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Random JRPG News Thread

kaisergeddon

Liturgist
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Insert Title Here Strap Yourselves In Codex Year of the Donut Codex+ Now Streaming! Enjoy the Revolution! Another revolution around the sun that is.
Also they're not actually randomly generated, but the layouts change up some aspects between runs.
Can you expand on this a bit? I was under the impression it was randomly generated, as I could have sworn the map was different when I started two new games in the first game. I refunded the game because of this, but was intrigued by everything else. Would love to be wrong about the random generation.

To be honest, I have no idea how the map system works exactly. Between my own runs, the screenshots I've seen online, and the youtube videos I found, there appears to be one single megadungeon that stays the same, with the same four areas, boss locations, and progression through them, but possibly with a mutator of sorts that discreetly changes the location of some resources, breakable walls, and minor passages. For example, there could be a bridge across a stream, and on another run, that bridge is missing from that location and found somewhere along the same water that runs in that area, but otherwise the design is 99% identical.

However, every NG playthrough I've seen shares the exact same map I had on my first run, so I really don't know. I'm certain it's not procgen slop or any sort of algorithm-based nonsense in anycase, as the general map design, campground locations, and progression are too deliberate for that sort of thing, and identical between every run I've had. I'm on NG+5 in Quester and NG still in Osaka btw. The Osaka map again is also identical to what I've seen others players get, and I've restarted that game several times to pick different parties, and I got the same map every time. The beginning is highly structured and leads you to discover a hidden wall and cross a river while avoiding an overpowered giant enemy crab to teach game mechanics and heighten tension.

I'm going to join the Japanese fan group and inquire about this soon because it's breaking my mind and making me question whether the changes I've seen were even real.
 

Falksi

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Nottingham
wrMXnT6.png



https://www.abc3340.com/news/nation...an-gender-identity-wok-life-american-japanese
 

911 Jumper

Learned
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Jun 12, 2023
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1,082
Vanillaware is recruiting development staff to work on a “new fantasy action RPG,” according to a post from the company on Twitter.

The recruitment flyer attached to the post specifies that the company is looking to hire programmers, 2D animators, and background designers.
 

._Tea_.

Literate
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imo squares problem is that they go exclusivity deals and dont sell on all platforms. ff16 and rebirth still exclusive and then it doesnt meet sales expectations? no kidding.. its like hollywood releasing a movie but skipping china lol
For real though. I would have bought both of their games (ff7rm and ff16) if I could have gotten them on PC. You have to be missing a big chunk of brain cells to think excluding whole markets makes business sense.
 

notpl

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imo squares problem is that they go exclusivity deals and dont sell on all platforms. ff16 and rebirth still exclusive and then it doesnt meet sales expectations? no kidding.. its like hollywood releasing a movie but skipping china lol
For real though. I would have bought both of their games (ff7rm and ff16) if I could have gotten them on PC. You have to be missing a big chunk of brain cells to think excluding whole markets makes business sense.
It generally takes japanese people 20-30 years longer than everyone else to acclimate to new ideas. "Personal computers" are still viewed as a weirdo nerd hobbyist niche over there rather than an omnipresent home appliance and the dominant marketshare in gaming. This attitude is mostly good, since it means they still make fun and creative games featuring attractive women, but occasionally it hurts them and us by extension.
 

deuxhero

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Flowery Land
Hadn't heard from the DQ3 HD-2D remake in 3 years. Knowing Square Enix they'll kill it with "body type" and censorship while sticking malware on the PC version. I'm surprised there's no PS4 version.
 

Shinji

Savant
Joined
Jan 10, 2017
Messages
336


A thread on the recent Square Enix news regarding FF sales numbers and expectations.
https://www.ign.com/articles/final-...-all-failed-to-meet-square-enixs-expectations

As a reminder I reported to two CEOs of Square Enix for the better part of a decade and ran a subsidiary. I also correctly predicted last year that Square Enix was going to break exclusivity. I'll note I have no confidential information that I'm basing my arguments on. To start, we need to look at decisions made on the titles under development within the lens of 2015-2022, not the lens of 2023. For example, FF16 would have started pre-production prior to the release of FF15, which was released in 2016.

This is a pre-Fortnite era. Budgets for FF7 Remake and into Rebirth would have been around this period too. This is important to note and we will get back to it.
https://www.axios.com/2023/09/25/square-enix-final-fantasy-xvi-jacob-navok

There's a misunderstanding that has been repeated for nearly a decade and a half that Square Enix sets arbitrarily high sales requirements then gets upset when its arbitrarily high sales requirements fail to be met. This was not true when I was there and is unlikely to be true today.

Sales expectations generally come from a need to cover the cost of development plus return on investment.
https://www.resetera.com/threads/do...ic-sales-expectations-for-their-games.519168/

If a game costs $100m to make, and takes 5 years, then you have to beat, as an example, what the business could have returned investing $100m into the stock market over that period.
For the 5 years prior to Feb 2024, the stock market averaged a rate of return of 14.5%. Investing that $100m in the stock market would net you a return of $201m, so this is our ROI baseline. Can the game net a return higher than this after marketing, platform fees, and discounts are factored in?

This is actually a very hard equation though it seems simple; the $70 that the consumer pays only returns $49 after 30% platform fees, and the platforms will generally get a recoup on any funds spent on exclusivity meaning until they are paid back, they will keep that cash. Plus, discounts start almost immediately. Assume marketing expenses at $50m, and assume that you're not going to get $49 but rather an average closer to $40 given discounts, returns and other aspects. Now let's say in that first month you sold 3m copies with $40 net received (we will ignore the recoup). You need to surpass $254m to make expectations. (That's $100m + $101m in ROI baseline + $50m in marketing).

At 3m copies with $40 per copy received, you've only made $120m. You're far off.
https://www.ign.com/articles/final-fantasy-16-sold-3-million-copies-during-launch-week

From the statements made, it will take FF16 eighteen months to hit expected sales. (I used the stock market as an example but actual ROI should be higher than stock market averages).
The sales figures required aren't wild expectations; the number of copies sold were too low. And my numbers are actually much lower than realities (game dev costs are probably 2x as high, and marketing is also likely 2x as high, and this makes ROI requirements higher too). But that's not even the core of the problem, this is just me proving that expectations aren't set immodestly.

