Square Enix released a three-year Medium-term business plan and its financial report for the fiscal year 2024. And while those are mixed results for the developer, he addressed how he’ll try to improve things.
First of all, the company revealed a brand new plan with “four pillars,” and under one of those pillars, it will “aggressively pursue a multi-platform strategy that includes platforms Nintendo, PlayStation, Xbox,
and computers”. No only Switch, but “Nintendo platforms”. Which is an obvious statement, of course, given that we’re slowly getting closer to the official announcement of the Switch’s successor. Square wants to “build an environment where more customers can enjoy our titles,” and that includes AAA games and major franchises.
While Square Enix works release many games on multiple systems — for example, we’ve seen the Final Fantasy Pixel Remaster series, Octopath Traveler II, and Star Ocean: The Second Story R all come to Switch alongside PlayStation and PC releases (although the former came out on PC first) — sometimes games are locked to one platform.
Dragon Quest Monsters: The Dark Prince, for example, is a Switch exclusive. And on PlayStation, Final Fantasy XVI and Final Fantasy VII Rebirth both are timed console exclusives, which has been the subject of much debate from fans considering that both titles, especially Rebirth, seem to have underperformed.
Cross-platform plans are only part of the picture, of course. Square also plans to move “from quantity to quality”, build an “optimal portfolio”, increase and strengthen digital sales, revamp its overseas business divisions and overhaul its policies for “allocation of human resources and investments”.
While digital entertainment sales and net sales were up very slightly from 2023 numbers, profit attributable to owners of the parent company fell 69.7% compared to last fiscal year. The report acknowledges that this is in part due to the “content lay-off” the company previously alluded to, but here it puts things much more clearly: “These losses resulted from the discontinuation of development efforts for some key pieces of content in the Digital Entertainment Segment.”
