Bravely Default Gameplay Trailer

First announced in Jump Magazine, Bravely Default: For The Sequel returns to the 3DS on December 5th, 2013 in Japan. The game will have support for save data from the original Bravely Default. According to the Japanese website, the game will have over 100 improvements and new features. Chief among them is support for Japanese or English voiceovers and text in Japanese, English, French, Italian, German, or Spanish.

Check out the awesome trailer below. Bravely Default comes to the Nintendo 3DS early 2014.

Square Enix raises outlook thanks to FFXIV: A Realm Reborn

Japanese publisher is expecting a stronger first half of the fiscal year thanks to better than expected sales of the latest Final Fantasy.

Square Enix today announced that it’s revising its first-half fiscal forecast for the period ended September 30. For the six-month period, the company is now expecting to report net sales of 61.7 billion yen and net income of 2.6 billion yen, as compared with the previous outlook of 59 to 63 billion yen in sales with a net loss of 1.3 billion yen.

Square Enix said the upward revision is mainly attributable to software sales of online RPG, Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn, which was released in August; the publisher also credited console software sales in North America, sales of arcade game machines, and continued group-wide efforts of cost reduction. While Square Enix altered its first half outlook, it’s not adjusting its full-year numbers for the fiscal year ending next March, “due to the uncertainties in the second half of the fiscal year.”

Square Enix recently revealed that Final Fantasy: A Realm Reborn had exceeded 1.5 million registered players in the two months following its release on PC and PS3.

Square Enix has been dealing with some tough times of late, losing more than $130 million in the last fiscal year despite putting out multi-million selling titles like Tomb Raider, Hitman: Absolution and Sleeping Dogs. The games failed to meet internal sales expectations, and in early 2013 Yoichi Wada stepped down. His replacement, Yosuke Matsuda, has described an “urgent” need for reform to get the publisher back on track.

 

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Warhammer Online – last month and a half-Play for FREE!

The Ancient Gaming Noob

I mentioned previously that EA has announced Warhammer Online will be closing down on December 18th of this year.

As part of the run up (or down) to that terminal date, the WAR team has convinced somebody at EA to allow them to let everybody play for free for the last month and a half.  And by “everybody,” they mean everybody who ever had an account in good standing, which I gather meant that you were a paid subscriber.  From the official site:

A Parting Gift
Posted by From the Devs | 2013 Nov 02 04:00 -0400 GMT

Greetings Warhammer players,

Effective immediately we will be turning off the ability to apply one month subscriptions and game time codes to Warhammer Online accounts and removing the ability to open new Warhammer Online accounts.

To give Warhammer Online a proper sendoff we are opening the game to anyone free of…

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Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky sequel finally coming stateside via XSeed

After a few Twitter-based teases, XSeed games has announced that Nihon Falcom’s RPG The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky Second Chapter is on its way to North America as a PSN download for PSP (Vita compatible). The new game, as well as its predecessor, will also become available on PC via Steam. This makes sense, as they were both PC games originally.

No specific release dates have been set for these projects. The Steam version of the original Trails in the Sky is expected this winter, while the sequel is set to come at an unspecified time in 2014.

The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky was met with love when it arrived on North American PSPs two years ago. Unfortunately, the games in this series have quite a bit of text, and translating it is notoriously hard; this severely limited the progress that a small company like XSeed could realistically make on such a project. To the stated delight of the loyal fans and XSeed staff members alike, the long wait is finally coming to an end.

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Perfect World suffers in the wait for new games

Revenue, profits and players all down in Q1 as online firm concentrates on pipeline

A lack of new games and content saw Perfect World’s business slow down on all fronts in the first quarter.

In the three-month period ended March 31, 2013, Perfect World’s revenue was RMB624.5 million ($102m/£68m), slightly down from RMB718.5 million in the prior year quarter. Net profit was RMB131 million ($21.4m/£14.1m), a more precipitous year-on-year decline from RMB209.8 million.

The steep drop in profits was due in no small part to higher levels of expenditure on R&D as the company attempts to address a similarly sharp decline in player numbers: Perfect World’s aggregate concurrent users have fallen from 804,000 in Q1 last year to around 554,000.

“During the quarter, we continued to primarily focus on developing new content for our portfolio and pipeline and slow down promotional activities,” said Perfect World CEO Robert Xiao in a statement. “As we expected, the overall performance of our existing games in the first quarter was softer, but we are pleased with the recent progress we have made in our portfolio and pipeline development.”

Perfect World has several major launches planned for this year: Cryptic Studios’ Neverwinter in North America and Europe, and Swordsman Online and Dota 2 in mainland China.

 

[source]