When Square Enix released its plans to replace current president Yosuke Matsuda with Takasi Kiryu earlier this month, fans immediately expressed their hope that Kiryu would squish the plans to dive head-first into the blockchain and NFT market with its games. But it turns out that won’t be the case.
In a financial report for the recent fiscal year for Square Enix, a response to a question at the bottom of it has fans groaning. In a response to a question about growth for the next fiscal year, Matsuda clarified that the company’s pipeline included a spread of new releases in the next few years that would spread out financial gain. At the end of that question, Matsuda said “We also hope that you will look forward to the blockchain games we plan to launch in FY2024/3 and thereafter.”
This question also answers a lot of fans’ inquiries about whether a change in president would prevent these kinds of games from cropping up from the company. Matsuke has been a staunch supporter of the NFT and blockchain market, which fans were made aware of when he released a letter at the beginning of 2022 that discussed his plans to enter the metaverse and NFT space.
It seems that a change in president is happening far too late for any of his actions to change the course of the company’s medium-term goals, which Square Enix said were focused on “AI, the cloud, and blockchain games.” Gamers were immediately displeased and were hoping that the change in president might alter Square Enix’s plans to release those kinds of games.
Square Enix releases mild results for fiscal year 2023
One of the admissions in the report is that the year’s titles didn’t sell quite as well as Square Enix expected. The MMO category declined year-over-year because of the lack of expansions for Dragon Quest Treasures and Final Fantasy XIV, and there are no expansions planned for those games either. But the company is hopeful that some “operational initiatives” will retain those players.
The report specifically mentions Forspoken, which was released to very mild reviews and Matsuda described as “challenging.” The game’s sales are “lackluster” as a result, but the company plans on improving its development capabilities in other games based on the good things mentioned in reviews such as combat and parkour features.
These financial results, while slightly more disappointing than expected due to the performance of new game release sales, were not unexpected. Matsuda said that the 2023 fiscal year was planned as a foundational year and that the next two years will see a slew of releases that should improve revenue in the near future.
