Dragon Quest 3 HD-2D exceeded Square Enix‘s sales expectations, though net sales for games over the last nine months have overall been in decline.
While the company’s latest earnings report doesn’t specify total sales of Dragon Quest 3, the company previously shared it had shipped and downloaded 2m copies. Further, according to Famitsu, Dragon Quest 3 became the top-selling game in Japan for the entirety of 2024 in just one week.
Square Enix is notorious for setting high sales estimates of its games, particularly the Final Fantasy series – most recently it admitted Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth and Final Fantasy 16 profits did not meet expectations. For Dragon Quest 3 to do so means the game has either sold exceptionally well, or the company had lower estimates this time.
Still, overall net sales for Square Enix’s games are down 10.7 percent year on year, while overall profits dropped by 9.9 percent.
That’s in part due to a decline in its HD games, with the likes of last year’s Visions of Mana, Life is Strange: Double Exposure, and Fantasian Neo Dimension failing to live up to the previous year’s Final Fantasy 16 and the Final Fantasy Pixel Remasters. Profit here was up, though, thanks to Dragon Quest 3.
Both sales and profits for MMO games increased year on year, in large part due to the release of the latest Final Fantasy 14 expansion Dawntrail.
The biggest change, though, is the plummet in net sales for the company’s mobile games by over 32 percent. In the last couple of years Square Enix shut down a number of its mobile games, including Final Fantasy: Brave Exvius, Dissidia Final Fantasy Opera Omnia, and Final Fantasy 7 battle royale The First Soldier.
Despite these closures, profits from mobile games (5.6bn yen) were still higher than HD games (4.6bn yen), both of which are dwarfed by MMOs (17.3bn yen).
It’s no wonder, then, the company is developing a mobile version of Final Fantasy 14. It’s currently without a release date, but will be free-to-play without gacha mechanics.
So what’s next for Square Enix? The third part of the Final Fantasy 7 remake trilogy is still a ways off, and Final Fantasy 14 won’t receive another expansion this year. Most recently the company released Final Fantasy 16 and Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth on PC as part of the company’s new multiplatform strategy. Xbox ports of these games would be the next obvious choice, though perhaps we could see Final Fantasy games coming to Switch 2 too.
Similar HD remakes of Dragon Quest 1 and 2 are also on the way this year, which will likely have high sales expectations.
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