Square Enix says more and more games either crash and burn or find big success "as players throng to a handful of major titles"

Foamstars character Soa stands with soap weapon ready to fire
(Image credit: Square Enix)

After a whole lo♛t of highs and lows across its recent publishing catalog, Square Enix is ackno🐲wledging to investors that games make up a risky business without much of a middle ground between colossal hits and tremendous failures.

"As a result of digitization and other t🎐echnological advances, consumer game content is increasingly sold via downloads rather than physical packages," Square Enix says in its latest . "Monetization methods such as free-to-play, microtransactions, and subscriptions have also given rise to a greater diversity of business models outside the confines of traditional one-off sales. As such, the consumer game market continues to grow. New releases tend to be met with either marked success or marked failure as players throng to a handful of major titles."

That stance is, admittedly, a pretty obvious one given how often we hear about the riskiness of AAA development, but we've spent the past several years watching Square Enix slowly catch on to some things that seem pretty obvious from an outside perspective. It wasn't that long ago that the publisher realized it neede🔴ಞd to get better at marketing after it kicked a bunch of JRPGs out the door with near-zero hype. It's also not easy to look at the contrasts like the 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:fast-selling Final Fantasy 16 and the 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:"lackluster" sales of Forspoken wi♍thout turning into an armchair financial analys𒁃t.

"Given the intense competition in both the consumer and smart device game markets," Square Enix says it needs to "not only to leverage existing intellectual properties but also to endeavor to create new intellectual properties and to recruit development resources if it is to continue to produce hits." That's not too far off from the publisher's recent comments that it needs to be less reli🦋ant on JRPGs like Final Fantas𒈔y and Dragon Quest, but ♈it does help to explain the strategy that's fostered left-field projects like Foamstars. 

Square Enix wants to be known for more than some of the 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:best RPGs ever made.

Dustin Bailey
Staff Writer

Dustin Bailey joined the GamesRadar team as a Staff Writer in May 2022, and is currently based in Missouri. He's been covering games (with occasional dalliances in the worlds of anime and pro wrestling) since 2015, first as a freelancer, then as a news writer at PCGamesN for nearly five years. His love for games was sparked somewhere between Metal Gear Solid 2 and Knights of the Old Republic, and these days you can usually find him splitting his entertainment time between retro gaming, the latest big action-adventure title🐠, or a long haul in American Truck Simulator.