Weak game sales, Final Fantasy delays hit Square Enix

Final Fantasy publisher Square Enix has confirmed yesterday's warnings of a ¥12 billion ($148m/£90.6m) loss for its full financial year, with revenues also down 34.8 per cent.

Net sales stood at ¥125.27 billion ($1.56bn/€1.09bn), with operating income down a massive 74.1 per cent to ¥7.33 billion ($91.0m/€63.7m). Net losses stood at exactly ¥12.04 billion.

Although a number of issues led to the poor results, and the last minute revision of expectations, one of the primary issues has been the problematic launch of massively multiplayer online game Final Fantasy XIV.

Other titles have also failed to perform, with the company only specifying Japanese-only Dragon Quest Monsters: Joker 2 and IO Interactive's Kane & Lynch 2: Dog Days as million sellers during the period.

"Our group experienced significantly lower sales and profit during the fiscal year mainly due to weak performance of console game titles released during the year as well as the impact of a continued delay in billing for a key online title, which was newly launched during the year," said president Yoichi Wada - the latter comment in reference to Final Fantasy XIV.

"Further, under a rapidly changing operating environment and more prudent estimates of future cash flows, the company wrote down goodwill (approximately ¥8.8 billion/$109.3m/€76.5m). Project development cancellation and related losses (approximately ¥4.5 billion/$55.9m/€39.1m) as well as losses caused by natural disaster (approximately ¥0.6 billion/$7.5m/€5.2m) were also factors in the recording of total extraordinary losses of ¥16.0 billion ($198.7m/€139.0m)."

"In the fiscal year ending March 31, 2012, we are very focused on the group's key strategic initiatives of globalisation, becoming 'network centric', and strengthening our own IPs as we work to generate a substantial earnings recovery from the fiscal year ending March 31, 2013 and beyond."