What? Of course there has been. Square-Enix's business model as of 2006 was heavily based on the concept of shipping a single top-franchise title every year. At the time, they had three 5m+ shipping RPG franchises that could fill this role: Final Fantasy, Kingdom Hearts, and Dragon Quest. By layering them this way, they could give every franchise breathing room and a long development cycle while still maintaining consistent profitability
Now this plan is in shambles and Versus is a major contributor, for a variety of reasons:
- By having two FF projects instead of pooling resources, SE took longer to get an HD FF on the market in the first place.
- By taking so long, Versus has single-handedly prevented there from being a console Kingdom Hearts game for seven years, significantly (and maybe irrevocably) damaging it as a franchise in the West.
- By taking so long to come out, Versus has prevented SE from meaningfully hyping an FFXV and forced SE to launch the ill-thought-out sequel FFXIII-2, significantly (and maybe irrevocably) damaging FF as a franchise everywhere.
If they could've gone into full-bore mode on Versus and released it in 2009 and let XIII bake for another year, they could've had a much stronger FF brand
and be looking to release a PS360 Kingdom Hearts by now.