The core of the problem is that the budgets were set in a period where the expectation was that audiences would grow. Total audience growth was a reasonable expectation in the 2015-2022 era and still is today. Not only had the industry grown significantly each year, but each day that new generations were coming of age, they were coming of age as gamers. Meaning that your total addressable population should be increasing and you should be increasing your revenue. What's happened? Not just to Square Enix, but to the industry as a whole? Audience behavioral patterns are radically different than expected in 2015. Remember, I said 2015 was pre-Fortnite.

The way it used to work was that you'd pick your release date similar to a Hollywood movie, stick to it, and consider the competition to be the titles releasing the weeks before and after. We would look at a Hitman or a Deus Ex release and consider whether there was a Call of Duty or Assassin's Creed coming out around that time, assuming that gamers had X amount of money to spend and Y amount of time, and that if we wanted to get the full sticker price (remember, discounts eat into cash received and also at that time, used disc sales were $0 cash received) we needed to get as many sales in the first two weeks as possible. At that time, as a gamer, once you finished the most recent game you were on, you moved onto the next. You were looking for your next title once you finished the prior one. We wanted one of our titles to be the next title you bought to fill your gamer needs.

This world radically changed in the last 6 years. Earlier this month Kotaku had an article called "9 Great Games We Can't Stop Thinking About." There's a surprise 10th slide, and that is Fortnite.
@ZwiezenZ writes in the article: "And once again, another weekend arrives and I realize that I'll be spending most of it playing Fortnite. I'm very close to maxing out both my battle pass and Festival pass, so that's the plan.

I hate how deep Fortnite has its hooks in me–to the point where I'm choosing to play it over brand-new, cool-looking video games–but I can't help it. I must finish these damn passes, get all the rewards, and earn the right to play other stuff. Well, until the next season starts up and I once again return to Fortnite to drop in and level up all over again. It's sick. I hate myself. I can't wait to play more this weekend."
https://kotaku.com/weekend-guide-1000xresist-hades-2-dragons-dogma-1851470390/slides/10

This is indeed the point. Square Enix are not competing against just the latest new installments, they are competing against every F2P online game that is constantly adding content and getting more robust over time. The assumption was that people would jump between products when they finished one. But, as you know, F2P games like Fortnite or Warzone are evergreen, they never get old. They are always updating with new content and experiences. They can continue for decades. Candy Crush has had its best years ever the last few years. And companies like Epic can continue to invest back into the products to make them better, creating even higher barriers to entry for competitors.
https://www.reuters.com/technology/...revenue-milestone-maker-king-says-2023-09-26/

The game industry is still growing in revenue but that revenue is increasingly captured by fewer live services games that are generating a level of stickiness seen in social media companies. There are reasons there are very few competitors to Facebook. Once the network effect starts, it can keep going for a long time. Since Instagram (also FB), the only real competitor in an entire decade that showed up and could quickly reach 1bn+ people was TikTok. And this is in a trillion dollar valued industry.

60 Percent Of Playtime In 2023 Went To 6-Year-Old Or Older Games, New Data ShowsA report shows that while the industry is growing, its biggest competition is Fortnite, GTA, Call of Duty, and Roblox
https://kotaku.com/old-games-2023-playtime-data-fortnite-roblox-minecraft-1851382474

I expect Fortnite, Roblox, Warzone, and similar products to continue to grow revenue. Meanwhile, put yourself in an older gamer's shoes: if you're a gamer with disposable income but less free time, and you have the choice of paying $70 to play 100 hours in FF16 or to just continue playing Fortnite with your friends for free, you'll wait to see the FF16 reviews before you decide whether to switch off FN.
In other words, your switching costs (how good a game is, how exciting it needs to be) are now substantially higher than when you'd finish the latest Assassin's Creed and look for the next title to fill your time, because you’re awash with content options. Fortnite doesn't end. This is the reason we see trends where games are either spectacular 10/10 successes, or disasters, with little in between; there is no "next hit" being searched for in many cases. And this polarization makes risks higher, and costs higher too (we will get to this in a moment.) Now if you're a younger gamer in your teens, you may not even be thinking about FF. If you are 13 years old now, you were 5 years old when the last mainline FF, FF15, came out.

Your family may not own a PS5 and you may not care. You're satisfied with Fortnite or Roblox or Minecraft with your friends on your phone or laptop. I'm not say that this is the case for everyone. But it is certainly a trend.

The old AAA franchises do not seem to be converting the younger generations that the industry was counting on for growth, and instead F2P social games on mobile are where they spend their time.
This is the reason every publisher chased live service titles; audiences clearly gravitated toward them, and profits followed in success. (It is surprising that Square Enix, which had successful F2P live service mobile titles in Japan, left the AAA live-service attempts to Eidos rather than try to build those products in Japan, but dissecting this problem would likely require an entirely different thread.) Regardless, the Fortnite-ization of the industry was not entirely predictable in 2015 when budgets were being planned. Even after FN came out and well into the Covid period it felt like industry growth was pulling all ships forward, not just a handful. But that isn't what happened. Now we have to get to the cost of development. Asset generation, motion capture, textures, animation, engineering, infrastructure are incredibly expensive. Making games costs a lot of money. The recent layoff wave is generally a consolidation toward a new expected sales average in the number of titles being produced, not the cost of an individual title, which is going to continue to increase. (Spider-Man 2 cost $380m! )

Development costs have gone up, and switching costs of the consumer has gone up, and as a result companies have to invest even more because it has to be a 10/10 or gamers will stick to Fortnite. (I don't literally mean FN, but similar types of products.)

Meanwhile, FF7 Rebirth, which has a 92% Metacritic rating, can't get the sales it needs (though that's also complicated due to it being a sequel.) These factors mean the status quo must change.
https://kotaku.com/what-hacked-files-tell-us-about-the-studio-behind-spide-1851115233

There are three levers you can pull to make the equation work for return on investment at a game company. You can decrease costs, increase price, or increase audience size. As noted, any non-service game is having trouble increasing audience size. Meanwhile, on the cost side, inflation is up, salaries are up, and consumers require sophisticated, beautiful products to get them to fork over cash rather than keep playing F2P titles.

It is true that there are many smaller games or less beautiful games that generate audiences and are profitable. But something like Balatro is not a good example to point to. It's made by one person. AAA games can take hundreds, thousands of people to make. A single person making $2-3m in sales is life changing, a hundred people trying to split that is not enough money. And products like Balatro are lightning in a bottle, you can't generally capture that twice, and there are hundreds of thousands of competing products on Steam or App Stores that fail for every Balatro. This leaves only price left as a lever to pull. Since the price of games hasn't substantially increased, relative to inflation, package disc games have gotten cheaper over the last two decades. The assumption was that this was okay because the audience size would grow instead of price. But the audience went to the platform titles.

