Bashayer
318 posts

Bashayer
@Bmsa1993
A sweet woman with a coffee addiction. Dottore's glazer.



Two years ago I said that one of Square Enix's biggest mistakes was to let MiHoYo make Genshin Impact instead of Square Enix. In my thread from last week, I pointed out that Square Enix has failed to bring its IP to a new generation, and that this will eat away at its future. The question I ask is what is it going to take to get my kid to care about the brand? If we solve that problem we can open up the rest of the opportunity. This is how I landed on Disney, Roblox and other partnerships. You have to be where the young people are. Imagine a Kpop Demon Hunters x Final Fantasy Collab, and how that would draw headlines and interest into the brand. MTG's success shows how Final Fantasy can play in other worlds; Kingdom Hearts shows how the lore can be malleable to other IP. The company can do it, with the right leadership and creatives. Square Enix has a deep bench of experience with live service, having run FF14 now for 16 years, and FF11 for decades. It would have been interesting to leverage FF14 as the technical basis to build a new, F2P "Elseworlds" server that brought in regular new experiences and collabs. I imagine blending the business model and platforms that Genshin Impact and Honkai are on with the RPG gameplay of FF14 and regular collabs with Elseworld lore. I really enjoyed the Demon Rush mode in Fortnite's Kpop Demon Hunters partnership last fall, it showed how simple tweaks to gameplay, art and sound could make the game feel utterly fresh and different. And it was impressive how quickly Epic put it together. Yoshida would have been great at pulling this off as well. It would take the CEO to go and pull off the negotiations with the IP holders, but Wada-san once said the CEO is supposed to be the ultimate BD person of the company. I think Square Enix is so used to being slow that it can't imagine what life would be like if it acted fast. There's a lot of internal red tape; the CEO's job is to make a decision and cut that red tape so that innovation flourishes. I know that Ichimura-san walked back his comments last year (gamesindustry.biz/dragon-quest-p… if you didn't read them) but look at Square Enix's focus on remakes from last week's strategy slide and tell me he was wrong. Also this YouTube overview of the Square Enix financial results is astounding: youtube.com/watch?v=gD8dpw…























