it makes total sense
SE is desperate. their AAA games are too expensive and they don't sale as they should...not because there is a lack of platforms but because their games are not meeting players expectations.
Yeah, it's selling faster.
Because they're not paid shills.
This doesn't even make sense. What does it matter if they're "PC shills" when the games they're buying and rating are on PC anyway? And, yeah they care so much about settings that most of them are rocking mid to low-tier rigs and PC is where the highest amount of niche and indie titles become popular. Do you even think before typing?
gameworldobserver.com
For low budget titles with fraction of Forspoken/Final Fantasy budgets it's certainly not bad strategy for SE and sometimes it could be great. The main problem lies on the AA and AAA budget games that failed to deliver.
Or, as per my theory, Sony has decided to offer an insulting amount of money in that hat that Square Enix decided it is worth taking a gamble going multiplat.
1.8M sold after being out in Japan for over a year and in the west for 4 months.
Nonsense.
Yes, they're pathetic. The current FF games can't even beat the numbers of FF on the freakin' PS1. This isn't 2005. 7M for Final Fantasy is fucking shit. Look at games like Ghost of Tsushima, God of War, Horizon, or other Sony exclusives. Their sales numbers make FF look like indie games, yet FF has a longer history than any of them and more brand recognition than all of them. XVI and Rebirth have massive budgets, huge brand recognition, and high metacritic scores, yet all they manage is 7M? The single platform excuse doesn't work, especially from someone like you who's always happy to thrash PC sales numbers whenever he can. Now you're using it as an excuse even though the sales on PC have been weak. 7 million 3.5 years is paltry in a world where big AAA games routinely sell 20M+ units in a single year.
That's what you asked:
It's selling much much faster and unless Metaphor's sales flatline, it'll easily overtake Persona 5.
Those are awful numbers. 7 million. How much money is that in revenues for SE? $250-300M? How much did the game cost to produce and market? $250-300M? Maybe more? Good thing Sony subsidized that. I'm not even sure they turned in a profit after all those years.
Doesn't matter. I'm saying it will. Do you take the bet or not?
The OG FF VII cost at least $80M back in 1997 and took 2 years of full production. This one took 5. Inflation alone tells us that it was expensive as hell. They're also based in Tokyo. It sure as hell ain't cheap and considering the extensive marketing campaign, I'm gonna go out on a limb and say this game cost a shitload of money.
I was including the marketing budget too, not just the production budget. Anyway, yeah, $200M is a safe bet.
No, it won't. Stop being a coward. When it sells like 5 million the first two months, that will be enough and you won't have any excuse to fall back on.
No less than 5 million of those P5 sales were all on PlayStation.
You forgot other switch exclusives like Harvestella or DQ treasurers, or other multiplatform titles like The Diofield Chronicles that also flopped.
I can tell you for a fact that I double-dipped for P5 Royal on Steam (I generally favor playing JRPGs on PC).
This old article explains the reasoning well:
Former Square Enix exec on why Final Fantasy sales don’t meet expectations and chances of recouping insane AAA budgets | Game World Observer
Former Square Enix executive Jacob Navok has shared his thoughts on less-than-expected sales of the latest Final Fantasy games. He also tried to explain why people mistakenly think that the Japanese publisher is simply setting unrealistic goals for its products.
In short, money hats are recouped. It's not just free money on top of what you earn.
To work through a simplified example:
Sony: Here's 200m for 1 year of playstation exclusitivity
SE: Sure!
(game proceeds to sell 3.33 m copies over a year, earning 200m)
SE: Hurray! With Sony's moneyhat and the new revenue, we now have 400m!
Sony: Actually, I get 200m back. I recoup my investment!
SE: :O
(SE & Sony now both have 200m)
(Game finally launches on Xbox and Steam, but hype and sales are considerably decreased)
Now, picture the other scenario where SE launched on all platforms simultaneously, sold 3.33m on playstation (same as before) PLUS an additional 4m between PC and Xbox. They would have a LOT more money.
Since moneyhats are recouped, you should take it only if you can't fund development yourself or if you think the game would sell less than the money hat (case of Alan Wake 2 on Epic). But if your game will sell gangbusters and will exceed the moneyhat, then there's basically no reason to take it.
Those are low-budget titles, and DQ treasurers shouldn't be put with the other two. It managed to sell 312k units physically in Japan
Based on this, with todays inflation 1997 Final Fantasy 7 cost 152–275M USD develop, so it is not like all Japanese games are cheap to mame. Even ramake cost close to 200M. Forspoken was 100+M which sounds quite a lot for the game we have got.
Can we stop with this stupid mantra?
After the successful trials of the Mana game on Switch, they somehow didn't think Switch was a viable platform for a new entry, and to anyone surprised, the game bombed so hard because most of their audience were on Switch.
Did Forspoken do well in comparison? Simultaneous release, "bad word of mouth".
Obvious difference, FF16 was praised by critics and Forspoken was not. Hype was through the roof for FF16 before release while Forspoken had basically negative hype.
So you're disagreeing with him that FF16 had bad word of mouth then. He's saying something else.
I'd say FF16 had mixed word of mouth. Some praised it and some hated it. Coming out on PC later certainly missed all the massive hype the game was getting just before the PS5 release though.
You'll... Game Pass?
Yeah, this. If it had launched simultaneously, you would definitely get more PC players buying the game. The hype around that game cooled considerably just a couple months after release, since it actually turned out to be a very shallow game.
it's an excuse for poor performance by attributing it to that. The only way xbox is going to help them is if xbox start paying them for licenses which I suspect is the deal. FF14 didn't make even a small dent on xbox in terms of player numbers but I hear it was lucrative for SE because MS paid for servers. It's going to be something unrelated to sales on xbox if their saviour is xbox related.
