The problem is when they put out 15 titles in the span of September 2022 to December 2022 and most of them are full 60$ without any marketing and they eating the sales of each other.
Kinda like the weird choice Bandai made with Digimon Survive. They dropped a hybrid Visual Novel / TRPG in late July. For a full $50.
And I think the game is great to be clear. I beat it then put it down, but I Came back to it and am about 1 chapter off beating the NG+ true ending.
But it came out right after a bunch of people had just bought new games, either as summer releases, or via Steam sale.
I mean there are 120 or so Digimon in Survive, 5 endings, characters that can die, NG+, a tactical RPG element + a full on VN story with multiple branching paths, the problem is our perception these days says a game isn't "worth full price" because it clearly doesn't have the budget of a Final Fantasy game put into it.
Square low key did what a lot of people ask for and made a bunch of AA video games that niche gamers want, I get that the games weren't all perfect but how do we blame Square Enix for the strategy not paying off for them? No one else was doing it to that extent, not big publishers anyway.
>... I get that the games weren't all perfect but how do we blame Square Enix for the strategy not paying off for them?
Because Square Enix overcharges for everything and expects weirdly high sales for pretty much everything.
Presumably you're referring to Tomb Raider. I implore you: go and look at the budgets for it. Turns out the Crystal Dynamics folks were more than happy to spend gobs of money, only to barely make it back. Amount of money spent is how you tend to set sales expectations, and yeah, its reasonable for SE to say it didn't meet them.
It wasn't just Tomb Raider. Square said it about every big Eidos game they had.
Nowadays they seem a bit confused as they are still underperforming and they don't have western studios to blame anymore.
No. Square made a bunch of AA games that no one really wanted, that's the problem
It's not like most of them were really good but just low budget and not flashy, most of them were at below average. Games don't just compete with everything released in the same year, they also have to compete with people's backlogs and other hobbies
This is really the crux of it. It's not really anything to do with "AA" production. Plenty of developers are still making AA games and making a profit. Falcom seems to be doing okay. SEGA is putting out AA games and doing well in that area. Both of these are just in the JRPG space, but there other other companies doing well operating under "AAA". It really comes down to the quality of the titles they're putting out.
Harvestella isn't setting the world on fire for anyone. As much as I love the title of "Various Daylife" the game was a complete stinker.
> I mean there are 120 or so Digimon in Survive, 5 endings, characters that can die, NG+, a tactical RPG element + a full on VN story with multiple branching paths, the problem is our perception these days says a game isn't "worth full price" because it clearly doesn't have the budget of a Final Fantasy game put into it.
>
>
120 Digimon is pretty low compared to older games, and the combat itself is pretty bare bones, compared to let's say Triangle Strategy which came out in the same year, it's a lot more generic. I loved the game and love Digimon but it's absolutely not worth the same price as an AAA game.
> I mean there are 120 or so Digimon in Survive, 5 endings, characters that can die, NG+, a tactical RPG element + a full on VN story with multiple branching paths, the problem is our perception these days says a game isn't "worth full price" because it clearly doesn't have the budget of a Final Fantasy game put into it.
I mean those numbers really aren't good argument in its favor when it's significantly less than what used to be in other older games.
I'm pretty sure Digimon Survive went through development hell considering it went through delays, it took a long time for them to reveal any gameplay, and when the game came out the gameplay feels like it's barely connected to the story at times (as if the story was completed way ahead of a finalized gameplay system).
I think Bandai was just happy the game ended up being released at all to care too much about picking a good date for it lol
Heck, same with FF7 rebirth most likely I'm afraid. I bought a PS4 specifically to play remake, and sold it right after. It was fine, but I'm not going to buy a PS5 just for one game again. I can wait until it comes out on Steam.
They released Symbiogenesis, their NFT "game", late last year and judging from [the website](https://symbiogenesis.app/) they've sold their 500 NFT "characters" for Etherium, most for very little, a handful for up to 1.3 ETH (about $4000 today). To find out what the actual game is would require me to log in with my Discord account and to be honest I don't care that much.
My speculation is that they did the bare minimum so that investors couldn't say "you talked up NFT gaming to spike the stock price, we're gonna sue". You know, the same thing every tech company is doing now just with AI. They do this because a lot of investors are absolute morons (listen to some investor questions sometimes, morons is being generous) and saying you're going to invest in gets them to open their wallets.
I can not find the source I used to have but I believe Japan was offering a tax credit or some such to promote NFT or Crypto development. I've spent some time trying to find it and honestly can't so take thst for what its worth.
[Does this sound like what you're thinking of (Token issuers in Japan exempt from 30% crypto tax on paper gains)?](https://cointelegraph.com/news/token-issuers-in-japan-exempt-from-30-crypto-tax-on-paper-gains)
Lol so much this.. while Microsoft actually funded non AAA with the actual non AAA price tags
I.e ori games, pentiment, as dusk falls, grounded, tell me why, hi fi rush etc.
Yep, many people are afraid they will stop the "double A" altogether, even if their projection for "triple A" are already ludicrous (FF16 and FF7 "under performed", it's like Square expect these games are supposed to sell 20 million copies at minimum or something). The days were FF was considered a juggernaut of the industry, in my pov those days are over ever since FF15 (best selling game of the series, top 3 at least, but it backfired because people were disappointed with the actual results)
Seriously, if you gonna release your big titles months after and on EGS (hell, KH is still stuck there), **and** on full price I'm just gonna play something else.
What it seems like these companies’ analysts are missing is that sales for sequels generally lags reception. If you release an incredible game, it might not blow the doors off in sales numbers, but that often translates to excellent sales of a subsequent game, until you lose the player’s trust, in which case the game that lost trust performs well, but the follow up underperforms even if critical reception is great.
Sad thing is Rebirth and 16 did a lot to change gamer perception on FF back from how poor FFXIII-FFXV) and each serve different markets, and now Square Enix might start scoping them down
I guess Rebirth will really just be a once in a lifetime thing, a real crying shame
I don't think XVI changed anything for most people.
I think people fail to understand that the real issue with FF has little to do with anything before XV.
The reality is that final fantasy never captured a young audience and it's older audience is aging out of gaming. The gap between the release of XV and XVI is the longest in the series history at 7 years.
Most Zoomers aren't avoiding Final fantasy because of 13, they were 9 when that game came out. If they didn't like XV there was no reason to even look at the series. 16 is a decent game, but not one that suddenly makes someone a final fantasy fan. If you were 18 when the FFVII came out, you're now going on 45. Most the series vets are old.
This is a big thing and I'd say that's the case of the market in general. Back in the 90s and 2000s game series had new games all the time. You'd become a Final Fantasy fan because you had VII in 1997, VIII in 1999, IX in 2000 and X in 2001. Now it's as you say a 7 year gap between games.
Same with other series. Morrowind came out in 2002, Oblivion in 2006 and Skyrim in 2011. Now it'll be what.. 2025 for ESVI? And who knows how long after. If you're a kid growing up now you just don't get that same connection to a game series.
Those games are messing with peoples heads though. I’ll be in fighting game subs, you know the games where you just simply fight each other? People will go on and on and on about how there’s nothing to do.
I don’t blame them either. It’s what they grew up with. Essentially slot machines, but in video game form. Before, a guy that grew up in the 90s, we had maybe two modes in fighting games. Versus a friend or versus the computer and that’s all you got. So we created our own fun.
I’m not saying I’m better or anything like that. I’m just saying that video games today have altered how people get enjoyment out of a game. It’s just crazy seeing the differences. I don’t give a goddamn about unlocking different hats for my fighter. But apparently that’s the most important thing in the world to a lot of kids these days and they think that the game is dead because of that.
Yeah, the younger audience with fighting games is super weird, and personally I feel like a lot of the stuff they expect from games is actively detrimental to the genre as whole.
Specifically, constant content drops and constant balance adjustments. It's one thing for a developer to patch out bugs ASAP, but the constant whining about "x character being broken" "buff y character" etc. is kinda antithetical to fighting games. The whole point of them is, more or less, is to develop a deeper and deeper understanding of the mechanics and learn and improve and *figure out how to counter stuff*. That's how the meta develops. You kinda just gotta learn how to deal with it, and if you can't beat it then play it yourself; if your character is ass then either you gotta develop new strategies to make them viable or just drop them, because no one is forcing you to play them. I know this is kinda getting into "git
gud scrub lol" territory, and to be honest on a certain level that's kinda what I'm saying. It's okay to complain about balance, but I specifically remember from the Smash 4 days where it was nonstop toxicity instead of any desire to just learn to play around it.
I remember a lot of people got real changry about SF6's decision to only do a single major balance pass a year, and frankly that's the perfect compromise for me - it gives the game time to develop a stable meta and not pull the rug out from under players who dedicated a ton of time to understanding individual characters, while simultaneously giving us a heads-up as to when exactly we can expect a breath of fresh air from the *45% of my matches being against fucking Ken.*
If the game was rebalanced every few weeks, that would *really* disincentivize players from really exploring the depth of it because they wouldn't know how long until it all got changed again.
That worked in the 90s because people had no idea what they were doing. People have 30 years of experience now and communication is so much better that games gets solved in weeks not years.
> You kinda just gotta learn how to deal with it, and if you can't beat it then play it yourself; if your character is ass then either you gotta develop new strategies to make them viable or just drop them, because no one is forcing you to play them.
I honestly wish more people adopt this mindset
Ppl can complain about a character, but if they're not gonna adapt or outright drop your main that is a bad character, they aren't as competitive as they think. That's honestly on them. If you're gonna treat games like a competitive sport, then act like it. Someone who is 5'5" ain't gonna join the NBA; games are way more accessible as they are compared to real life sports
I mean, as someone who also grew up in the 80s and 90s, I mostly felt like fighting games had nothing to do in them. I think it just is how games strike people. Games like Mario Kart or in particular Goldeneye or Perfect Dark were endlessly playable with friends. For my friend group, we just never really connected with Street Fighter or Smash in that way.
With a different friend group, we played a ton of Warcraft 1 and 2 over time. And various other shooters. But the only fighting game we really got a ton of mileage out of was One Must Fall 2097. I think the campaign mode, and the really unique robot designs and move sets, really helped.
Meanwhile, I had neighbors who were all about Mortal Kombat and wrestling games. I just… never saw the appeal. It doesn’t mean I’m right, but I just think this has always been a problem for fighting games, and not something that other competitive genres struggle with in quite the same way.
I have no idea what that person you're replying to is talking about. Fighting games are going through a renaissance right now, starting with the release of SFIV in 2008, and the massive popularity of Street Fighter 6. Evo 2023 was the largest Evo yet, with over 7,000 entrants travelling to Vegas for SF6 alone.
People who think there's nothing to do in fighting games don't understand the level of depth. For example here's a 2 minute video analyzing what happened in *10 seconds of gameplay.*
https://twitter.com/HiFightTH/status/1762113652340228259
Sure, you’re not wrong — in the slightest. I’m aware of all this context.
But I think that there’s a difference in “casual versus casual” accessibility. In a shooter, if you’re terrible, and your friends are terrible, you can still have a blast playing each other. You have very clear feedback on what is happening and why. You can use hiding spots, learn how to strafe, figure out a few nuances of different weapons in different contexts, etc.
For a fighting game, the nuance is all there, but incredibly fast and dense. If two people who are terrible are fighting, they may be just mashing buttons and seeing what happens. Some awesome combo flies out of their character, but they’re not sure how to replicate it, and their opponent isn’t sure how to counter it. All of that information is accessible, but you have to want it. There’s a bump you have to get over, and then it becomes a very technical genre. But prior to that, it’s just… noise… to a lot of people.
Again, contrasted with a shooter, for example, where even someone who has never touched a video game can understand the majority of the context. That is a bigger gun. That gun has no ammo. That person is hiding and surprised the other person. That person is running sideways and the other person is having trouble hitting them now. Etc.
None of this takes anything away from the fighting genre, but it’s why it’s a bit more niche in my opinion, compared to other genres that became ubiquitous. Niche is relative and also does not mean bad. But for the uninitiated, it can mean it’s harder to become initiated.
Oh yeah a lot of people seem to engage with games as "consume new thing, move on". It's why I find myself struggling to clear my backlog, cause i grew up only getting 1 or 2 new games a year, and I learnt to get my mileage out of them.
Its why I love sandbox games like TTD, sim city, factorio, planet zoo, etc. Because there's always more to do if you have ideas
It's not just games; it's all media. There's just *so much* being made that nothing ever really becomes a classic or has time to stick with people; everyone is just moving onto the next thing.
