Square Enix Do Have Loyalty: To Their Wallets

Posted on 2008/10/12 by Ronin90

Much has been said recently about Square Enix turning their back on Sony, as in the last 6 months, Square Enix have seemed to shift camps and now appear to be courting Microsoft much more than anyone else. This is primarily down to the shock announcement revolving around Final Fantasy XIII, when at E3 earlier this year, Square Enix announced that it was no longer a Playstation 3 exclusive in North America and Europe.

Further rumours have been abound recently due to the Tokyo Game Show 2008, where Microsoft had its booth right next to where Square Enix set up. Comments from Yoichi Wada during his keynote speech also helped to ignite the fire, but the question is, where do Square Enix's loyalties actually lie? Is this all being blown completely out of proportion?

The short answer is yes. Prior to when titles started being released en masse in the current generation of consoles (DS, PSP, XBox 360), Square Enix had released 33 original titles (remakes not included). A massive 82% of those titles were on the Playstation 2, with them only releasing 1 title on another home console, Crystal Chronicles on the Nintendo GameCube. The only other console which saw any kind of releases was the GameBoy Advance, which had 5 titles.

The simple reason for this, is that the Playstation 2 dominated absolutely everything. Not even the GameBoy Advance (which sold 81m units) could touch the Playstation 2, and the GameCube/Xbox certainly couldn't hope to dent its armour. From a financial perspective, there would be no real incentive to produce games for anything other than the Playstation 2.

However, with the advent of the new generation things changed slightly. Square Enix's loyalty didn't change though, as their loyalty has always been to the most profitable resource. So far this generation, the most profitable resource isn't the Xbox 360 and it isn't the Wii, it's the Nintendo DS. Conversely, since the Playstation 2 went out of mass production, Square Enix have released 40 titles and due to the nature of a much more competitive landscape, Square Enix's strategy has changed slightly.

Out of the 40 original titles developed (or in development) for the current generation consoles, 45% of them have been for the DS, whereas only 10% have been for the Playstation 3. The PSP has had big hitter titles such as Crisis Core and Dissidia, while titles like Rapture are still in the balance.

The interesting pattern here though, is that the percentage of titles developed for a console is almost identical to that of the percentage of consoles sold this generation. The only deviation from this being that the Xbox 360 has one more title in development than the Wii.

So, in conclusion, Square Enix have only ever had loyalty to the company which can prove they will give them the most return on their investement. For this generation, that company is currently Nintendo due to the massive success of the Nintendo DS and you can all but guarantee that if the Wii had the same number of sales that the DS did right now, then we would have a similar situation to the last generation with the Playstation 2. Will Square Enix decide to buck the trend if the Playstation 3 picks up some speed? More than likely, but it's up to Sony to prove that the Playstation 3 is worth Square Enix's investment.