Square Enix CEO Yoichi Wada Resigns

Not that I'm expert at this but,

I'm under the impression that outsourcing in gaming/film/animation industry is pretty common. I don't think outsourcing is the main issue, bad quality control is.

Wonder where things will go now. I liked seeing him in the FFXIV ARR Live Letters. Seemed cool for him to be there and he seemed pretty cool and with a sense of humor.

But if business at SE is anything like the big businesses I've worked at, its just a collective group of people up top making idiot decisions that fail, and then blame it all on one guy to take the fall for it.

I'll let the FF13 original slide cause they are always trying something different.. But all these stupid spin-off/sequels? And not bringing over Bravely Default? People are being straight up stupid.

FF14 ARR is looking pretty damn good so far for a team having to bring a corpse back to life. We'll see how that goes money wise though.

Just middle of the road games along with Hitman and Sleeping Dogs. No big deal.

Keyword: China. ;)

Before anyone try to, can't really compare outsourcing work to China where some "man monkey" copies and pastes a pattern through a map just slightly rotating it like if it were a stamp to something like Eidos or even Tri-Ace.

The point of outsourcing is to reduce the cost isn't it? Besides China idk other good place to do it.....India maybe?

I'm not sure what they outsource though, probably not game engine/programming related(again, no expert at this). But if it's art related it can easily be done in China.

I think there is some enmity between Japan and China that made it a bad move for them. Or thats what I remember reading with the whole Horse bird thing.

Understatement of the week!

I thought so but idk enough about their history to be comfortable saying anything for sure XD

Even recently, there were riots in China where people like, destroyed random citizens' Toyotas and hotels wouldn't serve Japanese guests

Indeed, but by both outsourcing it to China and not having a Quality Assurance which would be on par with the expectations of it's customer base, Square-Enix was certainly digging a new grave for it to drop dead into.

If they fail again who they will merge with ? Koei is taken, it merged with Tecmo already ... :P

While I won't hold my breath in regards to a change in corporate and cultural direction that will have us reminiscing over the good old Squaresoft days, as those days are long since passed and will not come back any time soon due to the unification with ENIX, as well as the loss of the majority of creative minds that left with Square.

However, if anything, I am optimistic this shift in movement will help SE throughly consider how they approach their franchises and those to come, rather than making blatant cash outs with minimal effort, as well as titles that presumably avoided some sort of due process, followed by a total cop-out.

I just checked staff credit, http://ffxiv.gamerescape.com/wiki/Staff_Credits

Apparently all the main game design/mechanics are still done in SE. FFXIV is bad because the game design is bad, on top of bad QA, and SE has nobody to blame but themselves. Outsourcing(usually art related stuff in the industry, which can be done easily in any country, gaming companies rarely outsource game engine/lv design) to China is just JP fan's excuse for SE's failure.

http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1139759,00.html

Not just China, Korea too I think.

Not to thrust things off topic, but here's a thought I had and posted in RT shortly after reading this thread.



While it's difficult to articulate allegory in regards to why a succession of releases within a specific time bracket befitted my likes and interests more so than a certain point afterwards, I can't help but feel there is some sort of combination of variables and conditions met that made it so.

Nah dogg, SE's taken waaaaay more risks since merging than they ever did as Square or Enix individually; the SaGa and Tri-Ace games were the only ones that even dared to remotely get away from formulaic wizardry clones.

Yeah, I had figured with the merge, came more assets that would enable them to branch outside their "play it safe" RPG titles, along of course with the quickly expanding market and industry for video games. Even before the lights blew out at Squaresoft, they were taking their chances in expanding outside their typical genre line-ups.
Some of you might remember Square making a few non-localized titles which included a racing and wrestling game. What we got out of this little funk was The Bouncer.

I liked The Bouncer lol

It was pretty fun, but ultimately showed signs of someone branching out of their genre for sure. I think if given the chance to stick to it and divide their production units properly, we could have seen some really good racers, fighters, and maybe even shooters from Square/SE.

I won't say Dissidia is OMG AMAZING but it's way better than it has any right to be.

I made a detailed post about this on the official forums. They deleted it.

Basicaly, I said a few things that about the restructuring costing $105 million and the expected loss announcement on march 31st. These where already reported in the links. The topic vanished because it scared players/employees about FFXI's future.

What scared the GM's was when I said If the NEW CEO is taking a 40% salary loss will it stop there or will other employees take pay cuts or get lay offs in the restructuring.

Grim stuff, I don't condone people losing their jobs. It's bad choices at the top and the market hitting them hard.

