People were asking about why SquareEnix owns Geno if they never plan to do anything with him. The answer is that's what Media Companies generally do. Game Publishers like Movie Studio and the like revolve around the collecting of Intellectual Properties. Generally Publishers fund a game project and generally in return the publisher retains the property rights to the intellectual properties of the project itself. This is generally intended for two main reasons.
1) If the project falls through the Publisher gets the right to take the IP in question and give it to another team or retool the project if they choose to do so.
2) The IP rights are what actually have value to a Publisher and what makes the publisher valuable in the perspective of an investor or shareholder.
Regardless of whether a publisher decides to use the IP in question or not ever again is generally not the point, rather the value that the IP has is more important. The selling of intellectual properties usually only occurs when a company is in a difficult situation or needs to pay certain debts. There is no real benefit to SE lettting go of Geno's IP rights and I doubt Nintendo gives enough of a damn about Geno to even engage the idea. Because the IP likely has no value to Nintendo compared to the value it holds for SquareEnix who then gets cuts anytime Super Mario RPG is re-released or Geno is used for something.
Now, I'm aware that this isn't always the case, Shantae is a good example where this did not happen (Even though Capcom published the original GBC game, they did not keep the Shantae IP for some reason), however this is usually the exception and not the rule.
