The head of Square Enix’s American branch has left his post, just two months after the resignation of CEO Yoichi Wada. Fischer, who had been head of the game publisher’s American division for the past three years, is now a vice president at Amazon.
Square Enix America boss Mike Fischer left the company this month on good terms, Polygon reports.
Square Enix has been facing financial trouble for quite some time now; earlier this year, the company announced that it had missed its (unrealistic) expectations on most of its big games, like Tomb Raider and Sleeping Dogs.
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8 responses to “Square Enix America CEO Steps Down”
How unrealistic were their expectations? Tomb Raider and Sleeping Dogs are awesome games, Dont see how either of these game could have been like System Shock 2 or Planescape Torment in that they had great reviews but poor sales.
Thing is they both had great sales, either they were over-budgeted or (more likely) square needs the money to cover their bloated Japanese operation
“Hey Squenix America? This is Squenix Japan. Your boss. We’re pretty shit at our jobs, fall on your sword for us.”
“OK!”
Agreed. Both Games are excellent, perhaps the higher ups just wanted to seep more money from the company.
They needed the Western operations to perform well enough to cover the gaping creative and financial black hole that Final Fantasy has become.
i played 3 of their published games – Sleeping Dogs, Hitman Absolution and Tomb Raider, they’re all great fun to play!! Looking forward to those sequels.
give the final fantasy fans what they actually want, i.e. not another MMO and not another extension of Lightning’s story and instead come clean about a FF7 remake or bring the series back to its roots. The arrogance of ‘this is what our fans want to see, emo teenagers saving the world while finding their own place in life’ and basically turning each game into an overblown interactive movie is what’s led Square Enix down this path. The Western games have been great. They have no right really to complain about the sales figures they got, unless they were expecting Tomb Raider or Hitman to sell like CoD. Pure and simple, it’s the Japanese department that’s been putting out slack games and they’ve ignored the criticism that’s everywhere to be seen and are now suffering for it.
Hopefully this doesn’t affect the American office too much though as it’s not their fault that Final Fantasy’s now a steaming pile of ….
from memory didnt the games sell well but not as well as that mediacritic rubbish predicted they would?
The thing is, those games didn’t actually sell that badly and they were fantastic games. The expectations were definitely too unrealistic. They should be bloody proud of themselves for making games like that.