Turning down our offer of 3 Phoenix Downs and 10,000 gil, Darrell Gallagher, Head of Product Development and Studios in America and Europe (formerly Studio Head at Crystal Dynamics), took to Gamasutra for a blog post, writing about all things Square Enix.
Mentioning sales figured for a couple of games, Darrell revealed that Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light has sold over 1 million copies on all systems, with the Tomb Raider reboot released this year at over 4 million. While for games like Sleeping Dogs and Just Cause 2, they still see 500,000 unique users playing the game each month.
Thanks to the continued support for Sleeping Dogs, it has turned profitable for Square Enix, something Gallagher calls “a critical milestone for a new intellectual property.” He then continued:
It also shows that we are creating content which is keeping millions of people entertained enough to want to spend their time in our world.
Overall as a games business – studios and publishing – we have walked away too early from some of the worlds that we have invested so much time and energy in. If we were to ask people that loved our games whether they would enjoy new content or deeper experiences in these digital playgrounds the answer would overwhelmingly be “yes”.
And for me, this is where the future starts. We see the opportunity for some of our games continuing beyond a traditional beginning, middle, and end. We can have them become extendable and more persistent – with an opportunity to build and grow across games. To design in a way to keep our games alive for years instead of weeks. I’m not talking about an MMORPG – although the concept is similar – I’m talking about creating persistent online experiences built on the foundations of the games we are well known for.
Now, this doesn’t apply to every game, there is no one solution that works in every case, but as a wider goal it’s certainly something which some of our franchises are incredibly well suited to and something I want to explore further.
Looking ahead to the next generation of consoles, he talked about how they “see a great opportunity to build and extend an ecosystem to work across platforms and provide unique complementary experiences to different types of gamers that fit the hardware.” What that ecosystem will be remains to be seen as they are still working “on how the next generation of titles could be shaped.”
With games like Final Fantasy XV, Kingdom Hearts III, a new Tomb Raider sequel, and more already confirmed for PS4 and Xbox One, things are looking pretty good for Square Enix next-gen. Now bring us Sleeping Dogs 2 and Just Cause 3!
What would you like to see Square Enix do in the next generation? Let us know in the comments below.
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