Why Stadia’s Failing: The Square-Enix Success Metric

 

Is anyone surprised by news stories like this any more?  I suppose if you’ve somehow not heard anything about Google Stadia beyond the initial announcement of the service, then it probably is news to you that it turned out to be such a gong show, but if you’ve spent any amount of time reading gaming news at all over the last decade or so, then you’ll know that launching a new gaming platform takes more than just saying you’re going to launch a new gaming platform.  No one wants another Infinium Labs.

You might say “At least Stadia launched,” but so did the Ouya and no one wants another one of those, either.  How in the world were Microsoft and Sony able to launch video game systems so many years ago and a company like Google with all the resources at their disposal can’t seem to manage today?

I suppose those of us who were optimistic that Stadia could’ve been great should’ve seen the writing on the wall, especially since there’s one company that seems to easily determine whether a console is going to rise or fall.  One company that, if they don’t support your console with anything significant, you’re doomed to failure.

Square-Enix basically doomed Stadia.

At this point, you might dismiss this as just some fanboy wanting to talk about their favourite developer some more and okay, I do have a bunch of retrospectives I’ve been doing about their games, but this is a pattern I’ve seen in action many times before.  I’ve noticed that Square is willing to support almost anyone and everyone as long as the company is certain they’ll be successful.  In their early days, they were a bit more selective and basically remained exclusive to first Nintendo and then Sony.  But once they patched things up with Nintendo and started releasing games on the Game Boy Advance and PlayStation 2, it’s like the gates were thrown open to experimentation.  They weren’t just porting games around, either.  These were games exclusive to each system.  Games like Final Fantasy XII and Front Mission 4 were released on the PlayStation 2, whereas Final Fantasy Tactics Advance was released on the Game Boy Advance and Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles made it onto the GameCube.  They even supported the Xbox 360 with games like Infinite Undiscovery and Project Sylpheed.

However, you can usually tell when the company has confidence in a system and when they’re being a bit more cautious.  When the Ouya launched, Square supported it, but only as far as porting an already existing port of a game.  The modern, DS version of Final Fantasy III had already been released for the DS and then for iOS, Android and PlayStation Portable before finally making it to the Ouya, seven years after it was initially released.  It was the only game Square would ever release on the system.

Square’s behaviour on Stadia has been a bit more liberal, but only in so far as they’re porting a lot more than just one old game.  They’ve ported several old games to the system, but I don’t think this is because they have any more confidence that Stadia is actually going to succeed.  They just happen to have a lot more games that they can port around.  A lot of Tomb Raider games are available on the system, but only because Square took all of the games that they originally published (so none of the games made prior to them acquiring Eidos Interactive) and released them on Stadia.  Dragon Quest XI is available on Stadia, four years after its initial release.  Final Fantasy XV is also available on Stadia three years after it was initially released.

There have been a couple new releases on Stadia, but nothing exclusive to the platform.  Marvel’s Avengers is also available on PC and on Sony and Microsoft consoles, and so is Outriders.  Stadia just happens to be another place you can buy it.  There aren’t any exclusive games from Square available on Stadia, and yet they went to the trouble of developing an original game for Apple’s iPod devices at a time when the notion that you could play games on such a device would’ve been news to most gamers.

One of the things I’ve noticed Square does when they’re certain that a platform is going to be (or already is) pretty successful is that they’ll begin releasing ports of their heavy hitters.  When Final Fantasy VII became such a big hit for them and they realized that few people who own a PlayStation might’ve been able to get their older games, they released ports of all but Final Fantasy III (plus Chrono Trigger) on the system, thus making it a one stop shop for gamers to play nearly the entire series in one go.  You could’ve theoretically played a series marathon on one machine, even more so near the end of the PlayStation 2’s lifespan, not just because of backwards compatibility, but due to the additional games available at that point.

It happened again on the Game Boy Advance, when Square decided they wanted to give gamers the ability to play the older titles on a handheld, and after merging with Enix, the DS received several Dragon Quest ports as well as finally receiving the first ever Final Fantasy III re-release as a full remake.  The PlayStation Portable and PlayStation 3 received similar bountiful game re-releases as well.

In recent years, Square has given substantial support to the Nintendo Switch in response to its runaway success, not only by developing new software for it but also by making it the next one stop shop for everything Final Fantasy.  All the non-MMO Final Fantasy games are available on Switch starting with the seventh one, with the notable absence of the Lightning trilogy.

It’s very notable that Google Stadia has yet to receive such attention from Square.  They’re willing to release the last ten years’ worth of Tomb Raider games to the system, but Square is, as yet, unwilling to dip into their own substantial well beyond giving Stadia users the chance to buy their most recent titles, and of the two games that were released brand new, neither of them are considered very good or come from Square’s flagship franchises.  There is also very little chance of this ever changing unless Google can figure out how to reverse their fortunes very, very quickly.