In a bit of gaming news that probably won't surprise anyone, Forspoken proved a critical and commercial failure. Square Enix tried to make lemonade out of their lemons, though, stating to investors that "the game has also received positive feedback on its action features, including its parkour and combat capabilities, so it has yielded results that will lead to improvement of our development capabilities of other games in the future." Whether or not that's true is anyone's guess, but I personally found both the parkour and the combat to be floaty and unsatisfying.
Luminous Productions, the studio behind Forspoken, is suffering the consequences: it's due to be absorbed wholly into Square Enix come May. This means a round or two of layoffs and a loss of individual identity, meaning that this one bad game was enough to, in essence, kill a studio. With the cost of triple-A games rising, smaller studios are now increasingly at risk of meeting a similar fate if their games fail to recoup their budget – is it any wonder everyone out there seems to be chasing more lucrative, predatory practices?