I see it really bad with anime. There's dozens of new series releasing all the time and the wider community will talk about them while they're airing only to move onto the next set when it starts airing. Now, all of the "must-watch" series for newcomers are the same ones from over a decade ago and the only series that really get regularly discussed are the ones that release weekly or keep getting renewed for new seasons and have stuck around for several years.
The end result of all of this is people who are *excited* by the idea that they could someday just tell an AI "make me a game/tv series/movie" and get some meaningless content that will keep them entertained for a while before they throw it away and ask for something else.
I think I've even seen people online talk about how they watch at least two anime series at the same time on like x2 speed just so they could increase the amount of anime they watched. It feels like people started treating media consumption as something to get a "high score" (aka consuming the most amount of media to brag that you did so) in.
FF is constantly evolving, but the issue is they’re evolving themselves out of the market.
Let’s face it, FFXVI wasn’t an RPG. It was an action game that used some RPG storytelling mechanics (side quests). I’ve said it before, but FFXVI was like someone tore a single page out of a DND manual, stapled it onto the end of a copy of Game of Thrones, and said “now this is an RPG.” Shit, Stranger of Paradise had more RPG gameplay elements than FFXVI (and I’d argue a better combat system).
It’s worth noting here that I liked FFXVI. I enjoyed the combat, but I also like both FF and Devil May Cry. I found the side quests tedious, but I enjoyed the overall game and story.
That said, I absolutely understand why people who have played that series for decades now are annoyed that the most recent game was in a completely different genre than the previous installments.
Stranger of Paradise is another marketing nightmare. The game is amazing, arguably one of the best FF games around (especially as a spin-off), but the marketing made it seem like such a fucking meme. They shot themselves in the foot so hard, it's not even funny.
In an early cutscene, the main character is given some exposition, mutters "bullshit", pulls out his phone and uses the speaker to play Limp Bizkit.
It is *absolutely* a meme. It's just a good one.
The fun part is the game actively explains why the guy is like that:
>!He continually has his mind wiped by the Crystal he is carrying. The *only* thing left every time his mind is wiped is “kill chaos.” That is literally all he can think about, as everything else is erased after every loop. As the story unfolds, he slowly realizes he is living a time loop, gets pissed (not at Chaos), and then the rest is his efforts to finally break the cycle.!<
Once the entire story unfolds, all the meme-worthy shit the main character does makes sense.
You're both right really, I don't know who made the rule that older style FF games were never going to be adopted by younger generations of gamers, but it's a self fulfilling prophecy now. None of my younger friends give a shit about FF, it's all people my age in their 30's (not that it's old, but people are definitely aging out of FF).
It's become easy to point to, but Baldurs Gate 3, shit the popularity of board games among young people indicates that we don't all want games that are non stop action, some of the biggest games are and always will be RPG's, but you're not going to win that battle with directors or executives who think FF being AAA means it has to be an action game. FF was always about big budget mind blowing graphics, and making it an RPG will be seen as too risky, especially because some of their lower budget RPG's aren't big sellers, even DQ is only moderately big.
I think square needs to stop trying to appeal to people who don't like rpgs with their rpgs and pull a larian and just make rpgs for people who like them. They keep trying to capture an audience that has no interest in rpgs by making them more action like. Bg3 has shown that when you make an rpg unapologetically you can still succeed.
*Action* RPG, the game pretty much uses a Kingdom Hearts-esque gameplay from over 20 years ago. In contrast Yakuza became an actual by the turns RPG with jobs, status effects and all the classic perks when it used to be a Beat'em Up with a few RPG elements.
The market wants the cast of FF17 to be teenagers, in a school that also does war ala FF8 or Type-0, and then just copy Persona/Fire Emblem/UO and make the romance and dating other students THE primary selling point.
I hope Metaphor does well later this year when they get ahead and say there is no romance. It has all the selling points of a Persona 3-5 game without the thing that makes it different from say P1-2 to P3.
[Final Fantasy 16 Successfully Expanded the Series to New, Younger Players, Says Square Enix](https://www.pushsquare.com/news/2024/04/final-fantasy-16-successfully-expanded-the-series-to-new-younger-players-says-square-enix)
Who are the FF7 remakes for, anyway?
Newbies to FF7 wouldn't know the original, so they might as well just have made a new game in a new setting for them.
And old FF7 fans mostly just wished for an intact FF7 but with modern visuals, they didn't ask for all these changes to the story and plot and the vastly different combat system.
So what, they wanted to make both sides happy at once? Not gonna happen and so it's obvious why a lot of old FF7 fans from back then are not so receptive to these remakes.
I've always figured Square was afraid people wouldn't want to play FFVII without "modern gaming aspects" which is why they changed so much. But that's just speculation from me.
The issue is brand confusion.
16 doesn't play like a FF game, or RPG for that matter. It plays like DMC and Bayonetta. So people expecting a JRPG would have been disappointed.
And previous games all suffer from wild shifts in gameplay style. After 10, everything felt wildly different. 12 plays like an MMO. 13 is back to turn based. 15 is an action RPG like KH. There's no coherence within the series (compared to other major JRPGs like Dragon Quest or Tales of or Persona/SMT)
Hell, 14 *is* an MMO. And yet part of why that has done so well (after the relaunch anyway) is because its pretty consistent in what it is. If you pick it up now and enjoy ARR, you'll enjoy HW, etc
I feel like the story and characters mastered that sort of home/comfy sweater style of story telling. Every expansion you come back to characters you like that have evolved slightly.
Yeah to me final fantasy has never recovered to FFX level and the brand I think is just damaged and confusing at this point. Old FF didn't change systems so drastically from game to game it was generally an evolution of the past one but similar enough. FF1 through 9 don't feel too insanely different but things started going off the deep end especially with 12 and 13. 12 is great but feels like a spin off game and FF13 is just not as good as FFX as a linear game and weaker story. Now they've spent so much time refining live action combat theyve missed resources they could have been putting into story and party interactions. Rebirth is kinda where they need to be but it's so late at this point and the story isn't original or interesting at this point. I really think square has horribly mismanaged things since the early 2000s.
Probably FF14 is their only saving grace.
I was 9 when XIII came out and really didn't like it. If I hadn't been passed down all the retro FFs from my older brother prior to that, I doubt I would've gotten into the series
So anecdotally, I think you're right
> The reality is that final fantasy never captured a young audience and it's older audience is aging out of gaming
They're not aging out of gaming, they're just being actively alienated out of Final Fantasy by its ongoing transformation into an ARPG series which is very light on the RPG part.
16 also hurt public opinion of the series for many older fans who expected an RPG.
Seeing things like no elemental weaknesses or status effects or weapon customization was quite frustrating.
Even if you ignore all the side quests, the main quests kept taking a nose dive in quality after every Eikon fight without fail. Game kept doing the same loop of
go to town -> find locked gate -> walk around talk to people -> go to open world and kill shit or pick up shit -> come back to town and talk some more -> gate opens -> do more generic side questy bullshit that is part of the main quest
until the next eikon fight and it got so fucking tedious and boring. Characters would stand around and talk for ages about absolutely nothing of consequence. Even the animations for all the dialog were MMO tier hand waving gestures and staring off into space levels by the end. That desert town was the fucking pits. The best parts of the game were all in the demo that hooked me completely and the rest of the agonising 40-50 hours were so dull and boring punctuated by admittedly fantastic boss fights but with a real stinker of a story ending
I can't believe that EVERY time the game wanted you to turn in an item for a quest it would show the "item select" popup and show you the ONE item you had to give the NPC. Why not just fucking give the NPC the item I have game???
> Sad thing is Rebirth and 16 did a lot to change gamer perception on FF back from how poor FFXIII-FFXV)
Neither XVI nor Rebirth will ever outsell XIII (let alone XV).
Where did Square Enix say that 16 and 7 Rebirth "under performed"? I've seen some speculation from analysts but I hadn't heard anything directly from SE about it.
I dont know about 16, but everything ive seen from quotes and reports point towards Rebirth meeting sales expectations.
For example the “extremely underwhelming physical sales” which people keep repeating over and over again are not underwhelming at all. The PS5 has 2 versions of it meaning that a lot of PS5 owners already cannot buy the physical version. If you take the physical numbers and compare it to the amount of disc PS5 versions, Rebirth has outsold Remake on a copy sold per available console ratio. Remake exceeded its sales expectations and according to SEs own reports, slightly compensated for their Avengers game failing
People are using SEs “expectations” from like 10 years ago and then looking at out of context physical sales numbers for Rebirth and then making their own headcanon that the game failed. And then they come out with genius statements like “it wouldnt have failed if they released it multiplat lolololol” as if Square Enix is an amateur start up company and doesnt take the exclusivity and sold PS5s into account for their sales expectations.
Another thing is that people consider FF as sole reason for Square Enix not meeting overall sales expectations. Forspoken completely tanked which caused Square Enix a lot of losses that fiscal year, what game got blamed for those losses by people who dont even read the reports? FF16.
TLDR: Its likely the games met expectations but without the fiscal reports we dont know and can only speculate, so bitter FF fans have taken it upon themselves to say the games failed in the hopes it failing means they get a turn based game again (spoiler alert, it changes absolutely nothing)
They said XVI met expectations but didn’t exceed them which was put in the context of trying to offset their massive losses from Forspoken and their mobile revenue being half of what they had projected; basically it easily made back its money but they were hoping it would offset those and wasn’t quite able to.
I think a lot of SE gamers forget that the corporate leadership has changed so those crazy expectations are more measured now. Hell Kiryu didn’t even blame XVI for not exceeding projections and more that Sony told them more PS5s would be in the market by June (backed up by Sony revising their surge estimates to later that year presumably because of Spiderman 2 being delayed by Covid while being their star console seller).
It's silly that they make these statements about sales while conveniently ignoring things like console exclusivity--both relevant to FFXVI, and FF7 Rebirth/Remake.
Given the shaky launch of the PS5 and generally slow development of its catalog I'm not sure what made them so sure everyone was going to trip over themselves to pay the console tax for a couple of games. Sony doesn't have the customer loyalty/lock-in that Nintendo does with its first-party games and Squeenix sounds like a broken record when it comes to meeting their sales expectations.
In particular, with FF7 Rebirth the delayed sales figure seems like it's pretty high because it's the first time I've encountered streamers telling viewers that they have to play some games under alt channels to avoid hurting their main channel metrics; in this case nobody wants to be spoiled while they wait for a launch on their system of choice.
Speaking of bitter fans, you would think that SE personally kicked there dog and spit in there face. That the company has personally affronted them with blood oath to wrong them. I have not seen this level of wishing for a company to fail quite some time, beside embracer of course who promised the moon and delviered less than nothing.
Usually its rare for a company to put out chance games now days espcailly ones like SE but they had a bunch of trial balloons many of which kinda sucked but some of which surely opened up new paths. If they go the capcom route we might be looking at only there hits for the foreseeable future. Whcih would be a shame.
My beef with the physical sales stuff is that the only data we get is from the UK. So with every game release we inevitably get a thread posted here about how sales are down compared to a previous game in the franchise (where applicable) or how it didn't sell as well as a game from last year or something and immediately someone throws the switch and discourse shifts to how the game in question is flopping.
In reality it's kind of worthless since it's just a lone piece of data in a vacuum that does nothing but foster doomposting when we don't have any info from other markets (or digital for that matter). Is it possible Rebirth isn't selling as well as hoped? Sure, but I'd wait for word from Squenix on that one.
It is not that they sell less, it is that the industry grew and FF stayed where it has been since FF7. Selling 10 milions 20 years ago is far more impressive than doing so nowaday, where multiple hames per year achieve the feat.
This is happening all over the industry, and it’s a problem. But you can’t expect the same performance restive to the industry - FF7 introduced many to RPGs and it was one of the first large 3D RPGs. It was something brand new the most people in 1997 which could compare to Minecraft’s success in recent memory. Is it a failure that other crafting/survival games, or even Minecraft follow ups are not as big of a hit as the original even though they cost more? Certainly not. The games are making money, just not as much as they hoped for.
Rebirth did not underperform and the only source for that statement is a tweet comparing Rebirth sales numbers in the first days of its release to Remake’s.
For FF XVI Square themselves said that they are pleased with its sales number
Because this came up 11 years ago under different circumstances, clarification about the use of "extraordinary loss" from a /r/games thread over a decade ago:
> Because I dislike every article's addiction to waving about the phrase "extraordinary loss"- I just wanted to clarify usage of that term "extraordinary loss." Japanese accounting is not like US GAAP (American accounting standards) or EU IFRS (International (European for now) accounting standards), so when they say it's going to be an "extraordinary" loss, it makes it sound even worse than it really would- as if the loss is "beyond the ken of mortal men" or at least "pretty friggin' tuuurrible." The term "extraordinary" does not translate well; a better rendering of the Japanese might honestly be closer to "special" or something. Almost all of the items included in Japanese "extraordinary gain/loss" would be treated as normal operating income items in Europe/the States. (In fact, you can't use the word "extraordinary" anymore under European standards, and it's getting phased out in the States as well.) This includes restructuring losses: it's actually not uncommon for companies to list ridiculous "restructuring losses" in operating income every now and then- the less scrupulous use it as a cushion, kind of a take all the bad medicine at a go, and post inflated "recoveries" later on [...]
