Square Enix Sequels, Remakes Sell Well

Why does Square Enix keep revisiting old franchises and selling polished classics? People buy them. This sales chart is a slide from Square Enix’s second quarter financial briefing of fiscal year 2009, a quarter when Square Enix released more new properties than any other quarter since the merger. Four brand new and entirely unattached games to any existing Square Enix series were introduced in Japan: Song Summoner, Nanashi no Game, Sigma Harmonics and Infinite Undiscovery. Sales of Dragon Quest V: Hand of the Heavenly Bride for the DS dwarfed all of them tallied together. Sales data for Song Summoner, an iPod game, was not released.

Actually, Infinite Undiscovery sold fairly well worldwide. Tri-Ace’s Xbox 360 game was on par with Final Fantasy Tactics A2 in North America and it just came out in September. However, even critically acclaimed games like the World Ends With You, which came out in North America this April, have a hard time standing up to legacy games like Final Fantasy IV. Since remakes cost less to develop and sell like hotcakes slides like these are a convincing argument for an executive board to stay on the remake train instead of developing new properties. Of course, Square Enix is still trying to make new properties. The Last Remnant comes out in just a few weeks.

Images courtesy of Square Enix.