There's a reason for that. No one gave a shit about FFXVI one week after it launched. 99% of hype for that game died the moment it released and people realized what it was and wasn't. Cant blame PC gamers for not showing up for it.
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Square Enix reports 9.9% drop in game sector operating profit despite strong sales of Final Fantasy XIV Dawntrail and Dragon Quest III HD-2D Remake
- Thread starter Thick Thighs Save Lives
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Mercador
Member
You are right from my side, I'll purchase FFVII but the next mainline, I'll hold for sure. Really disappointed by XVI.
Felessan
Member
It will not get them Japan audience back, the loss of which hurt them the most
adamsapple
Or is it just one of Phil's balls in my throat?
I don't get some of this criticism, FFVII Rebirth specifically was lauded by people on GAF for fanservice and that game sold less than their expectations.
And DQ3, the one game that for some reason people in this topic are targeting as a DEI thing, has done better than expected, going by Square's own report.
The results kinda paint a different picture (?).
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Fabieter
Member
Stock price trending up. Not far of all time highs.
Most japanese gaming stocks are up significantly tho.
I know its not part of q3 but it seems weird that they didn't mention future outcome with strong sales of Final Fantasy games on pc.
Nickolaidas
Member
Why do you think this criticism is about FF7 Rebirth ONLY? It's about Square in general.
Omnipunctual Godot
Gold Member
It seems pretty logical, though. FFXVI is it's own, stand-alone game. Rebirth is a great sequel, but if you didn't play the original, you probably wouldn't want to pick it up. That's the problem with stringing together a series of sequential 150+ hour RPGs. It can create a hard barrier to entry.
phant0m
Member
Seriously.
OG FF VII is what, 35ish hours? SE thought “let’s make it 250 hours and split into 3 parts”
They’re gonna be sorely disappointed by sales of pt 3.
adamsapple
Or is it just one of Phil's balls in my throat?
Sure but what else is there to talk about? Life is Strange is and always has been about the DEI adjacent content from the very first game. Removing that is basically eliminating the franchise altogether.
What else did they have? Romancing SaGa, that was a pretty vanilla experience. DQ3 HD had supposedly been ruined with the Type A and B stuff but that ended up doing better than Sq's internal expectations.
I wouldn't list DEI adjacent content as either good or bad for these results.
RetroGamingUK
Member
And how are sales on PC?
Many people buy PlayStation for Square’s games and JRPGs in general.
It’s just like how people who are WRPG fans are far more likely to play games on PC.
There’s no huge blue ocean of potential JRPG fans on PC, just as there isn’t a huge blue ocean for Microsoft’s games on PlayStation.
You choose a platform based on your taste in games.
thicc_girls_are_teh_best
Member
My thing is, if this idea that PC and console are two wholly distinct markets (or specifically, Steam is from consoles) like we've seen some people claim...why would XVI being a late port have had any impact on its Steam sales performance?
And taking the thing about install base size into account some people use (mainly to downplay sales of PS exclusives)...going by Steam's user base size, shouldn't XVI have sold even more there than it did on PS5? That clearly hasn't happened and will very likely never happen.
I don't claim to believe in those two metrics for measuring a game's success, btw. I'm just using talking points others used against XVI when it was a PS5 exclusive, and applying them to their logical conclusion now that it's available on Steam.
Horseganador
Member
Neither Dragon Quest 3 being multiplatform, nor FFXVI on PC has changed anything, Square continues to make losses, the problem is not the exclusivity with PS, it is the games and the interest they generate in the public.
adamsapple
Or is it just one of Phil's balls in my throat?
lol, come on now.
DQ3 is directly name-dropped as being a success and that game sold a million units on Switch in Japan alone. That's at least a million units that wouldn't be there with PS exclusivity.
Goalus
Member
What could be the reason?
HJuggernaut
Member
Japanese "men" having blonde spikey hair was very popular in the mid 90s to early 2000s which is where Cloud Strife got his look from not from Transexuals.
Woopah
Member
Games lose a certain "newness" factor when they are late ports. Additionally, late ports tend to get less marketing than a new release.
If you release a game on PC/PS/NS at the same time, it's generally going to sell more than if you only release it on one platform and port it to others later.
So for example, DQIII HD Switch would have sold lower numbers if it launched a year after the PS version.
StereoVsn
Gold Member
I don’t think there was DEI effect for either. Vast majority of folks don’t care about A/B bullshit in DQ3 even though it’s annoying.