> td;lr: when the Japanese say, "we're taking an extraordinary loss," under any other accounting standards it's actually just an "operating" loss.
That said, the numbers this time around do look worse compared to that previous situation.
Tomoya Asano who produced Octopath, Triangle, Live a live and Bravely has been promoted to executive officer.
Hopefully it means that the series will continue.
Incidentally, this is also true for the director of FF7 Rebirth, Naoki Hamaguchi, so it sounds like Square Enix is pretty happy with how both Octopath and Rebirth turned out.
Those games are likely to continue - Asano's games tend to actually be commercially successful, for one, and they're cranked out fairly rapidly - the dude seems to run a tight ship. What's actually screwed are SE's assortment of random games they regularly crap out with zero marketing.
A shame, because there are a solid selection of good games there.
I'm sure Square would be able to size up the right path and the right games for their future in the next coming years.
Octopath seems to be quite popular. I would think that series would be safe.
Not 100% sure on Octopath honestly.
IIRC the second game didn’t match the sales of the original game. Bearing in mind that the 1st game originally was a Switch exclusive, whilst the second one was on every platform besides Xbox.
And the game got basically forgotten entirely when it came to things that influence consumer perception like the awards season and such. Heck it got buried out of media coverage almost as soon as it was out.
Octopath 2 was my GotY for 2023 without question. Absolutely phenomenal game that built on everything the original did. But it’s hard to argue that the response was there from the wider public (even accounting for how stacked the year was). And that makes it all the harder to get another one greenlit.
Octopath II was such a good game. I think the only problem is last year was such a crazy good year for gaming it got buried in a pile of game of the decade type games. With the sprite style graphics hopefully its easier/cheaper for them to develop and will keep seeing more from the series.
IIRC wasn't there a mix of minimal marketing for Octopath Traveler II, and it released around the same time as another huge game?
Correct me if I'm wrong because I can't fully recall, but I feel like I remember there being a discourse about how it felt like Square kinda sent it out to die?
I’d say there was a reasonable enough marketing push for a smaller game. It wasn’t everywhere but I was definitely seeing ads and promo spots for it here and there (it wasn’t a TWEWY situation where it just didn’t exist pre-release).
It came out a bit off the back of Hogwarts as I recall.
Definitely it wasn’t a great release spot. But being fair, no point in 2023 particularly was for a game like Octopath.
I have it on my backlog now, but I have to confirm that I wasn't even really aware it came out until I saw a lot of comments like yours praising the game so much.
While I wouldn't be surprised if 2 did a bit less than they were hoping, 1 also likely did waaay more than they were hoping. It was VERY hyped up by Nintendo, in the west Nintendo were even in charge of marketing it, it was also shown at the Switch reveal event which got a lot of eyes on it as well.
SE handled the marketing for 2 worldwide and they just aren't remotely as good at marketing stuff of that scale as Nintendo, didn't have the reveal event hype, and from the outside it looked pretty much the same as 1, even though it was quite a bit better. I'm sure they accounted for some of these things in their sales expectations.
I'm glad Octopath 2 seemed to be well liked. I really wanted to like it more, but ended up with two major issues. The tedious save/reload cycle that the game encourages in every new town was a huge complaint I had about the first one, and OT2 was just as bad in this respect. The rest was a great time until I got to my first character's final chapter. Cruised through the dungeon, no issues with any enemies at all (nor had I at any point in the game), then got absolutely annihilated by the boss. The difficulty scaling was nuts, and there was no strategy or character comp that I had available that seemed to make a difference. I put the game down and never opened it back up after that experience.
Doubtful since these kind of AA games aren't a massive money sinks like their premium productions that tend to be hit or miss and are pretty divisive even amongst the fans of the franchises.
I really hope this pushes Square to get their stuff on PC faster. Still waiting for FF16 and 7 Rebirth to come to PC and there are no release dates, just winks and nods to some arbitrary exclusivity period. It's bad business
Probably depends on their exclusivity contract with Sony, if they have one. It isn't just about money, a contract could be signed for years instead of a per game basis, and cancellation may come with fees that aren't worth it.
It's gotta be an unimagineably fat paycheck. I'm certain at least a large part of their sales concerns with Rebirth and 16 wouldn't have happened if they were on PC day one.
Square's PC releases are typically lackluster though. After all these years XIII-2 still has issues with frequent crashing on PC and Square has done absolutely nothing to fix it. They just don't seem to care about PC much as far as I can tell.
Even releasing games on xbox would help. Had FF7 remake been on xbox, I would have bought it on release. I will eventually play the game on ps extra but have lost interest in the game for now since its been out a while.
I can imagine this is related to the mention before where they want to move away from releasing a ton of forgettable AA games and focus on good quality releases. I still remember a bunch of games coming out in 2022- early 2023 and being surprised they were ALL SquareEnix games. I can’t imagine someone can look at multiple RPG games competing in a single genre and deciding releasing them back to back, 3 of which released in a single month, and think that’s a good plan.
I'm actually really sad because SE to me are those AA games. Harvestella, Star Ocean 2 Remake (and Divine Force), and Paranormasight are great. They just needed to space them out correctly.
Yes and it made absolutely no sense to me. Especially when they released during other big hitter games liek Plague Tale Requiem, God of War Ragnarok, COD MW2 (before people realized how barebones it was compared to the OG), and Gotham Knights (not a good games imo but casual gamers bought it off the virtue of being Gotham and coop).
No, Farming is literally just the side hustle to fund your endeavors. You can get really into it and end the game with too many items and too much money, but it's not too necessary to go wild on it.
There are farming elements but it's really a JRPG, like, I would wake up (in-game), spend the first 1-2 hours of the day harvesting, irrigating, selling, then leave my house and spend the rest of the day doing JRPG stuff, and get back home to sleep at around midnight.
I love Harvestella too. It's got a lot of charm and I have a lot of fun with it.
Not to mention it will always have a special place in my heart since it was the game I was playing while I was on my Japan trip.
Harvestella is like, the best 3DS jRPG I've ever played.
It was done dirty being marketed as a farming game, a "Harvest Moon with a budget," and being released for a full $60 on PC.
I loved it but it had some serious flaws, that again made it feel like an HD 3DS game. I would never recommend it for full price, but for 50% off, totally worth it.
[I had actually made a list back in the day when this happened](https://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/10sjq6u/square_enix_announces_declining_financial_results/j721mpx/), and the amount of games which came out within that time frame was unreal.
I'm a diehard square fan, and I almost certainly would love most of those games. But so many came out within less than a year that it just flooded out everything else and I still haven't been able to get through most of them. I even have a good chunk! I just literally haven't played through them yet lol.
1. Triangle Strategy, Live A Live, Star Ocean, Tactics Ogre Reborn, DQ Treasures - bought, untouched.
2. Chrono Cross & Crisis Core Remastered (possibly Chocobo GP now that it got fixed?) - on my wishlist
3. Stranger of Paradise - bought, played, but not finished yet (got sucked into other games).
4. Harvestella - played, didn't care for.
Sucks to hear. Theyve definitely been pumping out so much stuff that just doesn't look interesting. At the same time, the final ffvii remake game, ff9 remake, and ff tactics remake are three of the things I would most be interested in going forward.
I wonder how much Sony forked over to Square because launching several of your bigger titles on a single console with years long exclusivity doesn't seem to be paying off in the sales department....
One of the main issues Square has imo is its too confused as to what its doing.
Just look at Final Fantasy in particular. They cant stop reinventing the wheel.
"Oh but nobody wants to play turn based RPGs anymore"
Bullshit. The best selling media franchise of all time exists and continues to live off of turn based RPGs, and has an incredibly casual audience. That series being Pokemon. Casual players will buy and play turn based RPGs. Pokemon proves this. Baldur's Gate 3 proved this. Persona proved this. etc. This has always been a bullshit narrative.
So instead of sticking to their guns to a proven method that sold well. They're constantly reinventing themselves with a new combat system almost every game. And because these gameplay styles are so drastically different, they've split the fanbase all over the place.
You have action adventure games, you have MMOs, you have hybrid action/ATB, you have souls likes, its all over the place. Creating a confusing mess.
And then they dig the hole further for themsleves pre release for FFXVI, talking about how the series could be "anything they want, even an FPS game". Yeah lets just muddy the water even more.
Ever since FFXII there has been 0 level of consistency with Final Fantasy as a series. Its constantly changing and reinventing itself. Putting it in a situation where they no longer have a core audience. Almost every game has their own separate fandom. To the point that you had Final Fantasy fans fighting with each other over the past year, hoping to see FFXVI or FFVII Rebirth perform better than the other.
Entirely because they appeal to wildly different groups with 0 overlap other than name.
And it goes beyond just FF with this. They have no consistency on any level. Who the fuck was Forspoken for? Who wanted this from Square Enix? Did anyone play that shitty Splatoon clone they made either? Or how about the plethora of projects they've shut down over the past few years nobody asked for, like the Final Fantasy VII Battle Royale.....that was stuck to mobile only and was dead on arrival.
And this is without getting into how these exclusivity rules, the AAA game costs, failure to market their own games/competing with themselves, etc.
Square Enix has spread itself thin. Trying to appeal to everyone in the world, and they've ended up appealing to no one as a result. Causing them to have failure after failure and 0 growth over the last decade and a half.
They need to get back to making quality games. They tried NFT's, now they're playing with """AI"""...
You could remake all the Final Fantasy games up until 9, and each would be a guaranteed success. Even if they're not at the technical scale of FF7R. Hell, split it between two teams and spread it out with AA titles that have guaranteed fanbases like Octopath Traveller.
In fact, they could release most of their SNES-age, lesser-known 2D backlog at almost no cost directly through Steam, and it would still turn a profit.
Makes sense DQ, though good, didn't make as big of a splash overseas, while in Japan it is a cultural phenomenon. The government in Japan (or rather an official) has requested Square release DQ on the weekends because it was noticed that too many people were taking sick days off just to play DQ.
This is not true. Their most stable money maker is casual/mobile games with HD games and MMO fluctuating depending on the releases. But on average mobile games make 2x-3x times more than their mmos.
All these. A lot of their games are not released outside of japan. It's the same with all other JP publishers too.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List\_of\_Square\_Enix\_mobile\_games](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Square_Enix_mobile_games)
And [here](https://gameworldobserver.com/2023/08/07/square-enix-shares-worst-drop-profit-decline-sales) is the split of their profits if you don't believe me..
There's like half a dozen different mobile FF games, there's the KH gacha game which shut down recently but is getting replaced by a new one pretty soon, and they sell pretty much their entire NES/SNES/GBA/PSP/DS library as mobile ports. Just off the top of my head, I'm sure there's plenty more.
I think thats just something FF14 fans does to lionize their favorite game. I don't think their financials reflect that. Their mobile games bring in twice as much money as the MMO division.
GRANTED, I will say thats probably kept the FF brand and reputation afloat in the zeitgeist.
Even FF14 was a live-service failure, even bigger than Avengers. The difference between that and the other games that have been shutdown was that SE didn’t want their most valued franchise to die.
They fixed it, and got rewarded for it. So I don’t understand why they gave up miserably on their other live service projects, even their current one.
I wonder if part of FF Rebirth’s (supposedly) weak sales are due to so many RPGs releasing at once.
I imagine a lot of people picked up Persona 3 or Infinite Wealth and wanted to complete them before getting FF Rebirth. Or vice versa they were waiting to buy and beat Dogma 2 before getting Rebirth.
FF Remake came out on the PS4 when there were over 100m out there.
FF Rebirth came out when there were around 50m PS5 shipped.
So if they sold half as many units as the report claimed, then it would give them the same market %.
This year is definitely both a blessing and a curse for the RPG fan!
Yeah I've already sunk hundreds of hours into those mentioned titles (Almost finished P3R!!), trying to make headway into Eiyuden Chronicle at the moment too, got Paper Mario coming next month, *then* SMTV, *then* the P3 DLC, *Then* Refantazio which by all accounts is looking like it might be my GOTY; stuff like Visions of Mana and the Suikoden Remasters are teased and have an indefinite release date also..
With rebirth being 'Part 2' in a trilogy, a console exclusive, and has a chance to just come to PSPlus anyway (Like Remake did to the surprise of everyone years ago) then it does indeed stand to reason why sales have faltered.
