I think everyone here is mostly just talking about the mainline FF series. SQEX has lots of great AA games. Apparently they plan to move away from that though.
That'd be a mistake on their part. The problem with SE's release schedule wasn't making AA games, it was releasing games way to damn close to one another alongside bad release timings in general.
People can only buy but so many games at a time, even big-spending hardcore gamers. If money isn't the issue, time would be.
I will not buy Rebirth because I played Remake.
Remake was, in my opinion, terrible. The dialogue, cinematic and character designs are, for lack of a better word, cringe. The story changes were not for the better, and dragging it out over 10x the time as the original was meandering and tedious.
Then the battle system… hated it. Stagger systems are trash. I didn’t find it implemented block and dodge mechanics very well or gave good player feedback. To be honest I played Remake after 16 and in retrospect 16’s battle system is probably a lot better than Remakes’s.
So yeah, no interest in Rebirth because modern SE is not appealing to me. I play 14 still but if Dawntrail is still more of the same then I think I can finally come drop anything SE from my gaming lineup.
Which is a shame because up until 12, they would have been my number 1 developer.
You literally could have played the
FREE DEMO to decide for yourself if Rebirth is to your liking or not, instead of assuming it isn't simply because of your time with Remake. The demo's literally right there on PSN. It's free. You can download it, play it, and judge Rebirth on its own merits from there.
I don't get this notion of vehemently holding Rebirth accountable for Remake when you can judge Rebirth by its own workings with the demo. For all you know, they might've fixed many of the things you took issue with in Remake.
He's never been a sales insider, he isn't Mat Piscatella. He's just an analyst of the Chinese market, I can be critical all i want because I know I'm right. Just like how I'm critical of Chris Dring for his assumptions he makes.
Daniel also turned off his comments because he's afraid to properly answer people, stop saying Zhuge, that's not his real name.
If you can't take the heat, don't step into the kitchen.
Why do people like this make statements with rather serious implications (implications that can actually negatively affect a company's stock value, for example), unprovoked at that (i.e no one directly asked him to comment on Rebirth sales before he just did so out of the blue), and then run & cower when they only want yes-people and brown-nosers to agree with their opinions?
Like it's friggin' Twitter dude, it's a public forum. You say something like a major game supposedly underperforming, you should expect people to ask you how, why, or even to provide sources or evidence to back it up. At least he didn't lock his "info" behind a Patreon like Imran Kahn does :/
The game would sell better if it was on more than one platform. 2 million isn’t very good. It can do more. The rest of what you’re saying is neither here nor there. In order to justify the development costs it needs to not be selling half of what the first Remake sold. Particularly considering it no doubt cost more to make than Remake.
As some others have already provided ITT, apparently the 2 million is the launch figure, which would've tracked at most the first week, not the entire month of March let alone anything of April. That particular point wasn't mentioned in the OP for...reasons, apparently.
So the truth is we really don't know what the sales would be for the game beyond the first week. The could be 4 million as of right now. They could be 2 million still (very unlikely). They could be less than 2 million due to refunds (very very unlikely). Fact is we don't know.
However, I never said the game wouldn't sell better if it was on more than one platform. The question is how much better would it actually be selling? Not every sale on an additional platform is an actual extra sale, because some people would have multiple platforms and would just choose one over the other to buy the game on. That's a lateral sale. We've actually been seeing some of that in action with Helldivers 2, even.
Also an assumption you're making here is that it "absolutely" cost more than Remake. I don't know if that's actually true. Remake had to be restarted at some point because the dev work with CyberConnect was gutted. Some of Remake's costs probably also accounted for engine programming and improvements. Also dev costs associated with Intergrade may've also absorbed some would-be costs for Rebirth.
Overall I wouldn't be surprised if Rebirth's costs were between $100 - $150 million at most. It may be using a lot of improved assets from Remake & Intergrade, but those are improved assets, not new assets. There are new assets too, obviously, but some of those may've used pre-existing assets as a base and then altered them significantly. All of this stuff would contribute to saving in development costs.
And, like with Remake, S-E might've already set up some parts of Rebirth on the dev end to account towards Part 3's development, which might shift some costs forward on that end. I don't know any of this for a certainty, it's just speculation. But I think it's sound speculation to make.