http://www.hd.square-enix.com/eng/news/pdf/20130326_02en.pdf

Wow I'm shocked. Even if I think a lot of the business investments were extremely poor choices in recent history, I still sort of liked the Wada I saw in 14's producer letters. A CEO who was willing to play the games he was publishing and goof around on the level of the rest of his employees.

I really wonder what this means for FF14 if anything, as it's reform seemed to be a personal project of Wada's.

I hope the new President has the ability to steer the company back in the right direction.

(ps, does this mean no more Lightning games? :D Oh please oh please oh please)

Wow, that's interesting news. I hope the new guy revives Chrono Trigger. I'd love a new game in that series.

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I wonder how the failure of FFXIV factored into this.

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COBRA KAI DOJO NEVER DIES
RIP Shiloh

I'd say either:

1) It didn't, not by itself anyhow. If this was going to be the case, they'd have done it back when it bombed. Not wait until a few years later.

or 2) The amount of resources that have been pooled into ARR have finally hit a level where they're not confident it's worth it.

However, number 2 seems unlikely. ARR is scheduled for around June/July right now and it doesn't seem drastically behind schedule or anything (they'd probably get away with releasing the beta as it is if it had all the regions and features put back in ready). With the game so close to release and the resources put in so far, they'd be silly to not wait for it to release first.

If ARR comes out after pooling the entirety of SE's development resources for two years and still bombs, then yeah he'd have been in big trouble. But with only possibly 4-5 months left until it releases, I doubt this is the reason he's resigning.

Incidentally, from what I've seen on other random forums, people are actually interested in watching out for ARR, despite the original FFXIV mega-bomb. I'm quite surprised they've somehow managed to shake the "oh FF14 was that terrible game wasn't it, why would I play that?" moniker. People seem fully aware they scraped the entire game and got a new team to re-make it from scratch, and this is before there's really been any kind of marketing push.

I think the "end of an era" trailer helped a ton. Even if it was really just a fancy ending video for 1.0 I'm pretty sure that thing was money well spent marketing wise. It was impressive as hell and really gave everybody a glimpse of the same traditional "swords & dragons" people have wanted out of FF for a while.

There aren't really any other big-name MMOs on the horizon for a while either that I'm aware of. It's good timing really.

EDIT: On topic of Wada himself, it's more likely to do with the overall performance of SE in recent years, with no real bread-winners coming out of the company in quite a while. FFXIII sold well (causing them to make a million more of them, despite it's problems) but other than that there's really not been anything. Compared to, for example, the PS1 era where a new mainline title was every year or two tops.

I feel like FFXIV was probably a very large factor. Not just from the financial bomb side, but because of the games that we don't have because of 14's bomb.

Asking where the hell FF Versus and Kingdom Hearts 3 are has kind of been a constant dialogue for a good 5 years now. That probably didn't do him any favors.

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the listed reason is a "10 billion yen loss of revenue" for the last year. so that's why he stepped down, either on his own accord or by the board of directors we dont know.

why they lost 10 billion yen is the real question. i think this article answers the question pretty well, and yes FFXIV looks like a big part of it: http://www.digitaltrends.com/gaming/square-enix-reports-61-million-loss-as-sleeping-dogs-and-hitman-absolution-sales-sag/

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RIP Shiloh - I'll never forget ya

Don't worry, everyone. Kitty and I are going to go to Japan on vacation next year, so we'll get that revenue back up when we visit the Squeenix store in Tokyo.

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I've wanted to visit Japan my whole life. That will be fun when you go!

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Thats was an interesting article whisp, thanks for posting it

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COBRA KAI DOJO NEVER DIES
RIP Shiloh