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Square Enix Q3 IR Presentation: Forspoken sales "lackluster", many new small and mid-sized titles below expectations

That seems like it's on the lower end of what "AAA" budgets are.

It would be, but for additional context the yen fell sharply against the USD ~13 months ago, so for the bulk of development they would have been spending the equivalent of more US dollars than the conversion would imply now.

Does anyone know where the "Over 10 billion yen" came from? Was that in SQNX docs directly, or is it speculation / insider stuff?
 
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Yeah they mentionned several success in the past.

Do you have a source for DQXI ? All I remember is that the JP launch sales were in the low-end of their expectations.
I remember seeing it in a Japanese tweet talking about one of the reports around the time it hit 6.5m but I can't find anything about it now, maybe I misremembered.
 
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Just going by reports SE had said FFXV, Nier Automata, Octopath Travellers, Trials of Mana remake and DQ11 had exceeded sales expectations.


That seems like it's on the lower end of what "AAA" budgets are. Don't know how much Forspoken has sold right now but if its anywhere between 1.5m and 2m then the game would have already broke even. If its below 1.5m then it's gonna have to crawl to break even, and that is before it's price gets slashed will will probably start happening later this month. This report is dated February 3th so it's only factored in 10 days of Forspoken sales but even then it had already started dropping lower in sales rankings by Feb.
Do you really think Forspoken has sold anywhere close to 1.5 million copies based upon all the information we've seen?
 
Do you really think Forspoken has sold anywhere close to 1.5 million copies based upon all the information we've seen?
No not right now, maybe in a few months at best, even a game like Callisto Protocol managed to sell 2 million and that was ranked much much lower than Forspoken did on NPD and GSD charts.
 
No not right now, maybe in a few months at best, even a game like Callisto Protocol managed to sell 2 million and that was ranked much much lower than Forspoken did on NPD and GSD charts.
Are you really comparing December to January charts? We know Callisto Protocol without digital beat Dead Space with digital in Europe....which stomped Forspoken.
 

That's a good guess, indeed! Also, I'm assuming the $74+ million is just development costs alone and does not include marketing. With marketing, this may very well take the cost above $100 million for this game. And yeah, with sales having fallen off a cliff just after a week or so on both on the PlayStation Store and Steam (out of global top 100 on Steam after just a week/dropped out of top 20 on PlayStation Store US/Europe in Feb), this would explain why they dissolved the studio.
 
Wasn't the marketing for Forspoken handled by Sony?

Oh, that's right. Never mind what I said above, then. Regardless, the development costs were above $74 million and marketing the game couldn't have been cheap either for Sony. At the end of the day, this was unfortunately a failure for Square.
 
I admit im really bad about lamenting cookie cutter game design from AAA publishers, but Forspoken is a textbook example of why its such a risk.

They could have made a sequel to FFXV ( or made a mainline game with the same game design/mechanics/assets) in a fraction of the time and it almost certainly would have sold better.
 
Are you really comparing December to January charts? We know Callisto Protocol without digital beat Dead Space with digital in Europe....which stomped Forspoken.
December chart had a whole month of Callisto's sales being counted, while January only had 4 days of Forspoken and 3 days of Dead Space counted for their NPD ranks, and the PSN top seller chart for their respective months again had a whole month of Callisto sales counted while only a week or less for Forspoken and Dead Space, and the only games above Callisto on the December month PSN top seller are the same games above Forspoken on January, despite Forspoken having less than 1/3rd of the days of sales counted as Callisto had.
 
December chart had a whole month of Callisto's sales being counted, while January only had 4 days of Forspoken and 3 days of Dead Space counted for their NPD ranks, and the PSN top seller chart for their respective months again had a whole month of Callisto sales counted while only a week or less for Forspoken and Dead Space, and the only games above Callisto on the December month PSN top seller are the same games above Forspoken on January, despite Forspoken having less than 1/3rd of the days of sales counted as Callisto had.

There were a couple of new games in the charts. EA's Dead Space remake comes in at No.6. The game arrives just over a month after The Callisto Protocol, which is a game very similar to Dead Space, and made by some of the game's original developers. The Callisto Protocol actually did better in its first two weeks than Dead Space, and that's even without digital (The Callisto Protocol publisher Krafton is not part of the digital panel).
 
December chart had a whole month of Callisto's sales being counted, while January only had 4 days of Forspoken and 3 days of Dead Space counted for their NPD ranks, and the PSN top seller chart for their respective months again had a whole month of Callisto sales counted while only a week or less for Forspoken and Dead Space, and the only games above Callisto on the December month PSN top seller are the same games above Forspoken on January, despite Forspoken having less than 1/3rd of the days of sales counted as Callisto had.
Common brah, we know the majority of launch sales are within those first few days. We don't even need to speculate that Forspoken is a bomba, we're in a thread where the guy who knows better then us said the game has done lackluster. That doesn't sound like break even to me.
 
Just out of curiosity, your perception of this company was formed primarily through a headline that you read 10 years and 3 console generations ago right? It's absolutely insane how much power and influence thread titles and headlines get
It's also very funny, most importantly.
 
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