Incase anyone is intreasted in how  well Square Enix is doing. I personaly do not think that this report will reflect the market as a whole for MMO giaming. But I did find it intresting enough to repost.

Now for me it would seem that the operating income and the ordinary income along with net income are all in the negative zone. Makes me wonder how other MMORPG game DEVs are doing?

Link

The article states that the majority of their losses comes from poor console game sales, while gains were in smartphone games and PC games.  Going forward they are going to focus on MMO profits.

Of course, anyone who played FFXIV knows SE is doing badly and trying to recover ;)

How much of that is the effect of the console cycle?  We're at the end of one generation of consoles and everyone's busy investing in games for the next generation of consoles that has been a little sluggish coming out.

If I owned a company I think I would play the game I was going to sell to the public before hand.  Just to be sure it worked.  And not on a super computer.  I'd go to my poor relatives house and try it on theirs.

Same if I owned a company that sold potato peelers as one of our products.  Not one potato peeler would have been produced until I first peeled a potato with it.

Company owners must have the IQ of politicians.

Originally posted by Jemcrystal

If I owned a company I think I would play the game I was going to sell to the public before hand.  Just to be sure it worked.  And not on a super computer.  I'd go to my poor relatives house and try it on theirs.

 

Same if I owned a company that sold potato peelers as one of our products.  Not one potato peeler would have been produced until I first peeled a potato with it.

 

Company owners must have the IQ of politicians.

Oh, I'm sure that they do play the game on a lot of different computers--some of which are decidedly low end--before they launch it.

The problem is, what if you find out that a lot of people won't be able to play your game?  You can't just wave a magic wand and double everyone's frame rate.  You can cancel the game so that no one can play it, or you can launch a game knowing full well that it won't run on a lot of computers.

Any simple performance optimizations that were available should have already been implemented long ago.  If you're ready to start beta testing and a lot of computers can't run your game, your available options to reduce the system requirements tend to be brutally expensive things like redoing most of the game artwork.

They missed net sales forecast, but beat all three income forecasts.  My guess would be that they had an effective downsizing that cut costs.