Prices for packaged disc games will go up. Game companies have no choice, it is the only lever left. Just look at Kotaku's article about GTA6’s price point from this week:
https://kotaku.com/gta-6-gtavi-grand-theft-auto-price-70-take-two-ceo-t2-1851489239

You're also seeing this trend with Ubisoft's Star Wars game
It's not because game companies are penny pinchers looking to fleece their users. It's because this is the only path left to make non-F2P service titles workable in the AAA space given cost and competition.
Something has to give; if SQEX can’t get its cost of dev down (it will go further up) and is getting good reviews but isn’t increasing audience, they and the rest of the publishers are going to have to increase price point. Otherwise live service titles will be all we have left

There's another path that I can think of, which is increasing the take rate. If publishers can capture more of the platform side revenue, they can moderate price point increases while capturing a better return on investment because they'll be capturing say $50 or $55 out of $70.

@TimSweeneyEpic knows this which is why he's fighting the good fight on platform fees, both at EGS and with the app stores, to open up PC and mobile ecosystems.
This is also why you'll see MS and others take advantage of his fight and start their own app stores. (You would think MS would chip in for Epic's legal fees given they're capturing the benefits with no risk!)

But this path will take time, and is very hard on consoles, where the AAA publishers make a lot of their money, so expect price increases to still be the norm.
Microsoft readies launch of its own mobile app store

Microsoft announced that they will be launching a new mobile games and app store to compete with Apple and Google Play.
https://readwrite.com/microsoft-to-launch-their-own-mobile-game-app-store/


Many thanks to everyone who shared or retweeted my dive into Square Enix’s financial results. I noticed a few recurring questions that I’ll respond to here.

First, I’ve seen several questions about how to build games cheaper or set budgets based on smaller sales figures.

It’s important to understand that game budgeting is an art rather than a science. I have very rarely seen a game stick to its budget. Through the creative process you may go back into pre-production three times, or throw out entire game directions, or find that the gameplay sucks, or that testing means that you need to completely rewrite the game mode you are working on. This is how games like Helldivers 2 go from an estimated 3 years of development to 7+ years:
https://www.pcgamer.com/games/third...araderie-and-compassion-saw-the-team-through/

Linear paths do not exist for any game except an incremental Madden release (and even those sometimes go haywire if the engine needs updating).

Making a game is not like painting a picture with Bob Ross or like making a movie (which, btw, go well over time and budget all the time).

My old boss, Yoichi Wada, who ran Square Enix for over a decade, used to say that games are the most complex form of mass-consumer software. Most consumer software like Word or Slack can run only on a CPU or even in a browser. Only games require GPUs, a specialized complex piece of hardware, to be able to run. There’s a reason that Apple showed off their iPhone 15 last year by promoting games like Resident Evil and Death Stranding being able to run on them.

(Today, ChatGPT and other LLMs can probably lay claim to being more complex than games (again, in terms of mass consumer software) given that they require huge numbers of even more complex GPUs than consoles run. But the point that I am making is that games are exceptional relative to most other forms of software.)

In sum, games are technically complex pieces of software that, unlike most other software, also require significant investments in story, art, interactive design, and network design. And dev will always go wrong before it goes right.

When a producer comes to you and says “Sorry, this isn’t working, we’re going to need twelve more months to redo then retest half the game” you can’t say, “Sorry you are over budget, ship it as it is” at a publisher like Square Enix. A 10% additional investment in time or budget will be the difference between a 5/10 game and a 9/10 game, and generates millions of units more sold. And there is no world where everything in a creative product always goes the way it is intended.

FF12 and FF15 both had a change of director (Matsuno, Tabata) during development. FF15 famously took a decade to make and started off as an FF13 spinoff. You cannot dictate “devs, be more efficient," you have to be able to know which creatives to give control, when to cut your losses and to have the cash reserves to pivot.

And as technology changes, games tend to change. There are huge technology strides in just two to three years in our industry, forget five years.

The 1990s FF7 had as many myriad things to do as FF16, and also pushed the edge of computer graphics (taking up nearly all of the CGI capacity of Japan at that time, a story its developers loved to repeat to me over drinks.)

FF7 was done faster because the technology was simpler and the bleeding edge of graphics at a far lower fidelity. Engineers have not gotten less skilled, and artists have not gotten worse at their craft in the ensuing decades. Everyone has gotten BETTER. It is the bar that is set higher because of what it takes to achieve fidelity.

To that end, you cannot make an 20 hour, AA Final Fantasy and have it still be Final Fantasy. You can make amazing 100 hour AA game like Octopath, or you can make an incredible 20 hour AAA game like Alan Wake II (which btw did not recoup its dev costs on launch: https://gamerant.com/alan-wake-2-sales-development-costs-report/)

But the FF brand is supposed to be an incredible, 100+ hour AAA journey. That is what the brand means, anything less will get terrible reaction from consumers, so if you want to make cheaper, shorter, lower quality products you need to use a different brand.

Square Enix attempted shorter, lower, cheaper new brands. That is how you got successes like the aforementioned Octopath (though no where near the revenue rate of an FF), and failures like Balan Wonderland, as well as mid-tiers like Foamstars. It’s hard to create new IP, to empower creators, to try new things. Many times there are failures. But we should not accuse Square Enix of not trying; they made many attempts and they should be lauded for all their attempts, and instead they were shamed.

If every game needs to be a 9/10 for you to buy it, the problem is going to be exacerbated. When you purchase 6/10 games or 7/10 games from a new IP, you help a publisher justify its investment into a better version of the next title. But the wallet voting here has been clear: people aren’t buying the 6/10 games, Square Enix shouldn’t try to make smaller, cheaper games unless they're 9/10 quality or greater, and it turns out quality is really expensive, even for a "smaller" game like Alan Wake II.

@stephentotilo put the results of this trend, seen across the industry, succinctly:
https://www.gamefile.news/p/nintendo-microsoft-square-fewer-games

To that end, FF as a brand cannot simply get smaller, be made better, be made cheaper, and still be FF. And frankly speaking, the lesson from my prior thread isn’t being learned in responses that say FF specifically should be smaller or cheaper.

Cost is not the problem, sale price and market size are the problem. We need to admit that a larger portion of players today prefer service games and are voting with their wallets and time, playing titles like Genshin Impact instead.