Bushido Blade 3 plz. :(

Maybe its nostalgia, but in my teen years, all of SE's games were just flawless. FFVII-X, Bushido Blade, Bouncer, Eirgheiz, etc. Some had good stories (FF, Bouncer) others had months worth of content (FFs, Eirgheiz) and most of all, all were just plain fun. I can't really remember the last FF game (other than XI, you cruel beast you) that I just consistently found to be fun. Sure, some had their moments, their primes, that big bad mega boss you've been aching to stick it to, but as a whole, the story/gameplay feels as though it takes away from the experience.

FFXIII was a beautiful game. Some of the characters were very well portrayed (already mentioned, Sazh, and I really enjoyed Snow, regardless if he was a carbon copy of some anime main protagonist or not) but overall, the shifts between the different group makeups, completing nearly half the game before you even open the ability to customize parties and explore the world, rather than through linear missions with rather redundant and boring goals and bosses just really put me off. I still finished it, if only to be awed by the graphics, but I did not enjoy the experience as a whole.

Get us back to a time when games were fun SE. You can have more than $13 a month from me then.

fking 14

For the most part, they mix like oil and water. The Chinese won't let go of major WW2 atrocities, and the Japanese don't feel obligated to assuage any bad feelings. Sad, really, since I have great friends in both countries. Well, not just sad for THAT reason, but you know what I mean.

Despite my hopeful post on the first page of this thread, I am having a bit of a hard time swallowing SE's latest mishandling of getting this expansion out. They just admitted steam won't have it at release (now) and I'm hearing reports on this forum of preorders of physical copies (Xbox) being out of stock (which negates the point of a preorder, I'd think).

So I'm not gonna cry too hard 'cause it will all work out & we've read enough negative stuff, but yeah. This gif (well, one with profanity which I can't post here) came to mind. Here is how I feel about every single person that makes a bad decision with regards to what has been a part of my life (in the form of countless logged hours) since I started gaming on the NES.

FFXIV should have been a "full game expansion" onto FFXI. That or a cross-bread version of what they currently are now. They then would have just had to update the FFXI graphics to match those of FFXIV alongside tweaking of systems. It was the less risky option they didn't take. Both games rolled into one; with big future updates such as Abyssea etc, taking the level cap to 99. Would have been brilliant. By keeping the games separate the loss induced by people changing to IV then quitting & other similar things must have been killer. I think of WoW as an example. Imagine if they made a WoW 2, costing a ridiculous amount of money then not allowing you to transfer your character to it? Who is going to join from your most loyal WoW players? A small portion. Who's going to join as a new player? A lot more players than FFXIV gained, but not enough to outweigh the amount still playing WoW and refusing to transfer. When i look at it... it's just been complete suicide. Such a shame.

I still think they should consider it. Even now after the new FFXIV release. If losses like this are going to occur yet again, i have hope this could be something that happens. It's also a way to not waste the effort and time spent on FFXIV - as they would if they put the project to bed.

I kind of went off topic, oops, but who doesn't! I just feel in reality this right here is where it all went downhill. Simply because they didn't roll the games together causing people to leave and not pay the subscription fees.

There's no reason FFXIV should have been as bad as it was. It's sort of mind-blowing

To be honest, I'm far more likely to play 4 again than 14 if I ever quit XI.

One reason is enough. They thought making it lazily and slapping "Final Fantasy" brand on it would make it hot money maker.

Wow they spent four frigging years developing their "Crystal tools" which they eventually renamed as "White engine". Right, they used it to make FFXIII and spinoffs on the PS3, but seriously that took precious time they could use on making FFXI more interesting.

They also spent three years to make the "Dancer engine" which FFX, FFXI and FFXII are based on.

You can have a good idea of what it can do when FFXI is running on the "high polys mode" (the character creation screen). Still it's just for show since they can't count on a system with the minimum specs for FFXI would be able to draw 50 characters with that level of detail in Jeuno ... lol

Blah blah blah (I hope FFXI survives this garbage ... I'm far from done with it... -_-;)

One of the big problems has been that when the companys merged Square (the original makers of FF) got a really bad deal in it and gave up almost all say in how the company was run. So what ended up happening is they moved away from focus on quality of the games to how much profit they can make. Basically pumping out games and slapping brand name franchise titles on them to try make them sell no matter how bad they were. This both ended up hurting the rep of those game franchises and the company as a whole.

Does anyone remember when a FF game release was a big event with great anticipation? People would buy a whole other game just to get at the FF demo inside,poor Tobal.