Square Enix is not at war with Yoko Taro and would genuinely like to put out more games with his name on the box, but a painfully familiar problem keeps blocking the way – former executive Jacob Navok says the potential audience just is not big enough to safely cover what those projects would cost.

Square Enix is one of the biggest power blocs in the entire games industry, and that position makes the company extremely wary of pouring money into ideas that do not look clearly profitable from the start. That mindset is nothing new, and it weighs just as heavily on the Final Fantasy teams as it does on other major publishers. What we have now, though, is a much clearer explanation of why so many pitches from Yoko Taro, the creator of NieR, have been turned down at the executive level.

Not long ago, Taro took the stage at the G-CON 2025 event in South Korea and explained that he is not currently directing any new games because a large number of his projects have been cancelled. Coming from the mind behind Drakengard and NieR, that confession sent a shockwave through his fanbase. Thousands of players immediately started calling on Square Enix to give the green light to his concepts, a groundswell of support that underlines how many people would gladly buy whatever this Japanese creator works on next. At that point, Jacob Navok, who previously served as a business director at the conglomerate, joined the conversation to spell out why the proposals from the man behind the Voice of Cards series have not been moving forward, as reported by GamesRadar+.

In a short thread on X, Navok wrote that “we would love to make more Yoko Taro games, but the audience size is not large enough to cover the costs.” That line surprised a lot of players, especially when you remember that NieR: Automata has sold around 9 million copies and that 2B has generated serious revenue through merchandise. Navok followed up with another post, stressing that “I am not joking. Square Enix is in the business of making profitable video games. If they think the game could make money, they would probably publish it.”

As Navok points out, Taro is talking about projects that never even made it to the announcement phase. In other words, it is entirely possible that none of these cancelled pitches had anything to do with a new NieR entry, a series that would almost certainly hit Square Enix’s targets in terms of potential audience. Even so, Taro has clarified that he is still being paid for his work and that he would rather “not release anything than release something strange,” a stance that has calmed at least some worried fans.

Big-name projects getting canned is nothing unusual

Signing a deal with a major publisher does not automatically mean your next game will see the light of day. The industry is full of situations similar to Yoko Taro’s, and there are plenty of cases where already approved projects quietly died before release. Some of the most recent examples include Perfect Dark from The Initiative, a studio that has since been shut down, and an MMO in development at ZeniMax Online Studios, the team behind The Elder Scrolls Online. PlayStation itself invested 25 million dollars in a game from the creators of God of War before shelving it.

In every one of these cases, the underlying issue is the same: executives are afraid of spending huge sums on development and then failing to earn that money back after launch. That fear naturally breeds caution toward experimental, risky ideas. As we can see, this way of thinking is alive and well inside the offices of the people responsible for Final Fantasy too.

Source: 3djuegos