It is plausible that if Sony released the numbers publicly, the lifetime revenue of Fortnite, WarZone and GTA5’s online mode on PS5 would dwarf the combined totals of the titles after them. Today, even first party titles like The Last Of Us are fodder to get you to buy a PS5 so that your service game of choice is played on a PS instead of an Xbox. Fixed-price AAA titles that don’t belong to the platform holder are going to be for smaller audiences and for those niche audiences to get the same level of quality they need to justify the purchase, prices for third party publishers will have to go up.

We also should not expect publicly traded AAA publishers to become AA publishers. Square Enix’s efforts with Balan were to build new IP but these new IP were never being counted on to be the main driver of returns because new IP and lower price point titles can’t incrementally move the needle enough for a company at Square Enix's size. They were seeds for the future that failed to bloom.

Public game publishers will thus continue to place their main bets on the side of the market they can influence the most (AAA) while gamers should look to Indies and smaller publishers for their AA hits because expectations from consumers and investors are different between the two. (The real puzzle to me, which I hinted at in the previous thread, is why someone other than SQEX made Genshin Impact; that should have been their market to capture. Expect creating a similar title to be a major focus the next few years.)

So I return to, the problem is that FF brand was not selling to what the product’s budget needed it to be. Part of this is going to be resolved by going multiplatform. And part of the problem is simply greater competition that isn’t recoverable from. Today, FF14 and F2P mobile titles are subsidizing the fixed price titles, further indicating where consumers are willing to spend the most time and money within the SQEX family of titles.

Next, a recurring theme that I saw in discourse on the prior thread was with regard to games being art and capitalism. I’ll note that the context of the original thread was statements made by Square Enix (a publicly traded company) on their annual financial results.

A public company, unless its mission statement is otherwise, has a fiduciary duty to its shareholders. This includes Japanese firms. There was a time where some Japanese public companies cared less about share price in the name of employment but the lifetime employment system broke down after the bubble collapsed in the 1990s.Square Enix’s shareholders include Enix founder Fukushima-san, several major Japanese banks, Vanguard (my own company’s 401k), JP Morgan Chase, and the Public Investment Fund (PIF) of Saudi Arabia and many more. (PIF has a large enough holding to have board representation: https://www.hd.square-enix.com/eng/company/officer.html )

When a bank like JP Morgan gives you interest on your savings account, it does so from the profits it receives by holding shares in companies like Square Enix. Similarly, when Japanese banks invest into Square Enix they do so with the deposits of their customers. Financial systems are deeply intertwined.

It is the responsibility of the company to generate the best return it can in order to fulfill its obligations to its shareholders. By definition, many companies will not surpass the average rate of return of the stock market. And by definition, many companies do surpass. The better the company performs, the higher its shares go, the more it can afford to reinvest.

If a public company intentionally set its budgets to underperform stock market returns, it would have a harder time raising money, servicing debt, and in turn, sustaining its employees. This does not mean that the company will hit its financial goals, but it does mean that in general public companies must seek better returns (the company may alternatively focus on growth, or dividends or other financial goals as fits the business and its sector).

Additionally, shareholders elect board members who control the budgets and can hire and fire the CEO. In other words, the CEO of Square Enix reports to its board, who reports to its shareholders, who seek greater returns on investment. This is the case for many public companies without alternative mission statements.

That does not mean that their games aren’t art, or creativity aren’t important to their businesses. It does mean that public companies, be it Electronic Arts, Take-2, Capcom, Nexon or otherwise generally build games to generate returns on investment. (Note that beating the stock market on a per-dollar basis was only an example of a way to determine a baseline, conservative return on investment. In fact most times the return on investment for a publisher like a Take-2 needs to be substantially higher than just stock market return baselines.)

There are of course non-public game publishers. Valve is one. Epic is another. You also have studios like Larian which have been able to remain independent. These companies can determine what’s important for their returns their own way without the same pressures of public companies. They produce a lot of amazing products. Public companies cannot behave the same way as private companies.

The resulting industry:
1. Publicly traded AAA game publishers will focus on fewer titles, with a combination of live service (microtransaction; e.g. an FF version of Genshin) and a higher price point fixed-price (CoD, GTA, FF) in the $70-$150 range
2. The mid-tier is the domain of independent developers and smaller publishers at the $30-$60 price point
3. Live service titles will increasingly platform-tize and offer UGC tools (expect this to be a big part of GTA)
 

kaisergeddon

Liturgist
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Messages
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Insert Title Here Strap Yourselves In Codex Year of the Donut Codex+ Now Streaming! Enjoy the Revolution! Another revolution around the sun that is.
That guy speaks with a bias towards following trends and protecting Squeenix, but he's right about the fact that the new generation of gamers are addicted to GaaS. They encourage one another to play it for FOMO reasons since they're a mostly free social experience, which snowballs the effect of robbing the time they have for proper singleplayer games that require buy-in, and this bites companies like Squeenix right on the ass.

But the FF brand is supposed to be an incredible, 100+ hour AAA journey. That is what the brand means, anything less will get terrible reaction from consumers, so if you want to make cheaper, shorter, lower quality products you need to use a different brand.

HOWEVER! I don't agree with this. The brand is certainly capable of being carried by smaller budget titles, people are receptive to the quality and warm feeling they get from Final Fantasy, not the spectacle of it. That's a lack of wisdom with the company's leadership.

Modern Final Fantasy is infamous for massive project overrun. There are several articles detailing the development cycle of FF13 for instance, where the artists and creators made enough for three separate games of the same size with no direction, and that played a large part in that game getting two direct sequels to try and recoup value on those assets. Squeenix can certainly release games like Octopath with the FF name and get people on board. They're on borrowed time as it is trying to cash in on FF7 nostalgia while diluting the brand name with MMOs and decade-long release droughts.
 

lametta

Educated
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Feb 4, 2021
Messages
156
Imo the guy is biased. There are more issues at work here.

Exclusivity didnt work out and was more harmful. Why else did they now decide to scrap that.
Games get hype and word spreads in the initial release window but it dies down if you split the releases for each system to different time periods.
Maybe the exclusivity money doesn't make up for the fact that square isnt really good at marketing and the hype for the games die down.

Chasing trends is an issue imo
Remember the battle royale game square released? Me neither but they did and it failed.
Remember the nft games square released? Me neither but the ceos both doubled down on planing to go full force on them.
Remember the A.I. driven game that square released? It was a shit show.

