According to the Japanese publisher, which is about to change CEO, sales of its “mid-range” games have fallen short of expectations.

Luminous Productions developed Forspoken. The game’s failure was already indicated by the fact that Square Enix folded the studio into the company shortly after its release. Then, Forspoken was one of the topics in the February 3 results summary report. According to Square Enix’s current president Yosuke Matsuda (who has already submitted his resignation, and we reported on his appointed successor earlier), the reviews the open world RPG received from the press were challenging. Still, the positives on some elements encouraged the publisher to strengthen its development capabilities.

However, Forspoken was disappointing on the essential factor, sales, which is not a big surprise, as the performance of the version that hit stores after its announcement was also frustrating. Matsuda added that their smaller and mid-size games also underperformed. They did not name them, although we would have liked to know which titles the Japanese publisher had in mind (it is possible to set too high expectations for a game, but if the product itself is good, it will get attention).

Square Enix is committed to improving Forspoken’s performance and releasing the promised DLC for the game. That’s why a patch was released the other day, offering bug fixes and more stable performance on PlayStation 5 and PC. Of course, Square Enix will be more directly involved in this now that Luminous Productions has been discontinued, and it’s safe to say that their technology, the Luminous Engine, won’t be around for much longer either, as we see more and more of Unreal Engine 5.

And after all this, Square Enix will continue to have two feet in the blockchain and NFTs and the games based on them, which is hard to find words for. Maybe it’s just that the Japanese publisher is a bit out of touch.

Source: WCCFTech