Square Enix hasn’t had a particularly good run over these past several years, to put it lightly. Final Fantasy XIV was a major flop and its non-MMO predecessor, Final Fantasy XIII , didn’t perform so hot itself. Square Enix senior executive officer Koji Taguchi is all too aware of this, and even went as far as to trash the company’s showing at this year’s E3.
According to his tweets on the final day of E3, Taguchi is feeling a little humiliated by the decline in quality on the Japanese side of the company. In fact, Taguchi believes that it’s thanks to Square Enix’s recent merger with Eidos that the publisher enjoyed any success out of E3 at all, with Tomb Raider , Deus Ex and Hitman attracting a lot of attention while, in comparison, Final Fantasy XIII-2 went largely ignored.
“Because we merged with Eidos and had games like Tomb Raider, Deus and Hitman, as a company we were able to keep face,” he said on Twitter. “But the decline in Japanese titles was almost humiliating. This has been a week where I worried daily about how we can fix this.”
Taguchi’s comments shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise considering last month’s news that Square Enix’s earnings last fiscal year (ending March 31, 2011) took a massive ¥12 billion ($148 million/£90.6 million) hit. I’m no business expert, but that doesn’t look pretty.
Thanks, Andriasang.