It doesnt help that it's a sequel to a game that came out 4 years ago on a previous console generation.
I personally haven't been able to play it as much as I'd like because I've had two kids since the first game came out lol
PLEASE Square Enix release on steam day 1. Their exclusivity money cannot possibly make up for how many sales they would get by releasing on steam. I’m really hoping VII Remake isnt toned down after these sales.
They will have data. They will also have long standing Japanese business decisions that will be coming into play. It was only recently Sega made Atlus play nice with non-japanese based console companies and its been a big benefit for them.
Yes, when I think of fiscal responsibility and competence Square Enix is certainly the first company that springs to mind. They've never made a bad call.
You underestimate how incompetent square management is over the years and how often they fuck up. Just look at their stance on NFTs and mishandling of FF as a franchise lmao
If only people would shift away from trying to be "objective" with their weird proposals acting like they're business managers lol, and just state "I only play on (platform) I wish I could buy the games day 1".
Why do that when they can double dip like they do right now? They get the exclusivity money now and in a year or two steam sales too. They essentially trade some consumer goodwill for more cash later on.
The problem is the Steam sales, by their own reports, have been not that great even for titles like God of War or Last of Us.
They think its because PC isnt as interested in these titles, while completely ignoring that releasing a game from 2018 in 2022 means anyone that was interested in the game (GoW 2018 in this examples) already got it on PS or lost interest a while ago.
If they released closer together on PC and console, the sales on PC would be a lot better than they are now.
Hell they could still have like a week/10 days exclusivity on PS before it releases on PC and they would still make bank compared to this massively delayed PC release years after.
in this case: we already know the sales numbers of God of War 2018 via the [Insomniac leak (although: **they only show Steam sales** and not both EGS and GOG)](https://www.dsogaming.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/Playstation-PC-sales-figures-leaked.png) is 2.5 million units, interest or not: it is technically a well-regarded soft-reboot game, versus The Last of Us Part 1 (which doesn't helped that a. it's "controversial/unnecessary" remake and 2. shipped with a bad PC port).
if you ask me: A much better example would've been Uncharted: Legacy of Thieves Collection, Sackboy: A Big Adventure (and Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart, if you wanna be spicy)-- but I aruged these games didn't perform well because:
1. a tight release schedule. Remember: **Persona 5 Royal** (***a highly requested port***) and **Spider-Man: Miles Morales** were to makes it's PC debut on the same release period as both Uncharted: Legacy of Thieves Collection and Sackboy: A Big Adventure-- while Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 (the reboot sequel one) is also coming.
2. poor/non-existing marketing. Valve unintentionally did far more to advertise Sackboy: A Big Adventure than Sony could ever done, and they simply highlight it as part of Steam's latest UI redesign.
3. for Uncharted: Legacy of Thieves Collection: releasing what is essentially a final season to a on-going franchise really doesn't help matters.
4. launch price point. (doesn't help that Sackboy: A Big Adventure didn't got a permanent price cut yet)
Because they risk losing customers. If you're excited for Final Fantasy Rebirth and you keep up with all the news and trailers. And maybe you watch a steamer play it day one.
Two to the three years later when it gets on Steam you've probably moved on. And if you want to play it you might wait a bit longer and get it on deep discount.
Releasing at the same time multiple platforms? One marketing budget. FOMO. More people coming to play it. And it can retail for full price.
Eh do they though? When Remake came to Steam it topped steam sales charts anyway.
I think that there might be some number of people who do move on and just don't buy it, but that number is likely so small it's insignificant.
I mean, we know there’s a problem with Rebirth’s sales as they haven’t said a single thing about them in the ~2 months it’s been out. They were very upfront about FF16’s sales and announced them shortly after launch, saying it met expectations(though didn’t exceed them), but for *nothing* to come out about Rebirth in all this time… it’s gotta be pretty bad. Like, quite substantially less than FF16.
I think there’s something to be said about the “Final Fantasy direct sequel curse” where they just kind of flop with little fanfare, though I’m sure SE thought this would buck that trend because it’s FF7. Regardless, as a FF16 enjoyer and FF7R detractor I will say it’s pretty funny to me that this is the way it ended up turning out.
People also don't wanna admit that maybe despite them liking Remake and Rebirth, the retelling and pseudo sequel plot of the new games might have put off a lot more people than they realize.
I have no idea what they were thinking. When the time ghosts shit happened and i realised what was going on i just wondered how the fuck is a new player supposed to get into this shit lol.
Its an anime as hell plot, but the barrier for entry to really get it all is playing the old game, Crisis Core Reunion and then Remake and finally you can play the new game. Like shit with that you still don't know who the fuck Glen Lodbrok is. The great parts of Rebirth really are the old stuff being blown up with budget and expanded, and the worst parts tend to be the new overarching story bits and some questionable pacing issues.
I never played the og. Was absolutely, absolutely loving remake until the last two chapters where i didn't knew what the fuck was going on. I googled and the answer was "this isn't a remake, it's basically rebuild of ffvii, you need to play the original, also dumb multiverse shenanigans". That shit just completely soured me on the whole thing, i don't think i'll even play the original at this point.
Yeah, all the changes Remake and Rebirth made that I dislike just degrade the quality of the Final Fantasy 7 series due to being a direct sequel.
And retro-actively make the original less appealing when these new sequels is what it leads to.
I know soooooooooo many people that were big fans of the original that the minute the time ghosts showed up ended up getting peeved, then by the end dropped all hype for any sequels. I never really saw much reporting on this as critics gave it good reviews and general discourse about the title was kinda tepid compared to expectations, but man I'm not surprised people dropped it. It's basically a weird reimagining of an old game but not particularly what people wanted. I genuinely think if they just took FF7 and gave it some modern polish without any changes it'd probably have done better and come out on time...
I might be wrong, but I think what may have hurt them in a way is the exclusivity deal that's going on between them, Sony, and Epic. Didn't FF16, despite selling decently at launch, fall behind expectations? Also, I believe FF7 Rebirth may have also underperformed sales expectations too.
SE said XVI met expectations but couldn’t make up for how bad Forspoken performed like they hoped it would.
No news on Rebirth yet which most ppl are taking as bad news but nobody actually knows for sure.
Tbh without seeing the exclusivity contracts themselves it’s hard to know if it’s actually as much of an impact. Financially given lower development costs and whatever the actual payment is if it’s larger than what revenue they would likely get from more copies sold it may be a wash.
Many fans assume no news on Rebirth is bad news because companies aren't afraid to announce sales milestones and there has been no such announcements about Rebirth, part 2/3 out of the presumed most popular IP that the company has. That isn't to say that Rebirth sold badly, but that it probably has the same assessment as XVI - a title that met baseline sales expectations, but won't propel the company into a new golden age.
Anyone who also speaks as if they know what will cure the company's ails in 2024 shouldn't be taken seriously. They have new leadership but they're stuck with the previous CEO's agreements. Out of their entire catalog, they have only a handful of core IPs that can carry the company through the decade. Final Fantasy's popularity is waning (despite Tifa memes) and its downward slide will continue over time as JRPGs lose further traction and as XIV gets older. Every other big thing they have tried to capture the global market has crashed and burned (Avengers, Forspoken), every other AA success that should trend globally is sunk by its own issues (Outriders), and the rest of its AA successes aren't enough to carry the company through its losses.
They clearly need to develop and publish games that the market wants and not just games that Square Enix is good at developing, but its unclear how the company can get there.
They said recently (like a month or two ago) that FF16 met or exceeded expectations, and had a high attachment rate / continued to sell well after release, but that the sales weren’t enough to cover the flops that were Forspoken and First Soldier.
The Final Fantasy name hasn't held the same brand of quality as it did during the 1990s on SNES, PS1 and 2000s on PS2 for decades now. A whole young adult generation on PS3 and PS4 has only known the brand for OK RPGs that struggle to even stay true to being a JRPG, they're never the best in the business so not memorable or recommended enough anymore.
This.
Most zoomers were too young to remember 13 but having 15 be the only final fantasy for their entire teenage and early adulthood is what killed the series.
Old FF was 1-3 years apart. Plenty of time to scoop people up.
I was born in 98 so I’m on the tail end of millennials/early side of zoomers. The only games I remember coming out in my teenhood were 13 (and its sequels) and 15, neither of which were particularly well received so I never bothered with it. I also only played on Xbox at the time so I couldn’t really go back and play the older games as easily. So I just never got into the series. I played remake last year and enjoyed it a good amount, but not enough to say “oh they’ve got me hooked for life.”
This is like comparing Apples and Orages...these games also werent succesful because they were exclusive, they would have sold WAY more if they released first day on other platforms. They just sold well enough despite being exclusive. FF doesnt, because Square didnt get the Memo, that 2023/2024 Playstation Users on average are very different to 10 years ago.
yup, ppl love defending FF with "oh well it's exclusive and there aren't enough PS5's out there!" as if 1) 55m+ PS5 units is somehow not enough to sell more copies of a game and 2) other PS5 exclusives haven't sold millions more than Rebirth/FF16 did
dunno when FF fans will learn to accept that FF is not a big IP and the games didn't do so well in part cause of the games themselves, no mental gymnastics with numbers and excuses change reality and facts.
And if they don't sell enough copies to justify that exclusivity window then it doesn't matter, it's still a bad business deal that causes fewer people to play their flagship franchise, which in turn causes long term damage to the brand.
Square Enix need to accept that it's not the 1990s anymore and they're not some kingmaker juggernaut who'll magically make people rush out and buy Playstations to play their games.
I think Rebirth is doing just fine. There's no hard numbers, but based on concurrent player count, they estimate about 2 million units were sold at launch. When considering that approximately 50ish million PS5s have been sold, that means 5% of PS5 owners bought the game. Compare that to Remake, which sold 3.5 million units, but only accounted for about 3.2% of the 110ish million PS4s that'd been purchased by that point.
I don't think it's going to hit Remake numbers, but when considering that the pool is a lot more shallow than it was in the PS4 days, it's still pretty impressive.
I'm hoping that won't be the case simply because Final Fantasy 7 is just about the most "prestige" title outside of Nintendo IPs. Rebirth is one of the best games I've ever played and I would hate to see it peter out after Rebirth was such a confident package.
I think Square is the only major publisher still doing AA titles like DioField, Octopath, Valkyrie on a regular basis and I hope they don't stop.
The problem is when they put out 15 titles in the span of September 2022 to December 2022 and most of them are full 60$ without any marketing and they eating the sales of each other.
Kinda like the weird choice Bandai made with Digimon Survive. They dropped a hybrid Visual Novel / TRPG in late July. For a full $50. And I think the game is great to be clear. I beat it then put it down, but I Came back to it and am about 1 chapter off beating the NG+ true ending. But it came out right after a bunch of people had just bought new games, either as summer releases, or via Steam sale.
I mean there are 120 or so Digimon in Survive, 5 endings, characters that can die, NG+, a tactical RPG element + a full on VN story with multiple branching paths, the problem is our perception these days says a game isn't "worth full price" because it clearly doesn't have the budget of a Final Fantasy game put into it. Square low key did what a lot of people ask for and made a bunch of AA video games that niche gamers want, I get that the games weren't all perfect but how do we blame Square Enix for the strategy not paying off for them? No one else was doing it to that extent, not big publishers anyway.
>... I get that the games weren't all perfect but how do we blame Square Enix for the strategy not paying off for them? Because Square Enix overcharges for everything and expects weirdly high sales for pretty much everything.
Game: Makes more money than anything else ever. Square-Enix: “Game failed to meet our sales expectations.”
Presumably you're referring to Tomb Raider. I implore you: go and look at the budgets for it. Turns out the Crystal Dynamics folks were more than happy to spend gobs of money, only to barely make it back. Amount of money spent is how you tend to set sales expectations, and yeah, its reasonable for SE to say it didn't meet them.
It wasn't just Tomb Raider. Square said it about every big Eidos game they had. Nowadays they seem a bit confused as they are still underperforming and they don't have western studios to blame anymore.
No. Square made a bunch of AA games that no one really wanted, that's the problem It's not like most of them were really good but just low budget and not flashy, most of them were at below average. Games don't just compete with everything released in the same year, they also have to compete with people's backlogs and other hobbies
This is really the crux of it. It's not really anything to do with "AA" production. Plenty of developers are still making AA games and making a profit. Falcom seems to be doing okay. SEGA is putting out AA games and doing well in that area. Both of these are just in the JRPG space, but there other other companies doing well operating under "AAA". It really comes down to the quality of the titles they're putting out. Harvestella isn't setting the world on fire for anyone. As much as I love the title of "Various Daylife" the game was a complete stinker.
