Square Enix has today released its financial information for the third quarter of this fiscal year which ended on December 31, 2018.

The biggest takeaway from the report released by Square is that as a whole, sales were well up in Q3 compared to 2017. Year over year, Square's third quarter saw net sales of 22.2 billion yen compared to 12.5 billion yen from the third quarter from the previous fiscal year, which is a pretty drastic jump. Square Enix cited Shadow of the Tomb Raider, Octopath Traveler, and Just Cause 4 as some of the games that helped bolster its sales in this span of time. In North America and Europe specifically, Square sold 12.47 million units across physical and digital avenues, which is up by over 3 million units in the same regions year over year.

Despite the success for the quarter with sales, profits for a whole on the quarter were slumping. Square Enix stated in the report that "profits declined YoY due to increased amortization of game development cost, advertising spending." It turns out that marketing and developing games can be quite expensive.

It's surely a disappointing end to the 2018 calendar year for Square Enix, but it seems like the publisher is still set up to end the 2019 fiscal year incredibly strong. Just this morning, Square announced that Kingdom Hearts III, which just launched in the west merely a week ago, has already shipped 5 million copies worldwide. It's also now the fastest-selling game in the history of the franchise.

Plus, they still have the upcoming third-person action title Left Alive that will release in early late February in Japan and March for those in the west. Assuming sales for KH3 continue to stay strong through the end of March and Left Alive has a good start out of the gate, you'd imagine that Square would have much more positive news to share in its next round of financials for Q4. We'll report on those figures down the road when they come through.

Until that time, you can check out a more specific layout of Square Enix's performance last quarter (as well as the previous quarters and past fiscal year) in the graph down below.