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Square-Enix financials: ¥5.7b loss amid 'increasingly difficult' console market

Square-Enix had a strong run of IP last year, but its latest financial report makes for uneasy reading. The Japanese firm has published a loss of ¥5.7 billion for the nine-month period ended December 31st 2012, and cites the increasingly difficult console market as a key factor.

It's an about-face for the company, which posted a ¥5 billion profit year-on-year for the previous period, begging questions about the console market's volatility in the run-up to next-gen formats.

Although profits were down, game sales were up from ¥95.7 billion to ¥102.7 billion, in a year that saw Hitman: Absolution, Final Fantasy XIII-2 and Sleeping Dogs go to market. It also published Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 in Japan, to no avail.

The company still has high hopes for its year-end financial report - presumably as Tomb Raider has yet to launch - with its net profit projection sitting at ¥3.5 billion, which is a 42.2% year-on-year decrease. Still, black is better than red.

In a statement issued this morning - via GI.biz - Square-Enix discussed its slumping financials:

"During the nine-month period ended December 31, 2012, the Company has not recovered the operating loss posted in the six-month period ended September 30, 2012. [This is] primarily due to the increasingly difficult condition of the world-wide console game market, under which the Group is struggling to achieve a fair expected return on its investment.

"On the other hand, content for other platforms such as PCs, smartphones and SNS such as 'Sengoku Ixa,' a browser game, and 'Final Fantasy Brigade,' a social networking game for Mobage, are generating an acceptable profit.

"In addition, newly released game titles, such as 'Kaku-San-Sei Million Arthur,' a social networking game released in April, 2012 serving more than 1 million registered users, have been expanding at a satisfactory pace. Registered users of Final Fantasy Artniks,' a social networking game released in November, 2012 for Gree, exceeded 1 million at the end of December, 2012."

We'll have more on this report as it comes.

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In this article

Final Fantasy XIII-2

Video Game

Hitman: Absolution

PS3, Xbox 360, PC

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Sleeping Dogs

PS3, Xbox 360, PC

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About the Author
Dave Cook avatar

Dave Cook

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Dave worked on VG247 for an extended period manging much of the site's news output. As well as his experience in games media, he writes for comics, and now specializes in books about gaming history.

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