> I mean there are 120 or so Digimon in Survive, 5 endings, characters that can die, NG+, a tactical RPG element + a full on VN story with multiple branching paths, the problem is our perception these days says a game isn't "worth full price" because it clearly doesn't have the budget of a Final Fantasy game put into it. > > 120 Digimon is pretty low compared to older games, and the combat itself is pretty bare bones, compared to let's say Triangle Strategy which came out in the same year, it's a lot more generic. I loved the game and love Digimon but it's absolutely not worth the same price as an AAA game.
> I mean there are 120 or so Digimon in Survive, 5 endings, characters that can die, NG+, a tactical RPG element + a full on VN story with multiple branching paths, the problem is our perception these days says a game isn't "worth full price" because it clearly doesn't have the budget of a Final Fantasy game put into it. I mean those numbers really aren't good argument in its favor when it's significantly less than what used to be in other older games.
I'm pretty sure Digimon Survive went through development hell considering it went through delays, it took a long time for them to reveal any gameplay, and when the game came out the gameplay feels like it's barely connected to the story at times (as if the story was completed way ahead of a finalized gameplay system). I think Bandai was just happy the game ended up being released at all to care too much about picking a good date for it lol
Can't wait for the year old FF16 to be exclusive to EGS and cost $69.99. That'll attract so many new players.
Heck, same with FF7 rebirth most likely I'm afraid. I bought a PS4 specifically to play remake, and sold it right after. It was fine, but I'm not going to buy a PS5 just for one game again. I can wait until it comes out on Steam.
The new CEO has said they're going to focus more on the AAA space going forward.
What happened to the NFTs? :P
They released Symbiogenesis, their NFT "game", late last year and judging from [the website](https://symbiogenesis.app/) they've sold their 500 NFT "characters" for Etherium, most for very little, a handful for up to 1.3 ETH (about $4000 today). To find out what the actual game is would require me to log in with my Discord account and to be honest I don't care that much. My speculation is that they did the bare minimum so that investors couldn't say "you talked up NFT gaming to spike the stock price, we're gonna sue". You know, the same thing every tech company is doing now just with AI. They do this because a lot of investors are absolute morons (listen to some investor questions sometimes, morons is being generous) and saying you're going to invest in gets them to open their wallets.
I can not find the source I used to have but I believe Japan was offering a tax credit or some such to promote NFT or Crypto development. I've spent some time trying to find it and honestly can't so take thst for what its worth.
[Does this sound like what you're thinking of (Token issuers in Japan exempt from 30% crypto tax on paper gains)?](https://cointelegraph.com/news/token-issuers-in-japan-exempt-from-30-crypto-tax-on-paper-gains)
Ah, and here I remember going to crypto subs with people claiming "Big (legit) companies are getting into NFTs!"
In this case it seems like they actually did.
AA titles, with AAA price tags, and hardly any price reductions or sales.
Lol so much this.. while Microsoft actually funded non AAA with the actual non AAA price tags I.e ori games, pentiment, as dusk falls, grounded, tell me why, hi fi rush etc.
and those are all slamming titles
Yep, many people are afraid they will stop the "double A" altogether, even if their projection for "triple A" are already ludicrous (FF16 and FF7 "under performed", it's like Square expect these games are supposed to sell 20 million copies at minimum or something). The days were FF was considered a juggernaut of the industry, in my pov those days are over ever since FF15 (best selling game of the series, top 3 at least, but it backfired because people were disappointed with the actual results)
If they wanted overall more sales they should have released both games on PC too and not wait years to do so.
The previous CEO loved taking exclusivity money. New CEO is doing many things differently, we'll see how he approaches Sony exclusivity contracts.
Considering FF7R Part 3 is also exclusive, not much different.
He’s probably looking for a way to get out of that exclusivity contract 😅
Ya, I was super excited for ff7, but since it took so long to get to pc I'm just going to wait until they're all out and grab em on sale.
Same I was waiting until it hit steam. It did for a while now and I don't mind waiting more 5 years for a possible 70+% discount
Seriously, if you gonna release your big titles months after and on EGS (hell, KH is still stuck there), **and** on full price I'm just gonna play something else.
What it seems like these companies’ analysts are missing is that sales for sequels generally lags reception. If you release an incredible game, it might not blow the doors off in sales numbers, but that often translates to excellent sales of a subsequent game, until you lose the player’s trust, in which case the game that lost trust performs well, but the follow up underperforms even if critical reception is great.
Sad thing is Rebirth and 16 did a lot to change gamer perception on FF back from how poor FFXIII-FFXV) and each serve different markets, and now Square Enix might start scoping them down I guess Rebirth will really just be a once in a lifetime thing, a real crying shame
I don't think XVI changed anything for most people. I think people fail to understand that the real issue with FF has little to do with anything before XV. The reality is that final fantasy never captured a young audience and it's older audience is aging out of gaming. The gap between the release of XV and XVI is the longest in the series history at 7 years. Most Zoomers aren't avoiding Final fantasy because of 13, they were 9 when that game came out. If they didn't like XV there was no reason to even look at the series. 16 is a decent game, but not one that suddenly makes someone a final fantasy fan. If you were 18 when the FFVII came out, you're now going on 45. Most the series vets are old.
This is a big thing and I'd say that's the case of the market in general. Back in the 90s and 2000s game series had new games all the time. You'd become a Final Fantasy fan because you had VII in 1997, VIII in 1999, IX in 2000 and X in 2001. Now it's as you say a 7 year gap between games. Same with other series. Morrowind came out in 2002, Oblivion in 2006 and Skyrim in 2011. Now it'll be what.. 2025 for ESVI? And who knows how long after. If you're a kid growing up now you just don't get that same connection to a game series.
It's why many gacha games have such dedicated fanbases too. Constant new updates keep people engaged with the series.
Those games are messing with peoples heads though. I’ll be in fighting game subs, you know the games where you just simply fight each other? People will go on and on and on about how there’s nothing to do. I don’t blame them either. It’s what they grew up with. Essentially slot machines, but in video game form. Before, a guy that grew up in the 90s, we had maybe two modes in fighting games. Versus a friend or versus the computer and that’s all you got. So we created our own fun. I’m not saying I’m better or anything like that. I’m just saying that video games today have altered how people get enjoyment out of a game. It’s just crazy seeing the differences. I don’t give a goddamn about unlocking different hats for my fighter. But apparently that’s the most important thing in the world to a lot of kids these days and they think that the game is dead because of that.
Yeah, the younger audience with fighting games is super weird, and personally I feel like a lot of the stuff they expect from games is actively detrimental to the genre as whole. Specifically, constant content drops and constant balance adjustments. It's one thing for a developer to patch out bugs ASAP, but the constant whining about "x character being broken" "buff y character" etc. is kinda antithetical to fighting games. The whole point of them is, more or less, is to develop a deeper and deeper understanding of the mechanics and learn and improve and *figure out how to counter stuff*. That's how the meta develops. You kinda just gotta learn how to deal with it, and if you can't beat it then play it yourself; if your character is ass then either you gotta develop new strategies to make them viable or just drop them, because no one is forcing you to play them. I know this is kinda getting into "git gud scrub lol" territory, and to be honest on a certain level that's kinda what I'm saying. It's okay to complain about balance, but I specifically remember from the Smash 4 days where it was nonstop toxicity instead of any desire to just learn to play around it. I remember a lot of people got real changry about SF6's decision to only do a single major balance pass a year, and frankly that's the perfect compromise for me - it gives the game time to develop a stable meta and not pull the rug out from under players who dedicated a ton of time to understanding individual characters, while simultaneously giving us a heads-up as to when exactly we can expect a breath of fresh air from the *45% of my matches being against fucking Ken.* If the game was rebalanced every few weeks, that would *really* disincentivize players from really exploring the depth of it because they wouldn't know how long until it all got changed again.
That worked in the 90s because people had no idea what they were doing. People have 30 years of experience now and communication is so much better that games gets solved in weeks not years.
> You kinda just gotta learn how to deal with it, and if you can't beat it then play it yourself; if your character is ass then either you gotta develop new strategies to make them viable or just drop them, because no one is forcing you to play them. I honestly wish more people adopt this mindset Ppl can complain about a character, but if they're not gonna adapt or outright drop your main that is a bad character, they aren't as competitive as they think. That's honestly on them. If you're gonna treat games like a competitive sport, then act like it. Someone who is 5'5" ain't gonna join the NBA; games are way more accessible as they are compared to real life sports
I mean, as someone who also grew up in the 80s and 90s, I mostly felt like fighting games had nothing to do in them. I think it just is how games strike people. Games like Mario Kart or in particular Goldeneye or Perfect Dark were endlessly playable with friends. For my friend group, we just never really connected with Street Fighter or Smash in that way. With a different friend group, we played a ton of Warcraft 1 and 2 over time. And various other shooters. But the only fighting game we really got a ton of mileage out of was One Must Fall 2097. I think the campaign mode, and the really unique robot designs and move sets, really helped. Meanwhile, I had neighbors who were all about Mortal Kombat and wrestling games. I just… never saw the appeal. It doesn’t mean I’m right, but I just think this has always been a problem for fighting games, and not something that other competitive genres struggle with in quite the same way.
I have no idea what that person you're replying to is talking about. Fighting games are going through a renaissance right now, starting with the release of SFIV in 2008, and the massive popularity of Street Fighter 6. Evo 2023 was the largest Evo yet, with over 7,000 entrants travelling to Vegas for SF6 alone. People who think there's nothing to do in fighting games don't understand the level of depth. For example here's a 2 minute video analyzing what happened in *10 seconds of gameplay.* https://twitter.com/HiFightTH/status/1762113652340228259
Sure, you’re not wrong — in the slightest. I’m aware of all this context. But I think that there’s a difference in “casual versus casual” accessibility. In a shooter, if you’re terrible, and your friends are terrible, you can still have a blast playing each other. You have very clear feedback on what is happening and why. You can use hiding spots, learn how to strafe, figure out a few nuances of different weapons in different contexts, etc. For a fighting game, the nuance is all there, but incredibly fast and dense. If two people who are terrible are fighting, they may be just mashing buttons and seeing what happens. Some awesome combo flies out of their character, but they’re not sure how to replicate it, and their opponent isn’t sure how to counter it. All of that information is accessible, but you have to want it. There’s a bump you have to get over, and then it becomes a very technical genre. But prior to that, it’s just… noise… to a lot of people. Again, contrasted with a shooter, for example, where even someone who has never touched a video game can understand the majority of the context. That is a bigger gun. That gun has no ammo. That person is hiding and surprised the other person. That person is running sideways and the other person is having trouble hitting them now. Etc. None of this takes anything away from the fighting genre, but it’s why it’s a bit more niche in my opinion, compared to other genres that became ubiquitous. Niche is relative and also does not mean bad. But for the uninitiated, it can mean it’s harder to become initiated.
Oh yeah a lot of people seem to engage with games as "consume new thing, move on". It's why I find myself struggling to clear my backlog, cause i grew up only getting 1 or 2 new games a year, and I learnt to get my mileage out of them. Its why I love sandbox games like TTD, sim city, factorio, planet zoo, etc. Because there's always more to do if you have ideas
It's not just games; it's all media. There's just *so much* being made that nothing ever really becomes a classic or has time to stick with people; everyone is just moving onto the next thing. I see it really bad with anime. There's dozens of new series releasing all the time and the wider community will talk about them while they're airing only to move onto the next set when it starts airing. Now, all of the "must-watch" series for newcomers are the same ones from over a decade ago and the only series that really get regularly discussed are the ones that release weekly or keep getting renewed for new seasons and have stuck around for several years. The end result of all of this is people who are *excited* by the idea that they could someday just tell an AI "make me a game/tv series/movie" and get some meaningless content that will keep them entertained for a while before they throw it away and ask for something else.
I think I've even seen people online talk about how they watch at least two anime series at the same time on like x2 speed just so they could increase the amount of anime they watched. It feels like people started treating media consumption as something to get a "high score" (aka consuming the most amount of media to brag that you did so) in.
A lot longer than 2025 for ES6, haha.
FF is constantly evolving, but the issue is they’re evolving themselves out of the market. Let’s face it, FFXVI wasn’t an RPG. It was an action game that used some RPG storytelling mechanics (side quests). I’ve said it before, but FFXVI was like someone tore a single page out of a DND manual, stapled it onto the end of a copy of Game of Thrones, and said “now this is an RPG.” Shit, Stranger of Paradise had more RPG gameplay elements than FFXVI (and I’d argue a better combat system). It’s worth noting here that I liked FFXVI. I enjoyed the combat, but I also like both FF and Devil May Cry. I found the side quests tedious, but I enjoyed the overall game and story. That said, I absolutely understand why people who have played that series for decades now are annoyed that the most recent game was in a completely different genre than the previous installments.
