Square Enix Admits Forspoken Sales Have Been "Lackluster"

thegamer.com:

We've known for a while that Forspoken wasn't the best Square Enix release of 2023, but now we have it straight from the publisher's mouth. According to Square's Q3 earnings report, Forspoken sales were "lackluster," which is no surprise after all of its middling reviews.

"Reviews of Forspoken, which we released on January 24, 2023, have been challenging," wrote Square Enix in its report. "However, the game has also received positive feedback on its action features, including its parkour and combat capabilities, so it has yielded results that will lead to improvement of our development capabilities of other games in the future. That said, its sales have been lackluster, and while the performance of new titles with February and March release dates will be the ultimate determinant, we see considerable downside risk to our FY2023/3 earnings."

Related: Forspoken Failed So Hard That Even Square Enix Doesn't Care Anymore

It seems Square Enix wasn't counting on Forspoken to bomb, which has dropped the company's net sales and operating income for its current financial year. Chief accounting officer Atsushi Matsuda told investors during his presentation that any growth for the year "will not be easy," but did say that the pipeline for next year's games is "extremely strong."

As for Forspoken, the game has received quite a few updates since its release in January. Today's release of update 1.10 adds a number of quality-of-life improvements such as changes to target lock-on that lets players decide whether they want to automatically target the next nearest enemy or not. The update also brings optimizations for high-end PC hardware and the PS5 that could provide players with performance increases as high as 30 percent.

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