Maybe just focusing on good titles will help them and i think that smaller titles even final fantasy ones could turn out well.
You could do a spin off series with vincent valentine with some goth/Dark atmosphere maybe set in the past or do a tifa swimsuit competition game (a man can dream ?) etc. etc. Didnt the theaterryhtm final fantasy game do well? Oh wait that one was exclusive ;)
 

911 Jumper

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Jun 12, 2023
Messages
1,082
DRAGON QUEST III HD-2D Teaser
There's not much to go on from the tease, as it showcases a very short animation of the franchise's Mark of Erdrick, captioned with the short phrase "The legend of Erdrick draws near". Crucially, however, we do get confirmation that the game will be heading to the Nintendo Switch in addition to Steam, Windows, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X/
 

911 Jumper

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Jun 12, 2023
Messages
1,082
Regarding the development of DRAGON QUEST 12


Translation (@YujiHorii post)
Everyone, thank you very much for all your congratulatory messages. Dragon Quest 12’s status has been causing you a lot of worry, but actually, I just had a meeting about it. I cannot reveal the details yet, but we want to create a game that is worthy of the final contributions of the two people who passed away. I’m doing my best!

Translation (@DQ_PR post)
Dragon Quest 1 was released 38 years ago today. Today (May 27) is also known as Dragon Quest Day. Dragon Quest 1 is the title that made the RPG genre popular in Japan. In the game, a hero from the Erdrick bloodline sets out on an adventure to defeat the Dragonlord who stole the “Ball of Light” and save the world.
 

lycanwarrior

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A thread on the recent Square Enix news regarding FF sales numbers and expectations.
https://www.ign.com/articles/final-...-all-failed-to-meet-square-enixs-expectations

As a reminder I reported to two CEOs of Square Enix for the better part of a decade and ran a subsidiary. I also correctly predicted last year that Square Enix was going to break exclusivity. I'll note I have no confidential information that I'm basing my arguments on. To start, we need to look at decisions made on the titles under development within the lens of 2015-2022, not the lens of 2023. For example, FF16 would have started pre-production prior to the release of FF15, which was released in 2016.

This is a pre-Fortnite era. Budgets for FF7 Remake and into Rebirth would have been around this period too. This is important to note and we will get back to it.
https://www.axios.com/2023/09/25/square-enix-final-fantasy-xvi-jacob-navok

There's a misunderstanding that has been repeated for nearly a decade and a half that Square Enix sets arbitrarily high sales requirements then gets upset when its arbitrarily high sales requirements fail to be met. This was not true when I was there and is unlikely to be true today.

Sales expectations generally come from a need to cover the cost of development plus return on investment.
https://www.resetera.com/threads/do...ic-sales-expectations-for-their-games.519168/

If a game costs $100m to make, and takes 5 years, then you have to beat, as an example, what the business could have returned investing $100m into the stock market over that period.
For the 5 years prior to Feb 2024, the stock market averaged a rate of return of 14.5%. Investing that $100m in the stock market would net you a return of $201m, so this is our ROI baseline. Can the game net a return higher than this after marketing, platform fees, and discounts are factored in?

This is actually a very hard equation though it seems simple; the $70 that the consumer pays only returns $49 after 30% platform fees, and the platforms will generally get a recoup on any funds spent on exclusivity meaning until they are paid back, they will keep that cash. Plus, discounts start almost immediately. Assume marketing expenses at $50m, and assume that you're not going to get $49 but rather an average closer to $40 given discounts, returns and other aspects. Now let's say in that first month you sold 3m copies with $40 net received (we will ignore the recoup). You need to surpass $254m to make expectations. (That's $100m + $101m in ROI baseline + $50m in marketing).

At 3m copies with $40 per copy received, you've only made $120m. You're far off.
https://www.ign.com/articles/final-fantasy-16-sold-3-million-copies-during-launch-week

From the statements made, it will take FF16 eighteen months to hit expected sales. (I used the stock market as an example but actual ROI should be higher than stock market averages).
The sales figures required aren't wild expectations; the number of copies sold were too low. And my numbers are actually much lower than realities (game dev costs are probably 2x as high, and marketing is also likely 2x as high, and this makes ROI requirements higher too). But that's not even the core of the problem, this is just me proving that expectations aren't set immodestly.

The core of the problem is that the budgets were set in a period where the expectation was that audiences would grow. Total audience growth was a reasonable expectation in the 2015-2022 era and still is today. Not only had the industry grown significantly each year, but each day that new generations were coming of age, they were coming of age as gamers. Meaning that your total addressable population should be increasing and you should be increasing your revenue. What's happened? Not just to Square Enix, but to the industry as a whole? Audience behavioral patterns are radically different than expected in 2015. Remember, I said 2015 was pre-Fortnite.

The way it used to work was that you'd pick your release date similar to a Hollywood movie, stick to it, and consider the competition to be the titles releasing the weeks before and after. We would look at a Hitman or a Deus Ex release and consider whether there was a Call of Duty or Assassin's Creed coming out around that time, assuming that gamers had X amount of money to spend and Y amount of time, and that if we wanted to get the full sticker price (remember, discounts eat into cash received and also at that time, used disc sales were $0 cash received) we needed to get as many sales in the first two weeks as possible. At that time, as a gamer, once you finished the most recent game you were on, you moved onto the next. You were looking for your next title once you finished the prior one. We wanted one of our titles to be the next title you bought to fill your gamer needs.

This world radically changed in the last 6 years. Earlier this month Kotaku had an article called "9 Great Games We Can't Stop Thinking About." There's a surprise 10th slide, and that is Fortnite.
@ZwiezenZ writes in the article: "And once again, another weekend arrives and I realize that I'll be spending most of it playing Fortnite. I'm very close to maxing out both my battle pass and Festival pass, so that's the plan.

