Maybe releasing exclusively on the Playstation but not pc or Xbox wasn’t the brilliant idea they thought it was 🤔
They are Japanese they don’t care about Xbox and PC. Also didn’t Sony gave them money for development?
PC Port always come late because Japanese studios can’t be bothered to support m&k and pc features. Even a year of porting will result in shitty ports that will need months of additional patching.
Other than that one can buy exclusivity.
After months of hearing about how Final Fantasy needed to become Devil May Cry because RPGs are dead, watching Buldurs Gate succeed and FF16 fall short of expectations is kind of cathartic.
FF16 sold really well though. Square Enix likes making unrealistic expectations for their games and they do it every time. I don’t think they even believe their expectations are real. The real reason for their share loss is increased operational costs.
Capcom was guilty of this 10-15 years ago with the infamous “Capcom test” where they would release a small project or re-release a game in a franchise they were floating around ideas for a new entry in, and if the small game or re-release didn’t sell basically like a new AAA game, the franchise didn’t get the new entry. This was part of how the company was basically reduced to only Resident Evil and Street Fighter for a time. Fortunately they eventually snapped out of it, probably when they realized you can’t make the kind of money you used to make when you’re effectively killing off all but two of your IPs due to stupid sales expectations. Square Enix will probably hit that point eventually as well.
FF15 sold 5 million copies on the first day, while FF16 took a few days to get to 3 million. It’s not selling as well as 15. Anecdotally I’m seeing far less discussion of it online than when 15 came out.
They also have more competition this year. Personally I won’t get it till it’s on sale because I haven’t enjoyed a FF game much in a long time, so I don’t really trust them anymore even if critic reviews are positive.
The article states that the 15 sales were for multiple platforms and 16 is for one platform.
Looks like we’ve found the reason
Baldurs gate sold great for larian, those are square enix numbers, and not numbers that would cover the investment square makes into their games. You know this surely.
I’m sure you are also aware of how many turn based games square puts out every year? Spoiler it’s more than everyone else.
After months of hearing about how Final Fantasy needed to become Devil May Cry because RPGs are dead…
This sounds like a strawman to me. Maybe you meant that people were claiming that “JRPGs are dead”? In which case, holding up Baldur’s Gate 3 of evidence to counter that seems strange. But I haven’t heard anyone saying that RPGs in general are a dying genre.
Which Squeenix game has ever met their expectations? Weren’t they also super disappointed with Tomb Raider and Hitman even though they moved millions of units.
It seems that SE is severely out of touch with the current state of the industry and where they are positioned.
It seems that SE is severely out of touch with the current state of the industry and where they are positioned.
Considering how hard they tried to push NFT crap the past two years, I believe it.
According to Squeenix, what was the last game that actually managed to “meet expectations” according to them?
Nothing. I remember Tomb Raider sold like 7 mil and they were crying about it
And of course made the genius decision the next year to make the sequel Xbox exclusive for a year
That Tomb Raider thing was completely asinine. It was a quality reboot of a series that had gone horribly off the rails with a lot of promise and Square tanked it with completely unreasonable expectations, apparently expecting sales in the dozens of millions. And here we are with FF apparently not meeting expectations as well–it’s easy to see where the issue is, and it’s not with the games.
Off the top of my head, NieR: Automata was the last big one. Before that was the first Life is Strange.
There’s also Octopath Traveler, which is perhaps relevant here because that was a game that filled a need on a hot platform. Taking relative install bases into account, FF16 probably had a better attach rate than FF15 did at this point in its lifecycle. I’m sure SQEX was hoping for a much higher rate than that given the slow pace of exclusives developed solely for PS5.
I’m also going to speculate that, internally, there’s alarm over the Japan sales. SQEX is part of a group of Japanese publishers that have historically been very–if not unduly–sensitive to poor home performance.
I’m excited to buy it when it comes to PC, but my single-player rpg backlog is long already. I’ll probably end up waiting for a sale, which shouldn’t take too long if articles like this keep coming.
