I agree with that person as long as we’re continuing to use the qualifier “if anything”. AAA studios have thoroughly undiversified themselves and are looking for buyers from the few other companies wealthy enough to afford them, hence Activision’s and Zenimax’s sales to Microsoft. EA, Square Enix, and Ubisoft were all looking for buyers, and it wouldn’t surprise me if Take Two was as well. EA’s got sports and Battlefield and little else. Square Enix has Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest and little else. Ubisoft has Assassin’s Creed and Far Cry and little else. On and on. They spent the last decade not making small bets on new IPs to replace these IPs once their time in the spotlight wanes. It’s the very thing that Phil Spencer was talking about in that leaked e-mail about what he sees as a strength of Game Pass and a weakness of how AAAs chose to respond to the changing market.
You’re forgetting The Sims, a veritable cash cow for EA, where every tiny add-on costs $15+.
But otherwise, I agree.
They’re pivoting to free to play, so that series may have waned as well. I’m sure it’s still profitable, but you don’t switch to free to play, especially for what is ostensibly a single player game that doesn’t rely on player counts, if everything is going well.
Oof. If that’s true, I feel bad for all the folks who have invested so much time into the series.
Free to play with microtransactions is just the way to go for games that can be monetized in that manner. The lower barrier to entry means far more downloads and the piecemeal monetization means that players will frequently end up paying more than $60 alongside the larger player base.
Square has final fantasy, dragon quest, kingdom hearts, octopath traveler, forspoken, and a myriad of smaller games you aren’t familiar with including lots of mobile game sales. They’ve got like 15 2023 releases on their Wikipedia. They’re doing fine and don’t belong on this list lol
They’ve got 10 games for 2023, and about half of them are either Dragon Quest or Final Fantasy (Kingdom Hearts, btw, is basically still Final Fantasy as it relates to IP). If you’re making small bets to find the next big thing to replace your big franchises, you need to make a lot more of those small bets, like publishers used to do 20 years ago and like mid-sized publishers are doing now. Rumor has it they divested themselves of former Eidos studios to make themselves a more attractive purchase for Sony, which fell through but resulted in exclusivity deals like Zenimax did.
Didn’t final fantasy perform poorly, and forspoken was so bad, they closed down the entire branch working on it?
