Square Enix Builds Manga Because Games Keep Failing
Square Enix has stopped making bets on itself.
The ten new manga and book projects announced for 2027—two Final Fantasy tie-ins and eight separate series—are not evidence of creative expansion but evidence of creative failure being systemized into a business model.
This is what a publisher does when the core product becomes unreliable: you stop investing in the thing that made you and leverage the reputation it built. The pattern is visible across Square Enix's last fifteen years—Final Fantasy XV shipped four years late and unfinished, Final Fantasy XVI launched to diminishing sales. Games like Marvel's Avengers, Babylon's Fall, and Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League each became monuments to bloated AAA development that failed to recoup investment.
Manga is the perfect vehicle for this strategy. It demands a tenth of the budget of a AAA game and can run for years generating consistent revenue even with modest readership—it requires no engine development, no physics simulation, no network infrastructure. Most crucially, it has no obligation to innovate. It can retell existing stories, expand minor characters, and cannibalize fanfiction energy without the risk that comes with creating something genuinely new.
When your games stop working, you don't fix the games. You turn the IP into everything else.
”The system works, but it just no longer makes the thing that made the system possible.
