Square Enix President Yoichi Wada Stepping Down

Square Enix President Yoichi Wada announced that he was stepping down today. Square Enix is the company behind some seriously popular titles such as Tomb Raider and Deus Ex, but it appears that the company is spending more than it’s taking in, and Wada was saddled with the blame.

Along with the announcement of the change at the top, the company also announced that they were changing their financial forecasts for the fiscal year ending March 31. The new forecasts indicate that the company saw “extraordinary loss.”

Square Enix has actually included “extraordinary loss” into the title of this new report. That’s how bad the company did in the last financial quarter. The loss comes as a surprise to gaming outsiders who saw huge sales of games like Tomb Raider as a positive sign for the company.

Likewise, the departure of Wada comes as a bit of a shock to a community, which just saw EA’s CEO step down last week. Current representative director Yosuke Matsuda has been named as Yoichi Wada’s successor and will officially take the reigns in June.

The company had to change their expected incomes by 5 billion yen, and their net losses was actually about 10 times what they had expected to see. Those are just two of the reasons the company apparently decided that a change at the top was needed.

One has to wonder if game developers will start to rethinkg making games like Tomb Raider and Deus Ex: Human Revolution. While those games are very pretty and have been met with mostly glowing reviews, the lackluster sales are what companies truly pay attention to.

This kind of loss could have a chilling effect on the gaming market on the whole as companies don’t see large enough profits for their efforts.

Did you expect Square Enix to be struggling this much?