Square Enix appears to have lost sight of things when they realized that their little niche title started to sell very well world wide. The latest JRPG game from Square Enix known as Bravely Default really made the development team stand back and get the big picture once again. Find out why this little niche title released for an expected small community of gamers resulted in a complete overhaul in their future development process.
Yosuke Matsuda, the president of Square Enix recently talked to Nikkei Trendy for an interview (translated by Siliconera). During the interview, Yosuke mentioned that the latest title released as a JRPG, Bravely Default, took them for surprise. Development for the title was expected to be released and picked up for a rather small niche community of fans. Unexpectedly, the game sold very well world wide. This made the development team realize that from now on, games in their development process should be made for core fans first and foremost rather than trying to appeal to wide range of audience.
Yosuke goes on to say that when Square Enix tried to make a title that would be more appealing to a wide range of audience rather than the fans of the series, the game always ends up selling as an incomplete title unfit for an audience.
If you focus too much on the global aspect, you might lose sight of who you’re actually making the game for…
Noticing the errors, Yoskue has now decided that future development titles in the series would be focused on pleasing fans of the series rather than trying to gain new players.
AAA titles we’re currently developing for series, we basically want to go back to their roots and focus on the core audience…