Announcing its financial results for the first half of the fiscal year ending March 31, 2021, Square Enix revealed that Marvel’s Avengers‘s initial sales didn’t meet expectations and that the game has yet to turn a profit.
President Yosuke Matsuda partly blamed costs associated with a “major” launch marketing campaign and said that Square Enix hopes to recoup costs in the second half of the fiscal year. The publisher hopes that sales will pick up when it offers “ample additional content” in the future.
“In addition to the amortization of that game’s development costs, another significant factor associated with the title was the fact that we undertook a major advertising campaign at the time of its launch to make up for delays in our marketing efforts resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic,” Matsuda told investors. “There is a certain amount of development costs still to be amortized in 3Q, but we want to recoup it by growing our sales going forward.”
When asked what Square Enix expects Marvel’s Avengers’ profitability to look like in the third quarter, Matsuda said that the company is focused on expanding sales first.
Elsewhere, Matsuda was asked if Square Enix could have prepared itself better for Marvel’s Avengers launch, to which he said the publisher had “ample preparation” but there were areas in which it could have done better. “We intend to leverage the lessons we learned from this experience in future game development efforts,” he added. However, Matsuda didn’t say what Square Enix thinks it could have done better and what lessons it has learned.
[Source: Square Enix]