I hate how deep Fortnite has its hooks in me–to the point where I'm choosing to play it over brand-new, cool-looking video games–but I can't help it. I must finish these damn passes, get all the rewards, and earn the right to play other stuff. Well, until the next season starts up and I once again return to Fortnite to drop in and level up all over again. It's sick. I hate myself. I can't wait to play more this weekend."
https://kotaku.com/weekend-guide-1000xresist-hades-2-dragons-dogma-1851470390/slides/10

This is indeed the point. Square Enix are not competing against just the latest new installments, they are competing against every F2P online game that is constantly adding content and getting more robust over time. The assumption was that people would jump between products when they finished one. But, as you know, F2P games like Fortnite or Warzone are evergreen, they never get old. They are always updating with new content and experiences. They can continue for decades. Candy Crush has had its best years ever the last few years. And companies like Epic can continue to invest back into the products to make them better, creating even higher barriers to entry for competitors.
https://www.reuters.com/technology/...revenue-milestone-maker-king-says-2023-09-26/

The game industry is still growing in revenue but that revenue is increasingly captured by fewer live services games that are generating a level of stickiness seen in social media companies. There are reasons there are very few competitors to Facebook. Once the network effect starts, it can keep going for a long time. Since Instagram (also FB), the only real competitor in an entire decade that showed up and could quickly reach 1bn+ people was TikTok. And this is in a trillion dollar valued industry.

60 Percent Of Playtime In 2023 Went To 6-Year-Old Or Older Games, New Data ShowsA report shows that while the industry is growing, its biggest competition is Fortnite, GTA, Call of Duty, and Roblox
https://kotaku.com/old-games-2023-playtime-data-fortnite-roblox-minecraft-1851382474

I expect Fortnite, Roblox, Warzone, and similar products to continue to grow revenue. Meanwhile, put yourself in an older gamer's shoes: if you're a gamer with disposable income but less free time, and you have the choice of paying $70 to play 100 hours in FF16 or to just continue playing Fortnite with your friends for free, you'll wait to see the FF16 reviews before you decide whether to switch off FN.
In other words, your switching costs (how good a game is, how exciting it needs to be) are now substantially higher than when you'd finish the latest Assassin's Creed and look for the next title to fill your time, because you’re awash with content options. Fortnite doesn't end. This is the reason we see trends where games are either spectacular 10/10 successes, or disasters, with little in between; there is no "next hit" being searched for in many cases. And this polarization makes risks higher, and costs higher too (we will get to this in a moment.) Now if you're a younger gamer in your teens, you may not even be thinking about FF. If you are 13 years old now, you were 5 years old when the last mainline FF, FF15, came out.

Your family may not own a PS5 and you may not care. You're satisfied with Fortnite or Roblox or Minecraft with your friends on your phone or laptop. I'm not say that this is the case for everyone. But it is certainly a trend.

The old AAA franchises do not seem to be converting the younger generations that the industry was counting on for growth, and instead F2P social games on mobile are where they spend their time.
This is the reason every publisher chased live service titles; audiences clearly gravitated toward them, and profits followed in success. (It is surprising that Square Enix, which had successful F2P live service mobile titles in Japan, left the AAA live-service attempts to Eidos rather than try to build those products in Japan, but dissecting this problem would likely require an entirely different thread.) Regardless, the Fortnite-ization of the industry was not entirely predictable in 2015 when budgets were being planned. Even after FN came out and well into the Covid period it felt like industry growth was pulling all ships forward, not just a handful. But that isn't what happened. Now we have to get to the cost of development. Asset generation, motion capture, textures, animation, engineering, infrastructure are incredibly expensive. Making games costs a lot of money. The recent layoff wave is generally a consolidation toward a new expected sales average in the number of titles being produced, not the cost of an individual title, which is going to continue to increase. (Spider-Man 2 cost $380m! )

Development costs have gone up, and switching costs of the consumer has gone up, and as a result companies have to invest even more because it has to be a 10/10 or gamers will stick to Fortnite. (I don't literally mean FN, but similar types of products.)

Meanwhile, FF7 Rebirth, which has a 92% Metacritic rating, can't get the sales it needs (though that's also complicated due to it being a sequel.) These factors mean the status quo must change.
https://kotaku.com/what-hacked-files-tell-us-about-the-studio-behind-spide-1851115233

There are three levers you can pull to make the equation work for return on investment at a game company. You can decrease costs, increase price, or increase audience size. As noted, any non-service game is having trouble increasing audience size. Meanwhile, on the cost side, inflation is up, salaries are up, and consumers require sophisticated, beautiful products to get them to fork over cash rather than keep playing F2P titles.

It is true that there are many smaller games or less beautiful games that generate audiences and are profitable. But something like Balatro is not a good example to point to. It's made by one person. AAA games can take hundreds, thousands of people to make. A single person making $2-3m in sales is life changing, a hundred people trying to split that is not enough money. And products like Balatro are lightning in a bottle, you can't generally capture that twice, and there are hundreds of thousands of competing products on Steam or App Stores that fail for every Balatro. This leaves only price left as a lever to pull. Since the price of games hasn't substantially increased, relative to inflation, package disc games have gotten cheaper over the last two decades. The assumption was that this was okay because the audience size would grow instead of price. But the audience went to the platform titles.

Prices for packaged disc games will go up. Game companies have no choice, it is the only lever left. Just look at Kotaku's article about GTA6’s price point from this week:
https://kotaku.com/gta-6-gtavi-grand-theft-auto-price-70-take-two-ceo-t2-1851489239

You're also seeing this trend with Ubisoft's Star Wars game
It's not because game companies are penny pinchers looking to fleece their users. It's because this is the only path left to make non-F2P service titles workable in the AAA space given cost and competition.
Something has to give; if SQEX can’t get its cost of dev down (it will go further up) and is getting good reviews but isn’t increasing audience, they and the rest of the publishers are going to have to increase price point. Otherwise live service titles will be all we have left

There's another path that I can think of, which is increasing the take rate. If publishers can capture more of the platform side revenue, they can moderate price point increases while capturing a better return on investment because they'll be capturing say $50 or $55 out of $70.

@TimSweeneyEpic knows this which is why he's fighting the good fight on platform fees, both at EGS and with the app stores, to open up PC and mobile ecosystems.
This is also why you'll see MS and others take advantage of his fight and start their own app stores. (You would think MS would chip in for Epic's legal fees given they're capturing the benefits with no risk!)

But this path will take time, and is very hard on consoles, where the AAA publishers make a lot of their money, so expect price increases to still be the norm.
Microsoft readies launch of its own mobile app store

Microsoft announced that they will be launching a new mobile games and app store to compete with Apple and Google Play.
https://readwrite.com/microsoft-to-launch-their-own-mobile-game-app-store/


Many thanks to everyone who shared or retweeted my dive into Square Enix’s financial results. I noticed a few recurring questions that I’ll respond to here.

First, I’ve seen several questions about how to build games cheaper or set budgets based on smaller sales figures.

