This is a bias you have afainst se…not only is dq huge ip but so is ff14. Ff14 has surpassed wow us the number 1 mmo, eso cant even reach its popularity. Phil and satya would want all of se.
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I don’t have a bias against SE and might have not articulated my point well. I think the risk of acquiring them is fanbase might not make jump to xbox since Japan side of square hasn’t sold that well on Xbox platform. However, the gamble could be worth it if able to get gamers in the ecosystem. Also if acquired can only acquire just the gaming side and not their non gaming side because it seems many japanese publishers have assets outside of gaming.
I do agree that they have potential with FF14, DQ, FF, and studio that made Octopath, etc. I just wonder if price to acquire Square is higher for microsoft due to potential loss in revenue by not having Japanese titles on PlayStation and Nintendo.
That’s a joke.
Isn’t Malik like an anti-Xbox troll on Twitter or something?
As far as I know he likes Xbox
You have to ask yourself whether SE is a good target to grow Game Pass. Assume the cost is $6B. Is SE a good way to spend that money?
- Forspoken is locked up to Playstation for 1-2 years
- FFXVI is locked up to Playstation for two years
- The FF7 Remake games, as far as we know, are committed to be Playstation timed exclusives
- The Dragon Quest games are popular in Japan, but haven’t seen nearly the popularity in the west. (And don’t tell me about DQ helping Game Pass grow in Japan. You don’t need to spend $120/year to just play one game. And Xbox doesn’t need to spend $8B for a “good start” in Japan, a market which is trending downward as a major living room console gaming market.)
- FFXIV is a very popular MMO, at at $13/month subscription fee adding it to Game Pass probably instantly converts all paying subscribers on platforms with Game Pass. So that’s probably a great add, but is it worth $6B?
- Avengers is a huge financial disaster, and Guardians of the Galaxy doesn’t look hot either. And that means that Crystal Dynamics and Eidos Montreal are both very far away from being in a position to produce fresh new content for Game Pass.
So like, what are you really getting with that acquisition? If you really really want to bring FFXIV to Game Pass, wouldn’t it make more sense to throw a bunch of money at SE to make that happen instead of buying the whole damn company?
Look, if SE didn’t already have Forspoken and all of the FF games in exclusivity deals with Sony, and Crystal Dynamics and Eidos Montreal had some exciting new games in the over and scheduled to release in next 18 months, I would say SE would be a really good target.
But the reality, as things stand, is that they don’t look like they’re going to be of a lot of use in terms of growing Game Pass for a very, very long time. And I think MS has other options for investing The War Chest in a way that can grow Game Pass (and the revenues it generates) in the more near-term future. And that’s how MS needs to be thinking.
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Max Payne IP by The Coalition one can only dream.
A lot of your points only make sense based on right now. An acquisition of that scale is just as much about 5-10 years out, 20 years out as it is about 1 year out. Long-term, being able to say to Japanese players you want the dragon quest? Do you have a phone? okay for 10 to 15 dollars a month you can get every dragon quest game, every final fantasy, every one of these umpteen Japanese mobile games we never see in America for this one low price. That’s an attractive for that reason.
Maybe in all the anime/manga square enix produces they start using Microsoft products instead would be another bit of free advertising.
Whether it’s a good or bad investment is only determined by if they would make back more than 6 billion dollars by owning them. If the answer is yes, then it’s a good investment. Whether it be the best investment per dollar or the investment you want is another story. There certainly are reasons though.
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Monster Hunter and Resident Evil are the big two. DMC and SF are not on the same tier as those two, nor on the same level as SE’s biggest games. Capcom produces fewer games than SE but they are more consistently successful in recent history. If your metric was buying a company for profitability, Capcom is a better option, but I think that if you’re trying to drive Gamepass, S-E is a slight winner, because you still get a few blockbuster franchises but it’s supplemented by a much steadier cadence of low end AAA games or AA scale stuff.
Either would be very impactful, of course, and more impactful than a cheaper company like Sega (which itself would still be impactful! Just not as much). The Capcom and SE Market caps are similar to each other.
(I doubt any of these companies are for sale at a price Microsoft is willing to pay, but any one of them would be worthwhile for Microsoft to pursue if they were).
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The diversity of titles is what puts Capcom over Square-Enix for someone like me.
The other thing is that the back catalog is larger on top of being more diverse. There are dozens of arcade titles spanning all sorts of genres, and a ton of popular series spanning multiple genres from each and every generation.
GamePass would be injected with over a hundred titles from platformers to beat em ups to fighters to shooters to third person action games, etc.
Get that library, get those IPs. When it comes to Square their big IPs could be count on one hand. Maybe both hands. But when it comes to Capcom you need a spreadsheet.
It’s mind-boggling to think that for Capcom, Street Fighter 5 had to be funded by Sony to become a reality. That they had to offload risk in that manner for one of the biggest brands out there. Maybe things have changed since Monster Hunter, but I’d like to see a Capcom where they can explore revisiting Dino Crisis, Darkstalkers, or Lost Planet without being worried about how they’re going to fund development.
