Life is Strange: Double Exposure reportedly a 'large loss' for Square Enix, says analyst, who adds: 'The company's IP fundamentally varies too much between good and bad'

Max, protagonist of Life is Strange and Life is Strange: Double Exposure, stares with trepidation at something off-screen with her friend.

(Image credit: Deck Nine Games / Square Enix)

I confess, dear reader, I was a little confused by the concept of Life Is Strange: Double Exposure from the get-go. As PC Gamer's own Mollie Taylor said during a preview, "remind me to never become besties with Max Caulfield, lest I end up dead in a ditch somewhere."

Retreading the same 'best friend dead' ground with the initial game's protagonist felt like, well, trying to play the hits, rather than coming up with something new and inventive. You know, like the OG Life is Strange was, growing up in the afterglow era of Telltale's golden age while we still had an appetite for choice simulators, keeping things interesting with a time-travelling twist.

Mollie still quite enjoyed it in her review, even if she wasn't "sure it's a game I needed". That same decent-but-not-necessary result has, as reported by Japanese analyst Hideki Yasuda (via TheGamer), led to a "large loss".

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In his analysis on the Japanese gaming industry as a whole, Yasuda states that a recent financial meeting at Square Enix saw company president Takashi Kiryu claim that the publisher's smash hit of Dragon Quest 3 was "offset by the large losses of 'Life is Strange: Double Exposure'."

While it's not painting the whole picture, we can at least get a glimpse of how well the game did by peeking over at its SteamDB numbers. Its all-time peak struck a humble 8,524 players on release—less than half of the hype that Episode One achieved back in 2015, with a peak of 18,260. And that was a few months post-launch, hinting at a solid word-of-mouth popularity that Double Exposure never captured. It's also an ill omen that, around a month after its release, development studio Deck Nine laid off around 20% of its staff.

The following (machine-translated) statement by Yasuda just about sums up Square Enix's foibles: "The company's IP fundamentally varies too much between 'good' and 'bad,' making performance unstable." It doesn't help that Square Enix itself seems to've had astronomical expectations, with Kiryu even going on record to say that its "winning formula is no longer effective".

As a Final Fantasy enjoyer myself, I've been regarding Square's recently stumbling with a bit of sadness (and worry for one of my favourite MMOs), but given Mollie's confirmation that the game did "a lot of retreading old narrative ground of its predecessor", I'm putting Double Exposure firmly in my 'this just wasn't a great plan, guys' pile. Still a few rungs up from that baffling NFT project, mind.

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Harvey's history with games started when he first begged his parents for a World of Warcraft subscription aged 12, though he's since been cursed with Final Fantasy 14-brain and a huge crush on G'raha Tia. He made his start as a freelancer, writing for websites like Techradar, The Escapist, Dicebreaker, The Gamer, Into the Spine—and of course, PC Gamer. He'll sink his teeth into anything that looks interesting, though he has a soft spot for RPGs, soulslikes, roguelikes, deckbuilders, MMOs, and weird indie titles. He also plays a shelf load of TTRPGs in his offline time. Don't ask him what his favourite system is, he has too many.