It’s important to understand that game budgeting is an art rather than a science. I have very rarely seen a game stick to its budget. Through the creative process you may go back into pre-production three times, or throw out entire game directions, or find that the gameplay sucks, or that testing means that you need to completely rewrite the game mode you are working on. This is how games like Helldivers 2 go from an estimated 3 years of development to 7+ years:
https://www.pcgamer.com/games/third...araderie-and-compassion-saw-the-team-through/

Linear paths do not exist for any game except an incremental Madden release (and even those sometimes go haywire if the engine needs updating).

Making a game is not like painting a picture with Bob Ross or like making a movie (which, btw, go well over time and budget all the time).

My old boss, Yoichi Wada, who ran Square Enix for over a decade, used to say that games are the most complex form of mass-consumer software. Most consumer software like Word or Slack can run only on a CPU or even in a browser. Only games require GPUs, a specialized complex piece of hardware, to be able to run. There’s a reason that Apple showed off their iPhone 15 last year by promoting games like Resident Evil and Death Stranding being able to run on them.

(Today, ChatGPT and other LLMs can probably lay claim to being more complex than games (again, in terms of mass consumer software) given that they require huge numbers of even more complex GPUs than consoles run. But the point that I am making is that games are exceptional relative to most other forms of software.)

In sum, games are technically complex pieces of software that, unlike most other software, also require significant investments in story, art, interactive design, and network design. And dev will always go wrong before it goes right.

When a producer comes to you and says “Sorry, this isn’t working, we’re going to need twelve more months to redo then retest half the game” you can’t say, “Sorry you are over budget, ship it as it is” at a publisher like Square Enix. A 10% additional investment in time or budget will be the difference between a 5/10 game and a 9/10 game, and generates millions of units more sold. And there is no world where everything in a creative product always goes the way it is intended.

FF12 and FF15 both had a change of director (Matsuno, Tabata) during development. FF15 famously took a decade to make and started off as an FF13 spinoff. You cannot dictate “devs, be more efficient," you have to be able to know which creatives to give control, when to cut your losses and to have the cash reserves to pivot.

And as technology changes, games tend to change. There are huge technology strides in just two to three years in our industry, forget five years.

The 1990s FF7 had as many myriad things to do as FF16, and also pushed the edge of computer graphics (taking up nearly all of the CGI capacity of Japan at that time, a story its developers loved to repeat to me over drinks.)

FF7 was done faster because the technology was simpler and the bleeding edge of graphics at a far lower fidelity. Engineers have not gotten less skilled, and artists have not gotten worse at their craft in the ensuing decades. Everyone has gotten BETTER. It is the bar that is set higher because of what it takes to achieve fidelity.

To that end, you cannot make an 20 hour, AA Final Fantasy and have it still be Final Fantasy. You can make amazing 100 hour AA game like Octopath, or you can make an incredible 20 hour AAA game like Alan Wake II (which btw did not recoup its dev costs on launch: https://gamerant.com/alan-wake-2-sales-development-costs-report/)

But the FF brand is supposed to be an incredible, 100+ hour AAA journey. That is what the brand means, anything less will get terrible reaction from consumers, so if you want to make cheaper, shorter, lower quality products you need to use a different brand.

Square Enix attempted shorter, lower, cheaper new brands. That is how you got successes like the aforementioned Octopath (though no where near the revenue rate of an FF), and failures like Balan Wonderland, as well as mid-tiers like Foamstars. It’s hard to create new IP, to empower creators, to try new things. Many times there are failures. But we should not accuse Square Enix of not trying; they made many attempts and they should be lauded for all their attempts, and instead they were shamed.

If every game needs to be a 9/10 for you to buy it, the problem is going to be exacerbated. When you purchase 6/10 games or 7/10 games from a new IP, you help a publisher justify its investment into a better version of the next title. But the wallet voting here has been clear: people aren’t buying the 6/10 games, Square Enix shouldn’t try to make smaller, cheaper games unless they're 9/10 quality or greater, and it turns out quality is really expensive, even for a "smaller" game like Alan Wake II.

@stephentotilo put the results of this trend, seen across the industry, succinctly:
https://www.gamefile.news/p/nintendo-microsoft-square-fewer-games

To that end, FF as a brand cannot simply get smaller, be made better, be made cheaper, and still be FF. And frankly speaking, the lesson from my prior thread isn’t being learned in responses that say FF specifically should be smaller or cheaper.

Cost is not the problem, sale price and market size are the problem. We need to admit that a larger portion of players today prefer service games and are voting with their wallets and time, playing titles like Genshin Impact instead.

It is plausible that if Sony released the numbers publicly, the lifetime revenue of Fortnite, WarZone and GTA5’s online mode on PS5 would dwarf the combined totals of the titles after them. Today, even first party titles like The Last Of Us are fodder to get you to buy a PS5 so that your service game of choice is played on a PS instead of an Xbox. Fixed-price AAA titles that don’t belong to the platform holder are going to be for smaller audiences and for those niche audiences to get the same level of quality they need to justify the purchase, prices for third party publishers will have to go up.

We also should not expect publicly traded AAA publishers to become AA publishers. Square Enix’s efforts with Balan were to build new IP but these new IP were never being counted on to be the main driver of returns because new IP and lower price point titles can’t incrementally move the needle enough for a company at Square Enix's size. They were seeds for the future that failed to bloom.

Public game publishers will thus continue to place their main bets on the side of the market they can influence the most (AAA) while gamers should look to Indies and smaller publishers for their AA hits because expectations from consumers and investors are different between the two. (The real puzzle to me, which I hinted at in the previous thread, is why someone other than SQEX made Genshin Impact; that should have been their market to capture. Expect creating a similar title to be a major focus the next few years.)

So I return to, the problem is that FF brand was not selling to what the product’s budget needed it to be. Part of this is going to be resolved by going multiplatform. And part of the problem is simply greater competition that isn’t recoverable from. Today, FF14 and F2P mobile titles are subsidizing the fixed price titles, further indicating where consumers are willing to spend the most time and money within the SQEX family of titles.

Next, a recurring theme that I saw in discourse on the prior thread was with regard to games being art and capitalism. I’ll note that the context of the original thread was statements made by Square Enix (a publicly traded company) on their annual financial results.

