FFXIV woes dog Square Enix

Square Enix has reported disappointing numbers of its second quarter ending September 30th 2010, with operating income plummeting from 13.091bn last year to 5.712bn this time out.

Sales were down sharply, too, from 90.561bn in 2009 to just 68.056. The latter number was below expectations, though the former was actually ahead of predictions due to strong sales of back-catalogue titles.

Japan continues to be the company’s strongest territory, though the margins are narrowing. It sold 2.84m software units in Japan, 2.71 in Europe and 2.48 in North America.

Dragon Quest Monsters Joker 2 was the strongest seller with sales of 1.28m units in Japan. Surprisingly, Kane & Lynch 2: Dog Days was its second biggest title, with sales of 1.12m across the three territories.
This means, of course, the Io Interactive’s gritty shooter out-performed the mighty Final Fantasy XIV, which sold just 630k units despite a global release.

Europe has delivered the game’s biggest sales, with 230k units being snapped up. 201k sales have been registered in America and 190k in Japan.

We’re quickly working on reforms,” CEO Yoichi Wada said of the game. We’d like to put our full power into regaining trust. If we satisfy our users, they will return. On the other hand, once the users say, ‘forget this,’ there’s no turning back. We can only recover our trust so far.”