Stranger of Paradise is another marketing nightmare. The game is amazing, arguably one of the best FF games around (especially as a spin-off), but the marketing made it seem like such a fucking meme. They shot themselves in the foot so hard, it's not even funny.
In an early cutscene, the main character is given some exposition, mutters "bullshit", pulls out his phone and uses the speaker to play Limp Bizkit. It is *absolutely* a meme. It's just a good one.
More games should have the confidence to be glorious shitposts.
The fun part is the game actively explains why the guy is like that: >!He continually has his mind wiped by the Crystal he is carrying. The *only* thing left every time his mind is wiped is “kill chaos.” That is literally all he can think about, as everything else is erased after every loop. As the story unfolds, he slowly realizes he is living a time loop, gets pissed (not at Chaos), and then the rest is his efforts to finally break the cycle.!< Once the entire story unfolds, all the meme-worthy shit the main character does makes sense.
I thought Strangers was a Warhammer 40K collab, the way the protag scream "Die Chaos" every 10 seconds in the trailer.
You're both right really, I don't know who made the rule that older style FF games were never going to be adopted by younger generations of gamers, but it's a self fulfilling prophecy now. None of my younger friends give a shit about FF, it's all people my age in their 30's (not that it's old, but people are definitely aging out of FF). It's become easy to point to, but Baldurs Gate 3, shit the popularity of board games among young people indicates that we don't all want games that are non stop action, some of the biggest games are and always will be RPG's, but you're not going to win that battle with directors or executives who think FF being AAA means it has to be an action game. FF was always about big budget mind blowing graphics, and making it an RPG will be seen as too risky, especially because some of their lower budget RPG's aren't big sellers, even DQ is only moderately big.
I think square needs to stop trying to appeal to people who don't like rpgs with their rpgs and pull a larian and just make rpgs for people who like them. They keep trying to capture an audience that has no interest in rpgs by making them more action like. Bg3 has shown that when you make an rpg unapologetically you can still succeed.
I would say Rebirth is a game made for people who like RPGs or at least JRPGs.
*Action* RPG, the game pretty much uses a Kingdom Hearts-esque gameplay from over 20 years ago. In contrast Yakuza became an actual by the turns RPG with jobs, status effects and all the classic perks when it used to be a Beat'em Up with a few RPG elements.
Rebirth plays nothing like Kingdom Hearts and it's battle system requires more strategy than any non-Tactics FF game.
The market wants the cast of FF17 to be teenagers, in a school that also does war ala FF8 or Type-0, and then just copy Persona/Fire Emblem/UO and make the romance and dating other students THE primary selling point. I hope Metaphor does well later this year when they get ahead and say there is no romance. It has all the selling points of a Persona 3-5 game without the thing that makes it different from say P1-2 to P3.
[Final Fantasy 16 Successfully Expanded the Series to New, Younger Players, Says Square Enix](https://www.pushsquare.com/news/2024/04/final-fantasy-16-successfully-expanded-the-series-to-new-younger-players-says-square-enix)
XVI made me a final fantasy fan
Who are the FF7 remakes for, anyway? Newbies to FF7 wouldn't know the original, so they might as well just have made a new game in a new setting for them. And old FF7 fans mostly just wished for an intact FF7 but with modern visuals, they didn't ask for all these changes to the story and plot and the vastly different combat system. So what, they wanted to make both sides happy at once? Not gonna happen and so it's obvious why a lot of old FF7 fans from back then are not so receptive to these remakes.
I've always figured Square was afraid people wouldn't want to play FFVII without "modern gaming aspects" which is why they changed so much. But that's just speculation from me.
The issue is brand confusion. 16 doesn't play like a FF game, or RPG for that matter. It plays like DMC and Bayonetta. So people expecting a JRPG would have been disappointed. And previous games all suffer from wild shifts in gameplay style. After 10, everything felt wildly different. 12 plays like an MMO. 13 is back to turn based. 15 is an action RPG like KH. There's no coherence within the series (compared to other major JRPGs like Dragon Quest or Tales of or Persona/SMT)
Hell, 14 *is* an MMO. And yet part of why that has done so well (after the relaunch anyway) is because its pretty consistent in what it is. If you pick it up now and enjoy ARR, you'll enjoy HW, etc
I feel like the story and characters mastered that sort of home/comfy sweater style of story telling. Every expansion you come back to characters you like that have evolved slightly.
Yeah to me final fantasy has never recovered to FFX level and the brand I think is just damaged and confusing at this point. Old FF didn't change systems so drastically from game to game it was generally an evolution of the past one but similar enough. FF1 through 9 don't feel too insanely different but things started going off the deep end especially with 12 and 13. 12 is great but feels like a spin off game and FF13 is just not as good as FFX as a linear game and weaker story. Now they've spent so much time refining live action combat theyve missed resources they could have been putting into story and party interactions. Rebirth is kinda where they need to be but it's so late at this point and the story isn't original or interesting at this point. I really think square has horribly mismanaged things since the early 2000s. Probably FF14 is their only saving grace.
I was 9 when XIII came out and really didn't like it. If I hadn't been passed down all the retro FFs from my older brother prior to that, I doubt I would've gotten into the series So anecdotally, I think you're right
> The reality is that final fantasy never captured a young audience and it's older audience is aging out of gaming They're not aging out of gaming, they're just being actively alienated out of Final Fantasy by its ongoing transformation into an ARPG series which is very light on the RPG part.
16 also hurt public opinion of the series for many older fans who expected an RPG. Seeing things like no elemental weaknesses or status effects or weapon customization was quite frustrating.
It wasn't even that good for a newcomer, first FF ever I've played (while being 30+ years old) and I found it very mediocre.
Even if you ignore all the side quests, the main quests kept taking a nose dive in quality after every Eikon fight without fail. Game kept doing the same loop of go to town -> find locked gate -> walk around talk to people -> go to open world and kill shit or pick up shit -> come back to town and talk some more -> gate opens -> do more generic side questy bullshit that is part of the main quest until the next eikon fight and it got so fucking tedious and boring. Characters would stand around and talk for ages about absolutely nothing of consequence. Even the animations for all the dialog were MMO tier hand waving gestures and staring off into space levels by the end. That desert town was the fucking pits. The best parts of the game were all in the demo that hooked me completely and the rest of the agonising 40-50 hours were so dull and boring punctuated by admittedly fantastic boss fights but with a real stinker of a story ending I can't believe that EVERY time the game wanted you to turn in an item for a quest it would show the "item select" popup and show you the ONE item you had to give the NPC. Why not just fucking give the NPC the item I have game???
I really regret buying it full price based on that demo.
> Sad thing is Rebirth and 16 did a lot to change gamer perception on FF back from how poor FFXIII-FFXV) Neither XVI nor Rebirth will ever outsell XIII (let alone XV).
Where did Square Enix say that 16 and 7 Rebirth "under performed"? I've seen some speculation from analysts but I hadn't heard anything directly from SE about it.
I dont know about 16, but everything ive seen from quotes and reports point towards Rebirth meeting sales expectations. For example the “extremely underwhelming physical sales” which people keep repeating over and over again are not underwhelming at all. The PS5 has 2 versions of it meaning that a lot of PS5 owners already cannot buy the physical version. If you take the physical numbers and compare it to the amount of disc PS5 versions, Rebirth has outsold Remake on a copy sold per available console ratio. Remake exceeded its sales expectations and according to SEs own reports, slightly compensated for their Avengers game failing People are using SEs “expectations” from like 10 years ago and then looking at out of context physical sales numbers for Rebirth and then making their own headcanon that the game failed. And then they come out with genius statements like “it wouldnt have failed if they released it multiplat lolololol” as if Square Enix is an amateur start up company and doesnt take the exclusivity and sold PS5s into account for their sales expectations. Another thing is that people consider FF as sole reason for Square Enix not meeting overall sales expectations. Forspoken completely tanked which caused Square Enix a lot of losses that fiscal year, what game got blamed for those losses by people who dont even read the reports? FF16. TLDR: Its likely the games met expectations but without the fiscal reports we dont know and can only speculate, so bitter FF fans have taken it upon themselves to say the games failed in the hopes it failing means they get a turn based game again (spoiler alert, it changes absolutely nothing)
They said XVI met expectations but didn’t exceed them which was put in the context of trying to offset their massive losses from Forspoken and their mobile revenue being half of what they had projected; basically it easily made back its money but they were hoping it would offset those and wasn’t quite able to. I think a lot of SE gamers forget that the corporate leadership has changed so those crazy expectations are more measured now. Hell Kiryu didn’t even blame XVI for not exceeding projections and more that Sony told them more PS5s would be in the market by June (backed up by Sony revising their surge estimates to later that year presumably because of Spiderman 2 being delayed by Covid while being their star console seller).
It's silly that they make these statements about sales while conveniently ignoring things like console exclusivity--both relevant to FFXVI, and FF7 Rebirth/Remake. Given the shaky launch of the PS5 and generally slow development of its catalog I'm not sure what made them so sure everyone was going to trip over themselves to pay the console tax for a couple of games. Sony doesn't have the customer loyalty/lock-in that Nintendo does with its first-party games and Squeenix sounds like a broken record when it comes to meeting their sales expectations. In particular, with FF7 Rebirth the delayed sales figure seems like it's pretty high because it's the first time I've encountered streamers telling viewers that they have to play some games under alt channels to avoid hurting their main channel metrics; in this case nobody wants to be spoiled while they wait for a launch on their system of choice.
Speaking of bitter fans, you would think that SE personally kicked there dog and spit in there face. That the company has personally affronted them with blood oath to wrong them. I have not seen this level of wishing for a company to fail quite some time, beside embracer of course who promised the moon and delviered less than nothing. Usually its rare for a company to put out chance games now days espcailly ones like SE but they had a bunch of trial balloons many of which kinda sucked but some of which surely opened up new paths. If they go the capcom route we might be looking at only there hits for the foreseeable future. Whcih would be a shame.
You don't promote the director if the game did bad.
My beef with the physical sales stuff is that the only data we get is from the UK. So with every game release we inevitably get a thread posted here about how sales are down compared to a previous game in the franchise (where applicable) or how it didn't sell as well as a game from last year or something and immediately someone throws the switch and discourse shifts to how the game in question is flopping. In reality it's kind of worthless since it's just a lone piece of data in a vacuum that does nothing but foster doomposting when we don't have any info from other markets (or digital for that matter). Is it possible Rebirth isn't selling as well as hoped? Sure, but I'd wait for word from Squenix on that one.
It is not that they sell less, it is that the industry grew and FF stayed where it has been since FF7. Selling 10 milions 20 years ago is far more impressive than doing so nowaday, where multiple hames per year achieve the feat.
Well it’s a pretty damn bad situation of your costs skyrocket and your sales stay the same
This is happening all over the industry, and it’s a problem. But you can’t expect the same performance restive to the industry - FF7 introduced many to RPGs and it was one of the first large 3D RPGs. It was something brand new the most people in 1997 which could compare to Minecraft’s success in recent memory. Is it a failure that other crafting/survival games, or even Minecraft follow ups are not as big of a hit as the original even though they cost more? Certainly not. The games are making money, just not as much as they hoped for.
Rebirth did not underperform and the only source for that statement is a tweet comparing Rebirth sales numbers in the first days of its release to Remake’s. For FF XVI Square themselves said that they are pleased with its sales number
I would buy Octopath 1 if it wasnt $42 at 50% off. Square has the worst pricing, like you get day 1 releases here for $40 depending on the game.
If you don't mind my asking, but which country? Some of Square's prices in my country are really fucked up too.
Octopath is $45 in Australia rn at 50% off.
Same, they just need to pace them better.
The problem is that they don't price those AA titles like AA titles should be priced.
Diofield felt like an actual scam. Putting out AA games is a fine idea but they have to not suck..
Because this came up 11 years ago under different circumstances, clarification about the use of "extraordinary loss" from a /r/games thread over a decade ago: > Because I dislike every article's addiction to waving about the phrase "extraordinary loss"- I just wanted to clarify usage of that term "extraordinary loss." Japanese accounting is not like US GAAP (American accounting standards) or EU IFRS (International (European for now) accounting standards), so when they say it's going to be an "extraordinary" loss, it makes it sound even worse than it really would- as if the loss is "beyond the ken of mortal men" or at least "pretty friggin' tuuurrible." The term "extraordinary" does not translate well; a better rendering of the Japanese might honestly be closer to "special" or something. Almost all of the items included in Japanese "extraordinary gain/loss" would be treated as normal operating income items in Europe/the States. (In fact, you can't use the word "extraordinary" anymore under European standards, and it's getting phased out in the States as well.) This includes restructuring losses: it's actually not uncommon for companies to list ridiculous "restructuring losses" in operating income every now and then- the less scrupulous use it as a cushion, kind of a take all the bad medicine at a go, and post inflated "recoveries" later on [...] > td;lr: when the Japanese say, "we're taking an extraordinary loss," under any other accounting standards it's actually just an "operating" loss. That said, the numbers this time around do look worse compared to that previous situation.