This will be my first single player FF since 10. I love XIV, so it seems to me that the hype of using the XIV team on this game wouldn’t add a huge amount of value to a PS5 exclusive release when the majority of XIV players are on PC, and others are still on PS4. It’s not like PC enjoyers and PS4-content players are going to go buy a PS5 just to play it early. They’re waiting for the port, then they’re waiting longer still for the port to be fixed.
They really need to take a step back and remember why people enjoy the franchise. I enjoyed the characters and the gameplay but they keep changing it. 12 was the beginning of the end of turn based combat. I still like 12 but give us a mainline turn based game. It can be fun and people will like it. Just make good characters.
Yeah imo FF12 was the last legit FF game. FF15 is fine, but doesn’t feel at all like FF to me, and I have zero interest in FF16.
Thats surprising. FF16 is great
I just couldn’t get into 16 at all, and this is from someone who loves everything right from the NES up to and including FF13 and 14.
Xenoblade has filled in the gap FF has left for me in many respects.
So that may explain their recent commitment to release games also on XBox.
I would have purchased it by now if I could get it on the xbox. I could be wrong, but it seems the Xbox gets the short stick a lot this generation. Switch and playstation seem to be given for a games release but it’s always a toss up if the Xbox will be included.
I wish it was less intensive for devs to make their games multiplatform. I hope with their recent announcement fir more Xbox support we’ll get ff7 remake and ff16 in due time
Xbox isn’t popular in Japan at all, and there’s the issue gamepass cannibalizing sales. Makes it a hard sell for Japanese studios for sure.
But in this case it’s because sony gave them a bucket of money. Microsoft isn’t really the place you want to be to support multiplatform games though, literally anywhere else is better, Microsoft is spending near a hundred billion dollars just to remove games from other people’s stores
There is no single piece of media that has had more impact on me throughout my life than the Final Fantasy series. I enjoyed the first half or so of 15 so much that I thought for sure it would be my new favorite game of all time. It devolved into such a shit heap that I couldn’t even bring myself to play it post updates & DLC. It along with KH3 has left me sour on all of Square’s modern releases. I was pleasantly surprised by FF7 Remake and will play FF16 at some point. Even a mediocre Final Fantasy is better than what 15 gave us.
The Remake is beautiful and isn’t a bad game, but every second that I’m playing it I keep asking myself “would I be having more fun playing the original?,” and every single time my answer is an immediate “yes.”
If they had kept the same gameplay mechanics (yes, including traditional turn-based combat), the Remake might have been my all-time favorite game. As it is, it’s just a very pretty shadow of what it could have been.
while I enjoyed playing it, it did get a bit tedious near the end, and fully keeping up with the story involved spending as much time in menus reading stuff as playing the rest of the game, 11 hours of which were cutscenes. edit: near the end I just couldn’t be bothered and started skipping all cutscenes and dialog just to be done with it.
Maybe they should release it on other consoles then.
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It did sell well however, selling over 3.5 million copies in the first 10 days. I don’t know how high Squeenix’s expectations were but it’s wild they thought it would sell higher for a game that only released on the PS5.
This times 100. I’m a massive FF fan. While there is debate in my mind about the combat system, I can’t even play it because I don’t have a PS5.
Hoping to get one eventually but the PS4 and Switch still have value. If SE want my money, they’ll have to wait.
Best selling game in Japan, 3.5+M units sold. What the hell did they expect?
Apparently they expected selling more than FFXV
The last numbered instalment, Final Fantasy 15, remains the series’ fastest-selling entry with 5 million units shipped and sold digitally in its first 24 hours alone. This was across multiple platforms, however.
The keyword of course being multiplatform.
When that only other platform was Xbox, though, I doubt that total remotely compared to PlayStation sales.
I honestly think it’s just lack of trust in the series after 15 along with the economic times we’re in, where people don’t want to spend money on something they’re not 100% confident in. It also didn’t get the same media cycle as 15, and didn’t have strong nostalgia value to coast on like 7 Remake.
Also, XV wasn’t well received, generally speaking. I’m sure there are at least a few people (like me) who decided to wait on this one, to be safe. A damaged reputation can cause tangible sales impacts
Have you heard of a little company called Disney?
Ff is not meeting expectations since 8
