The opening quarter of the 2024 fiscal year indeed isn’t a good one for Square-Enix. Shortly after the company warned investors of “extraordinary losses” for the coming quarterly report, it’s released its latest financial results, which confirmed some pretty hefty hits to profit.
The report confirms ¥15 billion ($96.2M US) in profit was made for the last quarter, a decrease of 69.7 percent from the same time last year, even in spite of the fact that net sales were up by 3.8 percent thanks largely in part to “HD games” releases like Final Fantasy XVI and Final Fantasy VII: Rebirth. Squeenix’s MMO and Games for Smart Devices/PC Browsers segments were otherwise down by 11 and 10 percent respectively. (We assume the MMO segment will perk back up with the launch of Final Fantasy XIV Dawntrail.)
The dip in profits has caused Squeenix to focus its efforts on a new business strategy, which it dramatically calls “Square Enix Reboots, and Awakens”: This three year-long effort will focus primarily on revamping its “business unit-based organizational design” (recall that the company renamed the dev team working on Final Fantasy XIV), “aggressively” pursuing multi-platform launches across all of its games divisions, and perhaps most ominously, promising to “rebuild its overseas business divisions from the ground up” in Europe and the US via “structural reforms.”
It's all obfuscated in the report, obviously, but the most shocking thing in the Square Enix financial report is that it seems the company's 'HD Games' element /lost/ money in the FY in which FF16 and Rebirth released. Bonkers and untenable
— Alex Donaldson (@APZonerunner) May 13, 2024
