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Square-Enix sells all of its Western game studios and their games to Embracer

arstechnica.com

231–240 of 264 posts

Re: Square-Enix sells all of its Western game studios and their games to Embracer

#231
post #18

>The Transaction will assist the Company in adapting to the changes underway in the global business environment by establishing a more efficient allocation of resources, which will enhance corporate value by accelerating growth in the Company’s core businesses in the digital entertainment domain. In addition, the Transaction enables the launch of new businesses by moving forward with investments in fields including b…

To me xiv is a horrible game and barely a mmo. Square enix hasnt done good games for a while. TWEWY is probably their only good series but they barely market it. Also their strategy of releasing everything epic game store exclusive on PC is pretty scummy.

Re: Square-Enix sells all of its Western game studios and their games to Embracer

#232
post #66
post #27

Western... Didn't they own the first or second "Dune" game?

First Dune game owner is Virgin, currently owned by EA Second Dune game owner is Westwood, currently owned by EA So... no.

Thank you, Western and Westwood got mixed up in my head.

Re: Square-Enix sells all of its Western game studios and their games to Embracer

#233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've never really liked those franchises, even though they do have AAA production value behind them. Uncharted and God of War in particular just feel like button-pressing simulators to me; they feel like 8 hour long cutscenes with a few QTEs and points where you can wiggle your joystick. Maybe I'm just spoiled by gameplay-heavy titles as of late, but a lot of Sony franchises feel like they'd be better as movies inste…

This Uncharted film seems like it really succeeded at the box office. $120M budget. Even if that gets bumped to $200M with marketing and say a bit more for more rev sharing, Sony will still come out with a profit. It’s at almost $150M in the US and might hit $400M worldwide with almost none of it coming from China or similar regions where their cut of ticket sales are much less. All the non box office revenue kicking…

I’m not an expert, but my rough understanding is that you have to take the nominal budget, double it for marketing and other incidental stuff, then halve the nominal revenue to account for the cuts taken by distributors and theaters and whatever. So to break even that means you need about 4x gross revenue over the nominal budget. In this case, just taking the numbers you gave, they are about $80m short of breaking even.

Re: Square-Enix sells all of its Western game studios and their games to Embracer

#235
post #18

>The Transaction will assist the Company in adapting to the changes underway in the global business environment by establishing a more efficient allocation of resources, which will enhance corporate value by accelerating growth in the Company’s core businesses in the digital entertainment domain. In addition, the Transaction enables the launch of new businesses by moving forward with investments in fields including b…

To me xiv is a horrible game and barely a mmo. Square enix hasnt done good games for a while. TWEWY is probably their only good series but they barely market it. Also their strategy of releasing everything epic game store exclusive on PC is pretty scummy.

can't agree about xiv-- i've never been an mmo guy, but have absolutely loved playing xiv. the story, esp. w/ Endwalker (the newest expansion) is fantastic. but to each, his or her own, i suppose. :)

Re: Square-Enix sells all of its Western game studios and their games to Embracer

#236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To me xiv is a horrible game and barely a mmo. Square enix hasnt done good games for a while. TWEWY is probably their only good series but they barely market it. Also their strategy of releasing everything epic game store exclusive on PC is pretty scummy.

can't agree about xiv-- i've never been an mmo guy, but have absolutely loved playing xiv. the story, esp. w/ Endwalker (the newest expansion) is fantastic. but to each, his or her own, i suppose. :)

Probably because xiv isn't really a mmo but single player theme park, with some multiplayer features.

Re: Square-Enix sells all of its Western game studios and their games to Embracer

#238

Man, I just want more of tye big world FF 7 through 12 type games. Anyone doing titles like that anymore? My wife and I really enjoy a big one and will play one all the way through. Miss that type of experience. The MMO is completely uninteresting and addictive as hell from what I see can happen to players.

>Anyone doing titles like that anymore? in what way? A huge sprawling turned based JRPG experience, or a big-budget Japanese-style game with a more "universally resonant" style of dialouge and narrative? If you don't mind some indie jank, Light fairytale[1] is very much a fan's attempt to capture that FF7 feel in the modern day. And then there's Edge of Eternity[2] that tries to do the same with an ff10/12 feel. if y…

Thank you. All of the above are fun. I will take the jump off points you linked and go looking.

We like to get lost in the art, story, puzzles and exploration, ideally with other fun to be found.

And it is just us. That is nice.

Re: Square-Enix sells all of its Western game studios and their games to Embracer

#239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Veteran game developer here: What makes "ai" and "the cloud" obvious areas of research for a next generation game developer? Games have had "AI" for decades and we've had neural net hardware on GPUs for years and years now which gets used for things like upscaling, global illumination, etc. "the cloud" has been available for ages and games already use cloud hosting extensively where it makes sense. All I see here are…

For AI, it's mostly machine learning that's attractive today. physically based animation will probably be the next big breakthrough to finally reign in the increasingly burdensome costs of asset production. It's been around for years in various white papers, but it's only recently starting to show up in commercial products. Cloud is simply what it is in other media: having your device be a thin client that the develo…

>"Netflix of Gaming" is too attractive a title in this multibillion dollar industry to not pursue.

"Netflix of Gaming" title has not aged well from years ago. Today's perception of Netflix is very negative and trend is negative as well. Tbh, negative perception of Netflix did not came from Netflix as tech company. It came from content production side. Game industry is a content heavy business and giving up IP and studios is net perceived loss. Its very strange when real value is replaced with buzzwords.

As engine programmer myself i cant pretend i understand content side of the business well. And as someone who finally cancelled Netflix subscription I am biased ofc.

Re: Square-Enix sells all of its Western game studios and their games to Embracer

#240
post #117
post #18

>The Transaction will assist the Company in adapting to the changes underway in the global business environment by establishing a more efficient allocation of resources, which will enhance corporate value by accelerating growth in the Company’s core businesses in the digital entertainment domain. In addition, the Transaction enables the launch of new businesses by moving forward with investments in fields including b…

For people who don't play MMOs because they're way too addictive, the focus of square on FFXIV has been really disappointing

In the space of MMOs FFXIV tries to do most things right though. There is hardly any "you must log in every day to progress", you can still experience all the old content at your pace (with some limitations, of course), even the seasonal events are usually done in 10-30 minutes and are available for a whole month. I know, it's easy to just name the things that are done better than in e.g. World of Warcraft, but YoshiP has said repeatedly (and this is very very rare for MMO studios): You don't have to play every day, and if you're done playing the content from the latest patch, go out and play other games, then come back when you like. It's basically the antithsis of FOMO. The only other example that comes to my mind is Guild Wars 2, which is actually some "come back 3 years later and continue where you left off".
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