I love Analysts, they are just the coolest guys. The make stupid amounts of money to predict things for an industry they often times know nothing about. The whole thing is completely unpredictable, that is my favorite bit, the false sense of foresight they think they have. This is what analysts do: They look at data and conjecture about data given by other analysts. They then make broad sweeping statements that sound very informed but they have the career accuracy that is the mathematical equivalent to making random guesses about everything they talk about.
That said, he could be right, but I would wager it won't be for the reasons he is stating. If they don't do well it won't because they have aggregate critic scores of only 80, it won't be because they didn't tack on enough MP on their games. It'll be because lately all they do is sink money into remaking old games, which I have never had the impulse to buy. They also spend years developing games and they should expect years of turn around time on the profits based on that. They have huge projects going and they don't respect deadlines at all. FFXIII was years in development, years of money sink, and yet the game was not very good. High development cost is almost universally due to bad spending and does not usually mean a whole lot to the actual game.
As a comparison: I have spent probably a total of 430+ hours on Dark Souls between the PS3 version and the PC version. I don't think I have spent that much time on all of the Square/Squeenix games I have played put together, and my first Final Fantasy game was Final Fantasy: Mystic Quest on the SNES. I have played through all of their Final Fantasy games since that game. You don't get those kind of hours from over inflated budget, you get those kinds of hours from quality games.
Never buying a BW game again.
