Lie me a river
So we all remember the day of absolute apocalypse where Square thought it totally within their rights to turn around and just kill off all of their Western Studios in a mad bid to 'purify' their company of any studio that was non-Japanese. A contingent that took the studio decades to amass, shed in a single transfer for a tragically undervalued price to an organisation that sounds like the mad anti-humanist cult trying to get everyone to look up at SCP 001 (When Day Breaks) so that we may all be 'embraced' for eternity. Embracer Group has talked big about their plans since then, in vague and non committal terms. Deus Ex is being worked on, it might be coming back! There's a new Tomb Raider where Lara has a female love interest (I swear to GOD if it isn't Sam I'm going to riot.) All these new studios will be perfectly balanced against the dozens that are already held under Embracer's banner; although looking at the amount of the studios under the Embracer banner I can't help but wonder if this isn't just going to be exactly the same as being independently owned in terms of support, only with the requirement of kick back a sizable chunk of income to publishing management.
I'm just saying; I don't think Deus Ex is coming back. Not least of all because the latest thing in the news is a desire from the active team that they want to: "Do what Cyberpunk 2077 couldn't!" Excuse me? CDPR couldn't do what they promised because it was bigger than their team could possibly create, and they were a bigger studio than Eidos has ever been. (Why can't Deus Ex just stick to what it's good at!) So we're looking at a long nuclear winter of hubristic failures probably heading our way, and whom do we have to thank for this holocaust? Square. The lunatics at Square. What could possibly have been going through their heads to cut so many loose like that? I can't imagine what calculations must have been firing through the think tank neurons in order to conclude that the future was isolationism for Enix, and I'm bugged that this is the direction they choose to go in. Can we get some clarification?
Oh we can? Great, thank you, Investor call; what is the word from Square proper on this situation, then? Well for one they let it be know that they are looking to sell their Stakes in the remaining studios that survived the sudden purge being put very much on the market to be pawned off. But when it came to explanation time of the big sale, Square has turned around and informed the world that their reasoning is that they believed their Western studios to be cannibalising the sales of their Japanese games; which feels like a dire simplification of a much varied issue, probably knowingly so because they didn't want to have to air the complexities of their issues, but lacking that in with the Square Enix management we have to take their word as gospel. Did Western games cannibalise Japanese games? Yes and no. Depending on how you look at it.
So the traditional definition of 'cannibalisation' within the industry refers to two games with the same target demographic being unceremoniously pitted against one another by the same careless publisher. Perhaps the most famous example of this being Titanfall 2 which was released hardly a week before the much bigger multiplayer shooter Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare. That meant that despite the low that Titanfall had received as a franchise up until that point, the player base was sucked dry by the bigger title which left a game described as one of the best shooters ever made to fester into nothingness. Of course, such situations can also occur with games not published by the same studio, but we don't classify those as 'cannibalisation'. Such as when both Horizon games came out next to huge industry changing games that overshadowed them, or Mad Max went up against 'Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain'. But this isn't the sort of cannibalisation that Square means.
It wouldn't make sense even if it was. Because Square's various studios actually covered quite a diverse collection of franchises that not only tended to slot around each other come release time, but didn't always share the same target demographic. Obviously there's always going to be adaptive audience that shift from game to game regardless of genre and are drawn to love for the franchise or just a desire for the new big release, but the core groups of who loves JRPGs and those who love Deus Ex as an RPG is not a flat circle. (There's a Venn there for sure, but it's not a perfect cross-over) In fact, it wasn't until Square decided to elaborate on their plans for the future that we really got a light shone on what exactly was meant by the 'cannibalisation' comment.
Square Enix, in their infinite wisdom, are looking to shift their remaining western fiduciary duties so that the remaining of their funds can be dedicated to the development of Japanese games who they claim were suffering from the upkeep to their western studios. Rising development costs are becoming such a problem, they say, that it has become necessary to "diversify the studio capital structure" by way of killing off companion studios in a blaze of ignominy. A very corporate and jargon-filled answer no doubt, but one that does slightly run up against critical analysis. Because afterall, if their problem was a lack of disposal development resources, why not drop a single big studio instead of all of them? And if this is a money issue, then why sell them off for a fraction of their estimated value? And if this is going to touch on 'rising development costs' then back off before I pop off.
"Rising development costs" is the bogey man of the AAA world, gaming's own ManBearPig; only this inconvenient truth is a very convenient lie. Not a lie that development costs are rising, they sure are; but a lie that the revenue these games are making aren't rising to meet those costs. Because hello; all of these triple A project now come packed with some sort of extra grift to funnel hundreds of millions from their consumers. If we're to believe Square that development costs is the big bad in this situation, offset by the expulsion of the west; then wouldn't it be fair to assume that Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth is going to release for $60 instead of $70? Afterall, they solved the development cost problem, so that painful price hike doesn't need to be passed onto the consumer anymore, right? That was their initial excuse, afterall? Heck, guess there's no need to push Live Services anymore too, right? And the NFT train they've being desperate to kick out the station; guess that's on it's way to be decommissioned; isn't it? Because the development cost leeches have been banished, the books are balanced, the valley of profits is saved! Right? But that isn't going to happen, is it? Because these games still make a stinking amount of profit, and the 'rising development costs' angle is a glaring red herring.
The actual reason is the exact same thing that was being said when the sale happened, the real reason that Square have been trying to smother over with their 'cannibalisation' smoke screen. They at Square have failed time and time again to push the right projects that resonate with the target audience and so are just retreating to the Japanese audience they're better in-tune with. Years of pushing Live Services fell flat for them and because Square Management are too dense to learn from their mistakes they preferred to just throw away their toes and start from scratch; and now they're too embarrassed to admit their rank incompetence and are hiding behind flimsy paper-thin excuses. We see you, Square; everyone does. No amount of false mirrors and shifted blame is going to cover up what you really at the tailend of all these deceptions; quitters
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