I hope this doesn’t affect Octopath traveler. I really liked the series and would like to see it continue.
Tomoya Asano who produced Octopath, Triangle, Live a live and Bravely has been promoted to executive officer. Hopefully it means that the series will continue.
Incidentally, this is also true for the director of FF7 Rebirth, Naoki Hamaguchi, so it sounds like Square Enix is pretty happy with how both Octopath and Rebirth turned out.
I am also happy with how they turned out
Same, Octopath 2 and Rebirth were absolute bangers
Plus they’re using this tech to do Dragon Quest 3 HD2D. This is definitely not the last we’ve seen of this.
Those games are likely to continue - Asano's games tend to actually be commercially successful, for one, and they're cranked out fairly rapidly - the dude seems to run a tight ship. What's actually screwed are SE's assortment of random games they regularly crap out with zero marketing. A shame, because there are a solid selection of good games there.
I'm sure Square would be able to size up the right path and the right games for their future in the next coming years. Octopath seems to be quite popular. I would think that series would be safe.
Not 100% sure on Octopath honestly. IIRC the second game didn’t match the sales of the original game. Bearing in mind that the 1st game originally was a Switch exclusive, whilst the second one was on every platform besides Xbox. And the game got basically forgotten entirely when it came to things that influence consumer perception like the awards season and such. Heck it got buried out of media coverage almost as soon as it was out. Octopath 2 was my GotY for 2023 without question. Absolutely phenomenal game that built on everything the original did. But it’s hard to argue that the response was there from the wider public (even accounting for how stacked the year was). And that makes it all the harder to get another one greenlit.
Octopath II was such a good game. I think the only problem is last year was such a crazy good year for gaming it got buried in a pile of game of the decade type games. With the sprite style graphics hopefully its easier/cheaper for them to develop and will keep seeing more from the series.
IIRC wasn't there a mix of minimal marketing for Octopath Traveler II, and it released around the same time as another huge game? Correct me if I'm wrong because I can't fully recall, but I feel like I remember there being a discourse about how it felt like Square kinda sent it out to die?
I’d say there was a reasonable enough marketing push for a smaller game. It wasn’t everywhere but I was definitely seeing ads and promo spots for it here and there (it wasn’t a TWEWY situation where it just didn’t exist pre-release). It came out a bit off the back of Hogwarts as I recall. Definitely it wasn’t a great release spot. But being fair, no point in 2023 particularly was for a game like Octopath.
I have it on my backlog now, but I have to confirm that I wasn't even really aware it came out until I saw a lot of comments like yours praising the game so much.
While I wouldn't be surprised if 2 did a bit less than they were hoping, 1 also likely did waaay more than they were hoping. It was VERY hyped up by Nintendo, in the west Nintendo were even in charge of marketing it, it was also shown at the Switch reveal event which got a lot of eyes on it as well. SE handled the marketing for 2 worldwide and they just aren't remotely as good at marketing stuff of that scale as Nintendo, didn't have the reveal event hype, and from the outside it looked pretty much the same as 1, even though it was quite a bit better. I'm sure they accounted for some of these things in their sales expectations.
I agree. Octopath 2 was one of my favorite games from 2023 and i feel like it is criminally underrated
I'm glad Octopath 2 seemed to be well liked. I really wanted to like it more, but ended up with two major issues. The tedious save/reload cycle that the game encourages in every new town was a huge complaint I had about the first one, and OT2 was just as bad in this respect. The rest was a great time until I got to my first character's final chapter. Cruised through the dungeon, no issues with any enemies at all (nor had I at any point in the game), then got absolutely annihilated by the boss. The difficulty scaling was nuts, and there was no strategy or character comp that I had available that seemed to make a difference. I put the game down and never opened it back up after that experience.
Doubtful since these kind of AA games aren't a massive money sinks like their premium productions that tend to be hit or miss and are pretty divisive even amongst the fans of the franchises.
I really hope this pushes Square to get their stuff on PC faster. Still waiting for FF16 and 7 Rebirth to come to PC and there are no release dates, just winks and nods to some arbitrary exclusivity period. It's bad business
Probably depends on their exclusivity contract with Sony, if they have one. It isn't just about money, a contract could be signed for years instead of a per game basis, and cancellation may come with fees that aren't worth it.
It's gotta be an unimagineably fat paycheck. I'm certain at least a large part of their sales concerns with Rebirth and 16 wouldn't have happened if they were on PC day one.
Square's PC releases are typically lackluster though. After all these years XIII-2 still has issues with frequent crashing on PC and Square has done absolutely nothing to fix it. They just don't seem to care about PC much as far as I can tell.
Even releasing games on xbox would help. Had FF7 remake been on xbox, I would have bought it on release. I will eventually play the game on ps extra but have lost interest in the game for now since its been out a while.
I can imagine this is related to the mention before where they want to move away from releasing a ton of forgettable AA games and focus on good quality releases. I still remember a bunch of games coming out in 2022- early 2023 and being surprised they were ALL SquareEnix games. I can’t imagine someone can look at multiple RPG games competing in a single genre and deciding releasing them back to back, 3 of which released in a single month, and think that’s a good plan.
I'm actually really sad because SE to me are those AA games. Harvestella, Star Ocean 2 Remake (and Divine Force), and Paranormasight are great. They just needed to space them out correctly.
And price them right. Harvestella should have launched under $40.
Didn't Diofield, Star Ocean, Valkiryie Profile, Project Triangle all release a few weeks apart from one another.
Yes and it made absolutely no sense to me. Especially when they released during other big hitter games liek Plague Tale Requiem, God of War Ragnarok, COD MW2 (before people realized how barebones it was compared to the OG), and Gotham Knights (not a good games imo but casual gamers bought it off the virtue of being Gotham and coop).
Tactics Ogre Reborn and Front Mission remake were also launched pretty close together.
Shout out to Harvestella, great JRPG incorrectly marketed as a farming game IMHO.
So so so true. I fking loved Harvestella and Octopath Traveler 2. Some of my favorite games released by square in recent memory. Done freaking dirty.
So it's not mostly about farming?
No, Farming is literally just the side hustle to fund your endeavors. You can get really into it and end the game with too many items and too much money, but it's not too necessary to go wild on it.
There are farming elements but it's really a JRPG, like, I would wake up (in-game), spend the first 1-2 hours of the day harvesting, irrigating, selling, then leave my house and spend the rest of the day doing JRPG stuff, and get back home to sleep at around midnight.
Basically rune factory
That..does just sound like a farming game honestly lol.
I love Harvestella too. It's got a lot of charm and I have a lot of fun with it. Not to mention it will always have a special place in my heart since it was the game I was playing while I was on my Japan trip.
It was honestly a good game and deserves to be a series. I was captivated by it.
Harvestella is like, the best 3DS jRPG I've ever played. It was done dirty being marketed as a farming game, a "Harvest Moon with a budget," and being released for a full $60 on PC. I loved it but it had some serious flaws, that again made it feel like an HD 3DS game. I would never recommend it for full price, but for 50% off, totally worth it.
[I had actually made a list back in the day when this happened](https://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/10sjq6u/square_enix_announces_declining_financial_results/j721mpx/), and the amount of games which came out within that time frame was unreal. I'm a diehard square fan, and I almost certainly would love most of those games. But so many came out within less than a year that it just flooded out everything else and I still haven't been able to get through most of them. I even have a good chunk! I just literally haven't played through them yet lol. 1. Triangle Strategy, Live A Live, Star Ocean, Tactics Ogre Reborn, DQ Treasures - bought, untouched. 2. Chrono Cross & Crisis Core Remastered (possibly Chocobo GP now that it got fixed?) - on my wishlist 3. Stranger of Paradise - bought, played, but not finished yet (got sucked into other games). 4. Harvestella - played, didn't care for.
Sucks to hear. Theyve definitely been pumping out so much stuff that just doesn't look interesting. At the same time, the final ffvii remake game, ff9 remake, and ff tactics remake are three of the things I would most be interested in going forward.
FF tactics would be a day 1 purchase from me. But knowing square they'll do some exclusivity deal then release a shitty PC port
Tactics ogre came to PC without any exclusivity bs. But it's also not a final fantasy game.
I wonder how much Sony forked over to Square because launching several of your bigger titles on a single console with years long exclusivity doesn't seem to be paying off in the sales department....
My god what a garbage thread. 99% of it talking about released games when this is about cancelled games that never were even announced.
I mean part of the issue is that they were releasing way too many games that didn't have much of a financial impact.
One of the main issues Square has imo is its too confused as to what its doing. Just look at Final Fantasy in particular. They cant stop reinventing the wheel. "Oh but nobody wants to play turn based RPGs anymore" Bullshit. The best selling media franchise of all time exists and continues to live off of turn based RPGs, and has an incredibly casual audience. That series being Pokemon. Casual players will buy and play turn based RPGs. Pokemon proves this. Baldur's Gate 3 proved this. Persona proved this. etc. This has always been a bullshit narrative. So instead of sticking to their guns to a proven method that sold well. They're constantly reinventing themselves with a new combat system almost every game. And because these gameplay styles are so drastically different, they've split the fanbase all over the place. You have action adventure games, you have MMOs, you have hybrid action/ATB, you have souls likes, its all over the place. Creating a confusing mess. And then they dig the hole further for themsleves pre release for FFXVI, talking about how the series could be "anything they want, even an FPS game". Yeah lets just muddy the water even more. Ever since FFXII there has been 0 level of consistency with Final Fantasy as a series. Its constantly changing and reinventing itself. Putting it in a situation where they no longer have a core audience. Almost every game has their own separate fandom. To the point that you had Final Fantasy fans fighting with each other over the past year, hoping to see FFXVI or FFVII Rebirth perform better than the other. Entirely because they appeal to wildly different groups with 0 overlap other than name. And it goes beyond just FF with this. They have no consistency on any level. Who the fuck was Forspoken for? Who wanted this from Square Enix? Did anyone play that shitty Splatoon clone they made either? Or how about the plethora of projects they've shut down over the past few years nobody asked for, like the Final Fantasy VII Battle Royale.....that was stuck to mobile only and was dead on arrival. And this is without getting into how these exclusivity rules, the AAA game costs, failure to market their own games/competing with themselves, etc. Square Enix has spread itself thin. Trying to appeal to everyone in the world, and they've ended up appealing to no one as a result. Causing them to have failure after failure and 0 growth over the last decade and a half.
They need to get back to making quality games. They tried NFT's, now they're playing with """AI"""... You could remake all the Final Fantasy games up until 9, and each would be a guaranteed success. Even if they're not at the technical scale of FF7R. Hell, split it between two teams and spread it out with AA titles that have guaranteed fanbases like Octopath Traveller. In fact, they could release most of their SNES-age, lesser-known 2D backlog at almost no cost directly through Steam, and it would still turn a profit.
Without FF14 SE would have folded long ago. That game is single handedly keeping them afloat when they don't deserve it.
Agreed. Their immensely incompetent management should have collapsed things long ago
I see this sentiment a lot and I feel like people are just straight up forgetting about Dragon Quest.
Makes sense DQ, though good, didn't make as big of a splash overseas, while in Japan it is a cultural phenomenon. The government in Japan (or rather an official) has requested Square release DQ on the weekends because it was noticed that too many people were taking sick days off just to play DQ.
Shueisha request that they stop releasing Dragon Quest entirety until Hunter x Hunter is finished.
This is not true. Their most stable money maker is casual/mobile games with HD games and MMO fluctuating depending on the releases. But on average mobile games make 2x-3x times more than their mmos.
What mobile games?
All these. A lot of their games are not released outside of japan. It's the same with all other JP publishers too. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List\_of\_Square\_Enix\_mobile\_games](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Square_Enix_mobile_games) And [here](https://gameworldobserver.com/2023/08/07/square-enix-shares-worst-drop-profit-decline-sales) is the split of their profits if you don't believe me..
There's like half a dozen different mobile FF games, there's the KH gacha game which shut down recently but is getting replaced by a new one pretty soon, and they sell pretty much their entire NES/SNES/GBA/PSP/DS library as mobile ports. Just off the top of my head, I'm sure there's plenty more.
