Square Enix CEO Yosuke Matsuda reveals that Yoko Taro's NieR: Automata did much better than expected, and talks about plans for the future.
Bungie veteran and current CTO, Luis Villegas, has left the company after fourteen years and has joined Sony PlayStation as its new Head of Technology.
"I feel incredibly lucky because as part of my new role I get to still work closely with my Bungie family."
New role and more pay and still can work closely with Bungie
2K Games is preparing to reveal the sequel to a "beloved franchise" at Summer Game Fest, with fans speculating that it might be Borderlands 4, BioShock 4, Mafia 4, and numerous other popular games.
After its latest games didn't meet sales targets, Square Enix is going multiplatform but the company's track record isn't convincing.
Square Enix been multiplatform for decades, a few exclusively-deals doesn't make them any less multiplatform.
SE needs to go all in optimization. Broken PC ports won't help its case, especially with big releases like mainline Final Fantasy
It's actually simple. What doesn't inspire confidence is Square allocating their budgets on the wrong projects such as Forspoken, Avengers, Babylons Fall and Foamstars.
Square has always been multiplatform since PS3/360 days which 80 % of their games are. People kick up a fuss over PS exclusivity but not Nintendo which has more exclusive projects console exclusive from Square.
FF16 has done ok but not enough to fix the blunders that the past mistakes Square has made with some of their projects. FF7 Rebirth is unclear we'll see a PC release for sure so it's hard to say so far not as good as they would of liked.
Then again unrealistic expectations. If it weren't for Sony these games would at least had another 2 years development time. So some people need to be realistic in that regard.
Square Enix just really need to revise its expectations. Maybe consider a change in strategy on dev end as well. Multiplat will help for sure but only good games that are marketed well will sell
Interesting
I think 2B was a significant factor in the success of the Nier: Automata.
I hope SE don't focus too much on 'Games as a service'. I suspect many gamers, especially SE fans, could be turned off by this. It isn't my cup of tea.
What a surprise. SquareEnix. Outsourced game. Sells above (even SE's stupid) sales expectations.
I'm so glad that Japanese games are selling very well and are slowly but surely coming back to its fromer glory of becoming very popular around the world like it was doing the ps1 and ps2 days. Nier automata is a perfect example of a unique game that we haven't gotten in a very long time and something that I want more out of Japanese Devs. I mean really in my opinion when Japanese Devs were trying to make their games appeal to the western market they lost of what made the Japanese games unique of their own. That's just my opinion though.
Automata did soooooooo many things right. It's getting well-deserved praise. Truly feels like a "next-generation" game.