Square Enix Previous Director of Business Holdings at SE discusses the Games Industry

[iroboto]

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1794901872043516092

Twitter here

Attached is the PDF of unroll found here for easier reading
More continued discussion that live service titles eat up the majority of game revenue, despite the fact that the industry is growing, the same titles continue to suck up that revenue.

To that end, FF as a brand cannot simply get smaller, be made better, be made cheaper, and still be FF. And frankly speaking, the lesson from my prior thread isn’t being learned in responses that say FF specifically should be smaller or cheaper.Cost is not the problem, sale price and market size are the problem. We need to admit that a larger portion of players today prefer service games and are voting with their wallets and time, playing titles like Genshin Impact instead.It is plausible that if Sony released the numbers publicly, the lifetime revenue of Fortnite, WarZone and GTA5’s online mode on PS5 would dwarf the combined totals of the titles after them. Today, even first party titles like The Last Of Us are fodder to get you to buy a PS5 so that your service game of choice is played on a PS instead of an Xbox. Fixed-price AAA titles that don’t belong to the platform holder are going to be for smaller audiences and for those niche audiences to get the same level of quality they need to justify the purchase, prices for third party publishers will have to go up.

His thoughts on what to expect in the future

1. Publicly traded AAA game publishers will focus on fewer titles, with a combination of live service (microtransaction; e.g. an FF version of Genshin) and a higher price point fixed-price (CoD, GTA, FF) in the $70-$150 range
2. The mid-tier is the domain of independent developers and smaller publishers at the $30-$60 price point
3. Live service titles will increasingly platform-tize and offer UGC tools (expect this to be a big part of GTA)

 

[Cyan]

food for thought. AAA gaming is at a crossroads. And also what you quoted kinda confirms that big AAA exclusives aren't representative of a console success.

Final Fantasy sounds like a slave of its own success. You gotta make a AAA every time you create a Final Fantasy game, plus it must be played for more than 100 hours to complete, etc etc.

For fans of the series this might sound awesome, but for instance a friend of mine prefers short games with an arcadey touch and calls RPGs an Excel ("ah, that game is an Excel"). To each its own, but the graphics are getting to a point where getting sold on them requires you to create games like Hellblade 2 that are also as fun or more fun than any mega classic game like Mario Kart and so on.

 

[Nisaaru]

food for thought. AAA gaming is at a crossroads. And also what you quoted kinda confirms that big AAA exclusives aren't representative of a console success.

The real issue is that most gamers haven't come to the same conclusion yet. It's all about perception and having beliefs which don't even apply to their own reality anymore either. They are living in the past.

The same happened in 2013 due the "always online" stuff or "digital vs. physical". Most were online by then and buying digital made far more sense at least from a convenience perspective to most customers. What's the point of physical if you need GBs of D1 patches anyway...

Dealing with masses of irrational customers isn't a trivial problem and that's where MS truly failed.

They needed to sell a dream without waking up its customers about the reality until they were ready.

 

[eastmen]

I think square would be much better served having 2-3 teams working on different final fantasy games but using a shared engine and assets and try and work it out so there is a two year between each release. So 2020 FF team 1, 2022 FF team 2, 2024 FF Team 3 and then 2026 FF team 1 but with the new engine and assets. I think that can drasticly cut their costs and speed up releases of gamse