this post was submitted on 13 May 2024
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I think that, right there, is the problem SqEnix is facing. It's games were fantastic a couple decades ago. While I wasn't a fan, it could be argued that they peeked with FF7 and it's why they keep re-making it. But, as the capabilities of systems and games themselves moved on, SqEnix kept pumping out the same, formulaic JRPGs. It's all teens and girls in too short skirts out to save the world with MASSIVE MELODRAMA!!!!!!!! (cue closeups of all characters looking shocked and screaming like idiots). And we all kinda out-grew that. While there is still a lot of terrible writing in games, I think there's a bit less tolerance for that particular brand of schlock. We have such an amazing array of options available to us today, that we can be choosier with what we put up with. If SqEnix intended to compete, they may need to come up with something a bit new-er than "Final Fantasy 7, Rebirth, Again, Look at how well rendered Tifa's tits are this time".
Square has had a lot of popular games past FF7. Just in the Final Fantasy series, they've had good success with ff9, ff10, ff12, ff14, and ff7 remakes. All of the others in the series are usually pretty well liked too. That's just their final fantasy main line series however.
They also have Dragon Quest, Tomb Raider, Marvel's (both good and bad), and Kingdom Hearts. They also published Nier: Automata; but I'm not sure how much that counts as their game.
All of those series have had successful and unsuccessful games, based on objective sales figures. It seems you may be thinking that SquareEnix == FF only, but that's not really true. And sure, the FF games have a lot in common, but so do the Halo games, the CoD games, etc. That's because they are all part of the same series and it is expected that they have similarities.
So, setting aside the whole question of whether they're making good games today, or whether their theming is a good idea, I think that you've got a point that with brands, you tend to sell a demographic on it, and maybe it's better to track the demographic that already likes your brand than to switch to another. I don't know if there's a term for that in branding.
Like, the original three Star Wars movies were aimed at a demographic that was...maybe teen and up? And by the time the later Star Wars movies came out, they were a lot older. When The Phantom Menace came out, it had a fair bit of material to appeal to kids. A lot of people who liked the original movies weren't happy with the movie, because it was shifting focus away from them as a target demographic. George Lucas said that he wanted to make something that his grandchildren would want to watch. Which...okay, that's fine, but there's also inevitably a tradeoff to make, in that content closely-tailored for one demographic can't be as closely-tailored to another.
I think that that's also some of what created friction around Fallout 76. The series built a large base of fans who enjoyed playing a single-player game. Shifting them to a multiplayer game just didn't necessarily make a lot of sense from a brand management strategy.