I confess, expensive reader, I used to be a little bit confused by the idea of Life Is Strange: Double Exposure from the get-go. As PC Gamer’s personal Mollie Taylor mentioned throughout a preview, “remind me to by no means develop into besties with Max Caulfield, lest I find yourself useless in a ditch someplace.”
Retreading the identical ‘finest buddy useless’ floor with the preliminary sport’s protagonist felt like, properly, making an attempt to play the hits, reasonably than developing with one thing new and ingenious. You know, just like the OG Life is Strange was, rising up within the afterglow period of Telltale’s golden age whereas we nonetheless had an urge for food for selection simulators, protecting issues attention-grabbing with a time-travelling twist.
Mollie nonetheless fairly loved it in her evaluate, even when she wasn’t “certain it is a sport I wanted”. That similar decent-but-not-necessary end result has, as reported by Japanese analyst Hideki Yasuda (by way of TheGamer), led to a “giant loss”.
In his evaluation on the Japanese gaming business as an entire, Yasuda states {that a} latest monetary assembly at Square Enix noticed firm president Takashi Kiryu declare that the writer’s smash hit of Dragon Quest 3 was “offset by the big losses of ‘Life is Strange: Double Exposure’.”
While it isn’t portray the entire image, we will at the least get a glimpse of how properly the sport did by peeking over at its SteamDB numbers. Its all-time peak struck a humble 8,524 gamers on launch—lower than half of the hype that Episode One achieved again in 2015, with a peak of 18,260. And that was a couple of months post-launch, hinting at a stable word-of-mouth recognition that Double Exposure by no means captured. It’s additionally an in poor health omen that, round a month after its launch, growth studio Deck Nine laid off round 20% of its employees.
The following (machine-translated) assertion by Yasuda nearly sums up Square Enix’s foibles: “The firm’s IP basically varies an excessive amount of between ‘good’ and ‘unhealthy,’ making efficiency unstable.” It does not assist that Square Enix itself appears to’ve had astronomical expectations, with Kiryu even occurring report to say that its “profitable system is not efficient”.
As a Final Fantasy enjoyer myself, I’ve been relating to Square’s lately stumbling with a little bit of unhappiness (and fear for one among my favorite MMOs), however given Mollie’s affirmation that the sport did “a number of retreading previous narrative floor of its predecessor”, I’m placing Double Exposure firmly in my ‘this simply wasn’t an ideal plan, guys’ pile. Still a couple of rungs up from that baffling NFT undertaking, thoughts.