I understand the appeal of having Final Fantasy as a Gamepass exclusive. It would be huge for the service. But in these cases I think it makes more sense to pay Square to have the game as a Day One Gamepass game on an individual basis.
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The majority of games from either company’s back catalogue aren’t on any xbox platform to begin with, so you’d need a major porting operation to get them done.
However, there still is a substantial diversity in the SE catalogue.
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You get the most popular traditional jRPG series (FF, DQ, plus many smaller sub series like Star Ocean, Chrono, TWEWY and Xenogears)
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You get the several of the earliest and most influential immersive sims / stealth games (Deus Ex, Thief). The legacy Hitman games would be involved but it’s unclear as to the future status of that series.
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You get an iconic action/adventure/platformer in the Tomb Raider series. There’s also the long dead platformer Gex, which I’m sure we’re all dying for the return of.
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You get an open world destruction playground in the Just Cause series
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You get what is probably the most popular remaining adventure game series, Life is Strange
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You get multiple action RPGs based on Marvel, the Avengers and GOTG. You also get a highly popular Disney based aRPG in Kingdom Hearts. The recent successful launch of Outriders is also notable.
There aren’t any recent fighting games, but if you would get retro releases of Bushido Blade, Fighting Force and Psychic Force, lmao. There’s zero shortage of incredibly popular franchises, and it’s not all just jRPGs.
“Microsoft already has RPGs” < True, but RPG is more of a meta-genre, and there’s value in really owning several of those spaces. Microsoft more or less owns the wRPG, and adding to that by dominating the jRPG, further cementing the wRPG, and then also getting the other games from SE on top is not a bad move.
I also don’t think Capcom would be a bad move, to clarify. I am of the opinion SE would do more, but Capcom would, in its own right, be a huge deal. Both companies have strong fanbases on PS and Nintendo consoles who would be likely to consider investing in the xbox ecosystem on some level to keep playing these games, but I feel that is stronger on SE.
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It would be more than 6 billion for either SE or Capcom, probably more like 8 because they’re unlikely to accept an offer based on recent declines, without somewhat of a premium.
But I do also want to point out that a similar analysis could have been done on Bethesda to argue against it - Deathloop and Ghostwire are locked up with Sony, Fallout 76 was a disaster from their main studio, Wolfenstein 2/YB, Dishonored 2, Prey, and Evil Within 2 were all commercial under-performers or outright flops. “Do you really want to pay 7.5 billion for this company??” It doesn’t seem attractive when you put it like that, but Microsoft is digging in for a long term strategy, not only looking at companies that will pay off in 1-2 years.
Regarding SE’s many exclusive deals, another thing to ask yourself is this - if this company is traditionally giving exclusives to Microsoft’s competitors in Sony and Nintendo, would reversing that be significant? I think turning a whole stack of future Sony and Nintendo exclusives into Xbox exclusives is very impactful.
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SE would be worth it for Deus Ex and Tomb Raider alone. The weirdo games is just a bonus.
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Agree…Plus Capcom has a way stronger track record with their past releases. Square Enix is also a great pick because of Final Fantasy IP imho. But why not both? Everything is possible
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I definitely agree with the bottom portion of the reply, I don’t think they’re buying any of the three in whole.
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D*mn, I forgot Tobal. This is the IP Microsoft needs to compete!
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SE is wasting the best cyberpunk IP in existence because of their ineptitude, what a shame.
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4chan post is wishful thinking, I could see Japan letting Microsoft to acquire a big one because you’re getting a slice of the cake, but two of them? And why Square and not Sega?
Regarding the docs, I think AT&T is waggling around at how much they can profit from the sales, it’s clear that they have backtracked before because they feel the studios and the IPs associated with them could give more money at the medium-long run, but they could have changed the idea quickly because stuff regarding debts weren’t getting any better, hence the merger with Discovery. Maybe they could negotiate a deal where Microsoft allows them to explore the games IPs in non gaming software media for decades, while Microsoft gets DC license at the same duration for exchange.
With Bethesda I would say that while Deathloop and Ghostwire Tokyo were both already wrapped by by Sony, Starfield and Redfall were deep into production and right behind them.
Also, let’s not forget that Final Fantasy XVI is known to be a Sony exclusive for two years, and Forspoken could very well be the same. And when is Final Fantasy even going to come out? 2022? That means MS would be buying the company and wouldn’t be able to put the crown jewel of the acquisition on their Service until 2024! And with Forspoken that date might be 2025! And by the time each of them is contractually allowed to appear on Xbox platforms, they’ll be old and dusty titles selling for $20 on Playstation and Steam.
So like, if Xbox is paying $8B today for SE, what exactly are they getting? Old Final Fantasy games? (They’re all already on the service.) That terrible looking Platinum game, Babylon’s Fall? The awful-looking Stranger of Paradise: Final Fantasy Origin?
And when you talk about flipping things on their head by keeping famous Playstation franchises like Final Fantasy off of Playstation, when is that going to happen? 2027? That’s six years from now!
Really, I just don’t see the value at all.
I get that you’re saying they need to think about the future and not just the present, but (1) I think the benefits of an SE deal would be TOO far in the future, and (2) I think there are other ways to spend that money that would benefit them today, as well as in the future.
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