Publisher Square Enix has announced that they will “aggressively pursue multiplatform strategy” following sales figures that put their total profits down nearly 16% despite a slight increase in total sales by 2.6%. In an attempt to redirect the company into stronger years, Square Enix has announced their “Square Enix Reboots, and Awakens” plan. A three-year strategy that places quality over quantity and “aggressively” moves to release titles across a multitude of platforms.
The losses put the company in the red roughly $52 million for this financial year. Obtaining sales that can mitigate these losses and, hopefully, outpace them, is obviously the way to fix the issue. Whether or not abandoning exclusive titles altogether is the way to do that remains to be seen. All the same, the fact that Sony, at a time when they were just recently hounded by the PC community for trying to make Helldivers 2 access tied to Sony accounts, is presumably not going to get any more Square Enix exclusivity deals, spells an interesting bind the industry has been put in.
Where the past held room for console wars and exclusive access to certain titles, gamers these days don’t really care for the company that holds fun just out of arms reach for a subsection of the community, and instead just want to be able to play games that are easily accessible. If Square Enix can land a number of good titles across PC, Xbox, Playstation, and Nintendo (which they confirmed they plan on doing), they can shape themselves into a widely accessed publisher (that makes a profit).
