Lackluster Forspoken Performance Could Affect Other Games

The video game industry can be fickle for developers and publishers alike. It can take just one bad game to set a company on a downward spiral, and it appears to have happened again to Square Enix. I say this because the Lackluster Forspoken performance could affect other games the company is trying to produce and release.

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Summary

• Square Enix hoped forsaken would be a new mainstay fantasy series, but instead, it received extreme criticism upon release.
• The Lackluster performance of Forspoken could affect other games that Square Enix is trying to produce and release.
• This could have long-term impacts on the game studio and impact where other developers may go with their games as well.

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Square Enix has more than cemented its reputation as a producer of fantasy games. Their most prominent title is called Final Fantasy. So when the company had initially started advertising and teasing Forspoken as a new action fantasy game, people were more than a little excited.

The game went through rough development but ultimately came out with a decent-looking title. Then it got sent out to reviewers who got to play the story, and that is where things went wrong. Now, this was reported and found by DomsPlaying on Twitter.

Square Enix:

Sales of Forspoken have been "lackluster" due to "challenging" reviews.

Even with new titles hitting this quarter, there is "considerable downside risk" to FY2023.

Claims that its pipeline for FY2024 is "extremely strong" including unannounced titles.

We'll see. pic.twitter.com/8QGL84DSXO

— Dom (@DomsPlaying) March 10, 2023

From the first time it was reviewed, people noticed that the story was lackluster and the dialogue was off-putting, for lack of a better word. The protagonist came off as whiny, and everyone else in the game world was just a little too weird.

These would be issues independently, but some games have gotten around this with fun gameplay and a different focus. The problem is that Forspoken is a story-driven game, meaning that these are primary elements that you will be interacting with almost the entire game.

There is no one good way to make a game. That is why we have such a great variety out there. One of the most important aspects to get right is the story and characters.

You can even have a cowardly character or a character that doesn’t want to be there, but they still have to be likable to the audience. This might be why Square is reevaluating all of its games because if they have been consistent on anything, it has always been character and story.

So now we see the devs recoil from this massive misstep and are trying to keep it from spilling over into their other projects. The fact that Forspoken’s reviews and sales have associated this is another signal of how audience feedback is deciding the course of games. If your game gets caught in a whirlwind of bad reviews, that is just going to be a pain to try and sell enough.

Only time will tell if Square can recover quickly enough to save its other projects. We will keep an eye on it in the future to see if any more important news comes up.

That is all we have on how the lackluster Forspoken performance could affect other games.

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