Square Enix sales, profits plummet

A game publisher that doesn't publish games is going to have a pretty hard time of things. Square Enix today reported its financial results for the April-June quarter, and the company blamed "a lack of major releases" as a main factor in company-wide sales and profits being down sharply.

For the first quarter of the publisher's fiscal year, Square Enix revenues were down 25 percent to ¥24.5 billion ($311.7 million), while net profits sank 62 percent to ¥690 million ($8.8 million). Part of the reason for the decline was a strong performance for the previous year's April-June quarter, which saw the release of the original Dragon Quest Monsters 2, which sold more than a million copies in Japan.

However, the 2011 April-June quarter wasn't entirely devoid of new games for Square Enix. In North America, the Obsidian-developed Dungeon Siege III launched on the PC, Xbox 360, and PlayStation 3. And although it technically launched the day before the quarter began, Dragon Quest Monsters 2 Joker Professional on the DS made frequent appearances on the Japanese best-seller charts throughout the April-June quarter.

Despite the dry patch, Square Enix is hoping to recover and finish this fiscal year in better shape than it did the last one. The company expects overall revenues for the year to be up 4 percent to ¥130 billion ($1.7 billion), while last year's net loss of ¥12 billion ($152.7 million) is forecast to be replaced by a profit of ¥5 billion ($63.6 million).