Forspoken is considered a failure by players and critics, and the studio has since been dissolved. Now Square Enix is commenting on the sales figures and they shouldn’t be good.
Square Enix’s new game Forspoken has not been well received by gamers and critics. Now the Square Enix boss says sales have been very weak. But that would also have been due to the “difficult” reviews. After all, one learned from the criticism.
The fantasy game Forspoken has been officially available since January 24, 2023 and has not had a good start. On Metacritic the rating is 64%, on Steam the rating is now 59% with more than 3,000 reviews. The Luminous Productions studio has now been dissolved.
The game had promised an fresh story and an interesting protagonist, but in the end it also failed because of the unsympathetic leading actress.
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Poor sales and bad reviews for Forspoken
In a press conference on February 3, 2023, Square Enix President Yosuke Matsuda spoke about Forspoken. Speaking to investors, he explained that the game’s sales have been pretty weak after “difficult” reviews. He himself speaks of “lackluster.” (via videogameschronicle.com).
He also blames the critics for the poor performance of the game, which probably simply nobody wanted to buy for 80 euros. After all, one has also drawn one’s lessons from the criticism. This is how he explains:
However, the game has also received positive feedback on its action features, including its parkour and combat abilities, and as such has delivered results that will lead to an improvement in our development capabilities for other games in the future.
How are the players reacting? On reddit, many players shake their heads about it. Because many criticisms were justified and that was not only due to the weak story. The performance was also a catastrophe, someone explains:
You also needed a high-end RTX card [von Nvidia] and even that had trouble running Forspoken. The game just wasn’t ready to launch.
Many believe that another release postponement would have done the game good, at least to raise the game to a reasonable technical level.
How is Square Enix doing anyway? The big publisher Square Enix hasn’t been doing well for years because many game releases don’t run and there are no great successes. In the past, several games had been messed up. This includes the expensive Babylon’s Fall, which had to die after less than a year. This should be Square Enix’s new service game, and it should bring in regular cash.
On the other hand, Square Enix has at least one strong long-running favorite that can currently keep the publisher afloat. And this is an MMORPG that turned around a few years ago and has been able to attract thousands of players every day since then:
After a year of flops, a 10-year-old MMORPG is Square Enix’s salvation