Square Enix Managed To Sell Fewer Games But Make More In Profits Last Quarter

Time for the brief consolidated financial report from Square Enix to give us a little insight into how the company is recovering after announcing the cancellation of projects and losses in the millions due to those cancellations. The financials are for the quarter ending June 30th (so April-June 2024) which means they would also include the company's layoffs back in May.

The report is a bit of a mixed bag. Sales themselves are down compared to the same quarter last year. In fact, sales came in at over $477 million, but that's down over 18%. That may be a bit of an unfair comparison, though, given that Final Fantasy 16 came out just before this quarter ended last year. Looking specifically at the Digital Entertainment division's sales, those were down by just shy of 30% ($299 million).

Profits are up though, up over 68%, in fact. 

How do you sell less but make more? Well, as mentioned, Final Fantasy 16 was a big driver of both sales and expenses last year, specifically in its first few weeks after release. Nothing that came out in the second quarter of this year would have even come close sales-wise. However, that also means that there were was a lot less spent by the company on expenses like advertising (and staffing).

For you FFXIV fans, the MMO division sales and profits were up slightly, but we should really see them up in the next report given the release of Dawntrail last month.

The yearly outlook hasn't changed on the back of this report, but we're still going to have to watch as the company tries to recover from a series of bad financial quarters.