The launch of Forspoken was anything but smooth for Square Enix. But even so, gamers had quite a lot of conflicting opinions about the game, since it wasn’t a complete bust, nor was it a solid hit. But all things considered, Forspoken was pretty half-baked at launch. The base concepts for the gameplay and even the world of Athea weren’t set to fail. But when the whole game came together, a lot of the seams started to show, and players could instantly see that it wasn’t exactly the experience the game promised.
The reception of Forspoken was rightfully mostly negative, or average at best. This resulted in the developers of the game, Luminous Productions, going the way of the dodo, and the employees getting moved about within Square Enix. And this financial presentation from the company makes it quite obvious why this happened:
Reviews of Forspoken […] have been challenging. However, the game has also received positive feedback on its action features, including its parkour and combat capabilities, so it has yielded results that will lead to improvement of our development capabilities of other games in the future.
While it wasn’t an absolute failure, if fans decide to hold their breath for a Forspoken 2, they’ll be holding it for a while. This has resulted in the “sales being lackluster” and coupled with the underperformance of other Square Enix titles, the company will “see considerable downside risk to our FY2023/4 earnings.” Atsushi Matsuda, the chief accountant at the company believes that meeting this year’s financial goals “will not be easy” at this point.
Square Enix Admits The Launch of Forspoken Was “Challenging”
Matsuda also said that most of the new small and mid-sized titles that Square Enix launched this year didn’t perform as well as the publisher had hoped. Like Babylon’s Fall becoming the biggest bust on the list, as it was one of the biggest bombs in the history of gaming. Other games like Strangers of Paradise Final Fantasy Origin, Tactics Ogre: Reborn, Crisis Core: Final Fantasy 7 Reunion, and Octopath Traveler 2 didn’t do that well either, which is a real bummer since most of these games are actually amazing.
Square Enix is betting everything on Final Fantasy 16 hitting it big, and considering how good it looks and how well the reception was to the game, it might do just that.
