The brutal thing about a cyclical industry like games is that the better you do one year off the back of a big release, the worse you'll look next year when you don't have a comparable whopper to punch up the numbers. Square Enix runs into some of that in its latest financial report, but its figures are also a more complex and interesting breakdown of how its game dev operations are going, now with a lineup of promising JRPGs poised to get it back to the good part of the cycle.
Square Enix breaks its reports into categories, and the one we're interested in is "Digital Entertainment" (DE), covering "HD Games, MMO, and Games for Smart Devices/PC Browser." Net DE sales for the three-month quarter ending June 30 were down 11 billion Yen compared to last year, which Square attributes to "lower sales than the segment had generated the previous year, which saw releases that included three 'Kingdom Hearts' catalog titles on Steam."
