging” hurdle, he revealed that “many of the new small and mid-sized titles we launched this year did not perform as well as we had expected.” Though not specified, some titles that fall into that category include The DioField Chronicle, Valkyrie Elysium, Harvestella, Star Ocean: The Divine Force, Dragon Quest Treasures, and more.
Octopath Traveler 2 and Theatrhythm: Final Bar Line were released last month, and it remains to be seen if they can balance out the underwhelming year-on-year performance.
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