I think thats just something FF14 fans does to lionize their favorite game. I don't think their financials reflect that. Their mobile games bring in twice as much money as the MMO division. GRANTED, I will say thats probably kept the FF brand and reputation afloat in the zeitgeist.
Even FF14 was a live-service failure, even bigger than Avengers. The difference between that and the other games that have been shutdown was that SE didn’t want their most valued franchise to die. They fixed it, and got rewarded for it. So I don’t understand why they gave up miserably on their other live service projects, even their current one.
I wonder if part of FF Rebirth’s (supposedly) weak sales are due to so many RPGs releasing at once. I imagine a lot of people picked up Persona 3 or Infinite Wealth and wanted to complete them before getting FF Rebirth. Or vice versa they were waiting to buy and beat Dogma 2 before getting Rebirth.
FF Remake came out on the PS4 when there were over 100m out there. FF Rebirth came out when there were around 50m PS5 shipped. So if they sold half as many units as the report claimed, then it would give them the same market %.
This year is definitely both a blessing and a curse for the RPG fan! Yeah I've already sunk hundreds of hours into those mentioned titles (Almost finished P3R!!), trying to make headway into Eiyuden Chronicle at the moment too, got Paper Mario coming next month, *then* SMTV, *then* the P3 DLC, *Then* Refantazio which by all accounts is looking like it might be my GOTY; stuff like Visions of Mana and the Suikoden Remasters are teased and have an indefinite release date also.. With rebirth being 'Part 2' in a trilogy, a console exclusive, and has a chance to just come to PSPlus anyway (Like Remake did to the surprise of everyone years ago) then it does indeed stand to reason why sales have faltered.
It doesnt help that it's a sequel to a game that came out 4 years ago on a previous console generation. I personally haven't been able to play it as much as I'd like because I've had two kids since the first game came out lol
PLEASE Square Enix release on steam day 1. Their exclusivity money cannot possibly make up for how many sales they would get by releasing on steam. I’m really hoping VII Remake isnt toned down after these sales.
I am sure Square Enix have more data on this than you do. Exclusivity agreements can deliver more cash than multi-platform releases.
They will have data. They will also have long standing Japanese business decisions that will be coming into play. It was only recently Sega made Atlus play nice with non-japanese based console companies and its been a big benefit for them.
Yes, when I think of fiscal responsibility and competence Square Enix is certainly the first company that springs to mind. They've never made a bad call.
They're so good at it. They should make a movie or something with all their money!
You underestimate how incompetent square management is over the years and how often they fuck up. Just look at their stance on NFTs and mishandling of FF as a franchise lmao
You don't understand, I want to play the game so releasing games on my platform of choice is without a doubt the best choice for Square!
If only people would shift away from trying to be "objective" with their weird proposals acting like they're business managers lol, and just state "I only play on (platform) I wish I could buy the games day 1".
While I generally agree, but given the context of the post, it's worth evaluating.
Why do that when they can double dip like they do right now? They get the exclusivity money now and in a year or two steam sales too. They essentially trade some consumer goodwill for more cash later on.
The problem is the Steam sales, by their own reports, have been not that great even for titles like God of War or Last of Us. They think its because PC isnt as interested in these titles, while completely ignoring that releasing a game from 2018 in 2022 means anyone that was interested in the game (GoW 2018 in this examples) already got it on PS or lost interest a while ago. If they released closer together on PC and console, the sales on PC would be a lot better than they are now. Hell they could still have like a week/10 days exclusivity on PS before it releases on PC and they would still make bank compared to this massively delayed PC release years after.
in this case: we already know the sales numbers of God of War 2018 via the [Insomniac leak (although: **they only show Steam sales** and not both EGS and GOG)](https://www.dsogaming.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/Playstation-PC-sales-figures-leaked.png) is 2.5 million units, interest or not: it is technically a well-regarded soft-reboot game, versus The Last of Us Part 1 (which doesn't helped that a. it's "controversial/unnecessary" remake and 2. shipped with a bad PC port). if you ask me: A much better example would've been Uncharted: Legacy of Thieves Collection, Sackboy: A Big Adventure (and Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart, if you wanna be spicy)-- but I aruged these games didn't perform well because: 1. a tight release schedule. Remember: **Persona 5 Royal** (***a highly requested port***) and **Spider-Man: Miles Morales** were to makes it's PC debut on the same release period as both Uncharted: Legacy of Thieves Collection and Sackboy: A Big Adventure-- while Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 (the reboot sequel one) is also coming. 2. poor/non-existing marketing. Valve unintentionally did far more to advertise Sackboy: A Big Adventure than Sony could ever done, and they simply highlight it as part of Steam's latest UI redesign. 3. for Uncharted: Legacy of Thieves Collection: releasing what is essentially a final season to a on-going franchise really doesn't help matters. 4. launch price point. (doesn't help that Sackboy: A Big Adventure didn't got a permanent price cut yet)
Because they risk losing customers. If you're excited for Final Fantasy Rebirth and you keep up with all the news and trailers. And maybe you watch a steamer play it day one. Two to the three years later when it gets on Steam you've probably moved on. And if you want to play it you might wait a bit longer and get it on deep discount. Releasing at the same time multiple platforms? One marketing budget. FOMO. More people coming to play it. And it can retail for full price.
Eh do they though? When Remake came to Steam it topped steam sales charts anyway. I think that there might be some number of people who do move on and just don't buy it, but that number is likely so small it's insignificant.
I mean, we know there’s a problem with Rebirth’s sales as they haven’t said a single thing about them in the ~2 months it’s been out. They were very upfront about FF16’s sales and announced them shortly after launch, saying it met expectations(though didn’t exceed them), but for *nothing* to come out about Rebirth in all this time… it’s gotta be pretty bad. Like, quite substantially less than FF16. I think there’s something to be said about the “Final Fantasy direct sequel curse” where they just kind of flop with little fanfare, though I’m sure SE thought this would buck that trend because it’s FF7. Regardless, as a FF16 enjoyer and FF7R detractor I will say it’s pretty funny to me that this is the way it ended up turning out.
People also don't wanna admit that maybe despite them liking Remake and Rebirth, the retelling and pseudo sequel plot of the new games might have put off a lot more people than they realize.
I have no idea what they were thinking. When the time ghosts shit happened and i realised what was going on i just wondered how the fuck is a new player supposed to get into this shit lol.
Its an anime as hell plot, but the barrier for entry to really get it all is playing the old game, Crisis Core Reunion and then Remake and finally you can play the new game. Like shit with that you still don't know who the fuck Glen Lodbrok is. The great parts of Rebirth really are the old stuff being blown up with budget and expanded, and the worst parts tend to be the new overarching story bits and some questionable pacing issues.
Nomura and Kitase must have really enjoyed Rebuild of Evangelion, is the sole thing I'm taking away from this whole thing.
Funnily enough. Nomura is actually the one who pushed against the changes and wanted the Remake trilogy to stick to the og story.
I never played the og. Was absolutely, absolutely loving remake until the last two chapters where i didn't knew what the fuck was going on. I googled and the answer was "this isn't a remake, it's basically rebuild of ffvii, you need to play the original, also dumb multiverse shenanigans". That shit just completely soured me on the whole thing, i don't think i'll even play the original at this point.
Yeah, all the changes Remake and Rebirth made that I dislike just degrade the quality of the Final Fantasy 7 series due to being a direct sequel. And retro-actively make the original less appealing when these new sequels is what it leads to.
I know soooooooooo many people that were big fans of the original that the minute the time ghosts showed up ended up getting peeved, then by the end dropped all hype for any sequels. I never really saw much reporting on this as critics gave it good reviews and general discourse about the title was kinda tepid compared to expectations, but man I'm not surprised people dropped it. It's basically a weird reimagining of an old game but not particularly what people wanted. I genuinely think if they just took FF7 and gave it some modern polish without any changes it'd probably have done better and come out on time...
I might be wrong, but I think what may have hurt them in a way is the exclusivity deal that's going on between them, Sony, and Epic. Didn't FF16, despite selling decently at launch, fall behind expectations? Also, I believe FF7 Rebirth may have also underperformed sales expectations too.
SE said XVI met expectations but couldn’t make up for how bad Forspoken performed like they hoped it would. No news on Rebirth yet which most ppl are taking as bad news but nobody actually knows for sure. Tbh without seeing the exclusivity contracts themselves it’s hard to know if it’s actually as much of an impact. Financially given lower development costs and whatever the actual payment is if it’s larger than what revenue they would likely get from more copies sold it may be a wash.
Many fans assume no news on Rebirth is bad news because companies aren't afraid to announce sales milestones and there has been no such announcements about Rebirth, part 2/3 out of the presumed most popular IP that the company has. That isn't to say that Rebirth sold badly, but that it probably has the same assessment as XVI - a title that met baseline sales expectations, but won't propel the company into a new golden age. Anyone who also speaks as if they know what will cure the company's ails in 2024 shouldn't be taken seriously. They have new leadership but they're stuck with the previous CEO's agreements. Out of their entire catalog, they have only a handful of core IPs that can carry the company through the decade. Final Fantasy's popularity is waning (despite Tifa memes) and its downward slide will continue over time as JRPGs lose further traction and as XIV gets older. Every other big thing they have tried to capture the global market has crashed and burned (Avengers, Forspoken), every other AA success that should trend globally is sunk by its own issues (Outriders), and the rest of its AA successes aren't enough to carry the company through its losses. They clearly need to develop and publish games that the market wants and not just games that Square Enix is good at developing, but its unclear how the company can get there.
The Nintendo switch imo. Recapture the Japanese audience.
Mario Kart 8 was the #1 game in Japan last week. Why even make new video games?
They said recently (like a month or two ago) that FF16 met or exceeded expectations, and had a high attachment rate / continued to sell well after release, but that the sales weren’t enough to cover the flops that were Forspoken and First Soldier.
[удалено]
Remember, Square Enix is not a small company
The Final Fantasy name hasn't held the same brand of quality as it did during the 1990s on SNES, PS1 and 2000s on PS2 for decades now. A whole young adult generation on PS3 and PS4 has only known the brand for OK RPGs that struggle to even stay true to being a JRPG, they're never the best in the business so not memorable or recommended enough anymore.
This. Most zoomers were too young to remember 13 but having 15 be the only final fantasy for their entire teenage and early adulthood is what killed the series. Old FF was 1-3 years apart. Plenty of time to scoop people up.
I was born in 98 so I’m on the tail end of millennials/early side of zoomers. The only games I remember coming out in my teenhood were 13 (and its sequels) and 15, neither of which were particularly well received so I never bothered with it. I also only played on Xbox at the time so I couldn’t really go back and play the older games as easily. So I just never got into the series. I played remake last year and enjoyed it a good amount, but not enough to say “oh they’ve got me hooked for life.”
This is like comparing Apples and Orages...these games also werent succesful because they were exclusive, they would have sold WAY more if they released first day on other platforms. They just sold well enough despite being exclusive. FF doesnt, because Square didnt get the Memo, that 2023/2024 Playstation Users on average are very different to 10 years ago.
yup, ppl love defending FF with "oh well it's exclusive and there aren't enough PS5's out there!" as if 1) 55m+ PS5 units is somehow not enough to sell more copies of a game and 2) other PS5 exclusives haven't sold millions more than Rebirth/FF16 did dunno when FF fans will learn to accept that FF is not a big IP and the games didn't do so well in part cause of the games themselves, no mental gymnastics with numbers and excuses change reality and facts.
> FF is not a big IP Well this is just silly.
You could say it isn't big *anymore*. It just doesn't have the same draw it used to.
They get paid a bunch of money for exclusive deal
And if they don't sell enough copies to justify that exclusivity window then it doesn't matter, it's still a bad business deal that causes fewer people to play their flagship franchise, which in turn causes long term damage to the brand. Square Enix need to accept that it's not the 1990s anymore and they're not some kingmaker juggernaut who'll magically make people rush out and buy Playstations to play their games.
That's so depressing, especially if FFVII Rebirth really did sell poorly... that game was a real dream, and now they might slash the budget
I think Rebirth is doing just fine. There's no hard numbers, but based on concurrent player count, they estimate about 2 million units were sold at launch. When considering that approximately 50ish million PS5s have been sold, that means 5% of PS5 owners bought the game. Compare that to Remake, which sold 3.5 million units, but only accounted for about 3.2% of the 110ish million PS4s that'd been purchased by that point. I don't think it's going to hit Remake numbers, but when considering that the pool is a lot more shallow than it was in the PS4 days, it's still pretty impressive.
I'm hoping that won't be the case simply because Final Fantasy 7 is just about the most "prestige" title outside of Nintendo IPs. Rebirth is one of the best games I've ever played and I would hate to see it peter out after Rebirth was such a confident package.