A public company, unless its mission statement is otherwise, has a fiduciary duty to its shareholders. This includes Japanese firms. There was a time where some Japanese public companies cared less about share price in the name of employment but the lifetime employment system broke down after the bubble collapsed in the 1990s.Square Enix’s shareholders include Enix founder Fukushima-san, several major Japanese banks, Vanguard (my own company’s 401k), JP Morgan Chase, and the Public Investment Fund (PIF) of Saudi Arabia and many more. (PIF has a large enough holding to have board representation: https://www.hd.square-enix.com/eng/company/officer.html )

When a bank like JP Morgan gives you interest on your savings account, it does so from the profits it receives by holding shares in companies like Square Enix. Similarly, when Japanese banks invest into Square Enix they do so with the deposits of their customers. Financial systems are deeply intertwined.

It is the responsibility of the company to generate the best return it can in order to fulfill its obligations to its shareholders. By definition, many companies will not surpass the average rate of return of the stock market. And by definition, many companies do surpass. The better the company performs, the higher its shares go, the more it can afford to reinvest.

If a public company intentionally set its budgets to underperform stock market returns, it would have a harder time raising money, servicing debt, and in turn, sustaining its employees. This does not mean that the company will hit its financial goals, but it does mean that in general public companies must seek better returns (the company may alternatively focus on growth, or dividends or other financial goals as fits the business and its sector).

Additionally, shareholders elect board members who control the budgets and can hire and fire the CEO. In other words, the CEO of Square Enix reports to its board, who reports to its shareholders, who seek greater returns on investment. This is the case for many public companies without alternative mission statements.

That does not mean that their games aren’t art, or creativity aren’t important to their businesses. It does mean that public companies, be it Electronic Arts, Take-2, Capcom, Nexon or otherwise generally build games to generate returns on investment. (Note that beating the stock market on a per-dollar basis was only an example of a way to determine a baseline, conservative return on investment. In fact most times the return on investment for a publisher like a Take-2 needs to be substantially higher than just stock market return baselines.)

There are of course non-public game publishers. Valve is one. Epic is another. You also have studios like Larian which have been able to remain independent. These companies can determine what’s important for their returns their own way without the same pressures of public companies. They produce a lot of amazing products. Public companies cannot behave the same way as private companies.

The resulting industry:
1. Publicly traded AAA game publishers will focus on fewer titles, with a combination of live service (microtransaction; e.g. an FF version of Genshin) and a higher price point fixed-price (CoD, GTA, FF) in the $70-$150 range
2. The mid-tier is the domain of independent developers and smaller publishers at the $30-$60 price point
3. Live service titles will increasingly platform-tize and offer UGC tools (expect this to be a big part of GTA)

Honestly, I think the mods should make this a separate thread and move it to General Gaming subforum. It is something that isn't really just about Square Enix but is applicable to the entire game industry in general.
 

deuxhero

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That guy speaks with a bias towards following trends and protecting Squeenix, but he's right about the fact that the new generation of gamers are addicted to GaaS. They encourage one another to play it for FOMO reasons since they're a mostly free social experience, which snowballs the effect of robbing the time they have for proper singleplayer games that require buy-in, and this bites companies like Squeenix right on the ass.

But the FF brand is supposed to be an incredible, 100+ hour AAA journey. That is what the brand means, anything less will get terrible reaction from consumers, so if you want to make cheaper, shorter, lower quality products you need to use a different brand.

HOWEVER! I don't agree with this. The brand is certainly capable of being carried by smaller budget titles, people are receptive to the quality and warm feeling they get from Final Fantasy, not the spectacle of it. That's a lack of wisdom with the company's leadership.

Modern Final Fantasy is infamous for massive project overrun. There are several articles detailing the development cycle of FF13 for instance, where the artists and creators made enough for three separate games of the same size with no direction, and that played a large part in that game getting two direct sequels to try and recoup value on those assets. Squeenix can certainly release games like Octopath with the FF name and get people on board. They're on borrowed time as it is trying to cash in on FF7 nostalgia while diluting the brand name with MMOs and decade-long release droughts.
People liked World of Final Fantasy aside from its poorly thought out mechanics (apparently there's no point to not putting the entire party in two stacks because you loose so much damage so the entire stacking mechanic is pointless) and broken PC port. It was clearly made on a lesser budget. The DS era was full of well liked spinoffs (A2, Revnant Wings, The 4 Heroes of Light, Dissidia, Type-0, and Dimensions are all well liked. Even the worst of the era, The After Years and the Crystal Chronicles dungeon crawlers, are considered "Eh" at worst instead of a blight. Apparently the Japanese original of the PSP FF7 cash in is considered a real stinker though).

The problem is Square loves to rip defeat from the jaws of victory. This can't even be explained by large companies being slow to address issues because they went out of their way to double down on things that drove people away. More people remember Bravely Default for how badly they kept censoring it then the actual series, and its dead because that kept occupying every talk about the game. Rather than learn, their ethics department invaded everything else. The Type-0 HD crashed and burned because SE decided to let a tranny rewrite the dialog, but they keep doing it to further games.
 

Falksi

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Square are just shit now.

They were always overrated anyway, for every top tier game they would release they would release some dross wither either bad mechanics, a bad structure, or both such as Secret of Evermore or Valkyrie Profile 2: Silmeria

They've gotten by on their core fanbase being mentally stunted. They're the type who constantly vote in polls that Chrono Trigger has a better story than Planescape Torment, and all it takes is a little romance and a few wow moments to appease them. I used to love some Square games for their charm, worlds and sense of wonder, but even that was usually recycled hugely, and bad/easy gameplay often got in the way of enjoyment regardless. Years of simping by their fans have allowed Square to get away with such bad practices, and now they are rife in most of their games.

The sooner they die the better. It's companies like Square which draw baby-minded simps to the hobby, and why real RPGs started getting watered down to appease such simps.
 

Machocruz

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Square are just shit now.
But notice that is never part of these analysis. Maybe the games just aren't good enough, and by good I mean either their quality or have/doing things that are interesting enough to enough people, despite the scores from metacritic muppets*. Take away GaaS games and I still don't see them doing much better. It would just be other, "better" single-player games eating their lunch.

*We're back to trusting game reviewers again? Insert J Jonah Jameson meme here -->
 

911 Jumper

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Edit: several other SMT entries, too. Just a rumour at this stage. Nothing has been officially confirmed.
 

deuxhero

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Messages
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Flowery Land
Honestly, SMTIV+4A port is bigger news than the gamepass: Maybe someone can mod the game mechanics to not be awful. I wonder if they'll do DS Soul Hackers and SMT1+2 (they have a translation and modern code base from the iPhone release) after this.
 

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