Kotaku writes:
Square Enix honcho Yoichi Wada (above, left) is worried. Western game companies are doing really well! Meaning that competition is getting harder. Yet, Wada hopes to capitalise on the Western market, aiming to increase the ratio of overseas sales from its current 50 percent to 80 percent in the next three years. According to the exec:
"We face competition not only from Japanese videogame companies but from game companies worldwide. We also see some new players from outside the videogame industry coming in... Economies of scale and breadth of scope is getting important. It may be a business alliance or it may be us taking a stake in others, but we need to go beyond traditional Square Enix."
That business alliance sounds nice and all. But, how about stop calling everything Final Fantasy? Or make things other than RPGs? Or if you are going to make RPGs, why not make the games people have been asking for for the past decade?
Dominated by Nintendo loving, handheld doting gamers that don't spend anywhere near the amount of money on software that the burgeoning American market and solid European market do.
I really thought the departure of designer Hironobu Sakaguchi (along with composer Nobuo Uematsu) to found Mistwalker in 2004 to catch the prevailing winds might've woken up Square a lot earlier.
Now that "The Last Remnant" is coming to both next-gen consoles, should we speculate about more prominent franchises doing the same?
S-Enix just need to get some "next-gen" games out of the door.
It's all fair and good saying how your competition has increased and you are trying to break more into the foreign markets but you can't do that without releasing a game.
If you even want to go more direct than that and simply attract gamers to your brand STOP releasing all your new footage etc behind closed doors to industry types, they are not the ones who buy your games, we are, show us!
All they need to do is to drop their ill-fated xbox360 support and focus solely on ps3. Most people fed up with ms and their crappy console, while ps3 is gaining love from all over the world day by day.
Western developers are innovating.... Japanese are just churning out the same old gern RPG's year after year...
Look at Oblivion, Mass Effect, Fable 2...
Then look at FF, Lost O, Blue Dragon...
Move forward you stpid F**KS!
HA HA HA HA!
I concur.