Square Enix Reports Profits Increase in 2016
According to Square Enix’s latest earnings report, they have a 26% increase in profits. The report covers a nine-month period, ending on December 31st, 2016. Both the company’s profits and revenue are up compared to the previous year. This is largely due to the release of Final Fantasy XV, and the PlayStation 4 version of Rise of the Tomb Raider.
Square Enix released their earnings report yesterday, on February 6th, and the numbers are looking pretty good. During the nine-month period ending on December 31st 2016, the company has raked in 190 billion yen (approx. $1.7 billion). Compared to the same period last year, this is a 24% increase.
Similarly, the company’s total profits are 17 billion yen, or around $151 million. Last year, they made 13.5 billion yen in the same time frame. That’s a 26% increase. This is all excellent news for the famous publisher, who finally seems to be coming to its senses after a series of blunders.
A lot of this success has to do with the fact that Final Fantasy XV shipped more than 6 million copies. The other major contribution is Rise of the Tomb Raider finally making its way to PlayStation 4 back in October 2016, after a year of waiting.
Square Enix also credits “strong download sales of catalogue titles released previously”. They’ve also released a whole bunch of new content updates for their MMO titles, but the revenue on that side stayed steady.
Another major contributor to their profits are mobile and browser-based games. According to the report, those games have been getting a significant increase in earnings. This is fantastic news, especially considering some of their mobile games were legitimately a lot of fun. We can almost forget Final Fantasy: All The Bravest.
Hopefully, Square Enix will keep this upward trend up. And I don’t just mean with their earnings. I’m talking about them embracing what made them such a behemoth of a company in the first place. We’ll see how the Final Fantasy XV DLCs will do this year.