And Rebirth suffered due to large amount of folks still on PS4 and being middle game in 3 part series. It’s a great game and this is super unfortunate.
Edit: And yeah, Square’s stupidity with exclusivity and late launch for Remake especially, soured some folks on the series.
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StereoVsn
Gold Member
Yep, if you look at Japanese entertainment during this era, it was very common.Japanese "men" having blonde spikey hair was very popular in the mid 90s to early 2000s which is where Cloud Strife got his look from not from Transexuals.
asdasdasdbb
Member
That's why I've been saying Final Fantasy needs to be on Switch. For better or worse. Playstation is dead in Japan and that's a market the franchise needs to be in.
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StereoVsn
Gold Member
The issue with XVI is that it’s not a good Final Fantasy, it’s not a good JRPG and it’s just a mid game with nice graphics.
Hence the low sales on PC as there was plenty of time for folks to see the reviews, in depths discussions, 20-40 min YouTube videos and so on.
{insert code here}
Member
Maybe they should setup multiple squads to work on the remakes instead of putting everything (FF7R) on one team. I bet Rebirth has better sales if it's both multiplatform day one and had launched 2 years post FF7R instead of 4.5 years.
Imo if they're going to continue with the remakes they absolutely need to get multiple teams involved AND massively scale-back the scope and production. It's nice (for me, as a fan) to have three FF7 games but it wasn't necessary to expand the game like that.
I understand AAA production is what it is but, do what you gotta do to scale it down to 3-4 years for each remake and stagger them so we get one every two years.
Imo if they're going to continue with the remakes they absolutely need to get multiple teams involved AND massively scale-back the scope and production. It's nice (for me, as a fan) to have three FF7 games but it wasn't necessary to expand the game like that.
I understand AAA production is what it is but, do what you gotta do to scale it down to 3-4 years for each remake and stagger them so we get one every two years.
thicc_girls_are_teh_best
Member
Well, certainly a large portion of the fanbase liked the game, it's sold more than 3.4 million at least.
But it's true, XVI was a VERY divisive game among core fans.
After both Remake and Rebirth pushed the envelope in production values, SE have kinda conditioned people to expect similar with Part 3. So scaling it back heavily might actually hurt the game; it wouldn't necessarily improve prospects among people new to the trilogy (since they haven't played the other two games), and could alienate players of the first two installments due to scaled-back scope.
Now for future FF installments, I agree they may want to consider scaling back production values and overall size of the games. Those aren't the only things FF needs IMO, but they would help a lot. If that FF IX Remake is real, I'd expect its budget to be within line of RS2R, and that game did extremely well both critically and commercially. Meanwhile for say FF XVII, I think they should aim to keep the budget no higher than $100-$110 million. For platforms, they could do PS5/PS6/Steam/EGS for a Day 1 release and if possible, Switch 2 as well.
Although considering Switch 2, I think SE would actually rather aim for PS5/PS6/Switch 2 Day 1, and a PC release on Steam and EGS somewhat later on. Hard to say where Xbox would fit in; Series X and S won't be commercially relevant by then (probably even discontinued), and depending on how the hybrid aspect of the next-gen devices are handled SE could just get away with a Steam/EGS version knowing the next Xbox could access them anyway with alternative storefront support.
Well, we can't pretend like multiplat Day 1 has no downsides, either. For one, it generally means waiting longer for the game to even come out. It also means budget & manpower for QA is spread thinner, so the game could be buggier on release as a result. For platforms where physical is still a thing, you have logistical issues too in terms of determining production splits of discs or carts, which regions get what supply, and how to handle overstock.
The example with DQ3 is kind of unique and specific to that game IMO. DQ as a franchise/IP has a very strong association with Nintendo systems; there was only one, maybe two gens (console-wise) where DQ skipped Nintendo and even then, they still showed up on the handhelds in one way or another. There's also the fact that, in a way, if DQ3 was a PS5 exclusive for a year, that probably could've actually led to higher PS5 sales and higher sales of DQ3 on PS5, resulting in a relatively similar total sales situation for SE with that game. As in, they may've seen less sales on Switch, but the gain of sales on PS5 would have offset it.
There's a chance that may NOT have happened, of course, and considering PS5 and Switch are a lot more dissimilar than PS5 & PC (IMO), I think you're dealing with a larger amount of distinct customers between the two platforms. Meaning, even if DQ3 were a PS5 timed exclusive, I'm not sure if that'd actually have impacted total potential sales on the Switch anyhow. They most likely would've stayed the same, with maybe a +/- 5% (or 10%) swing. A swing that, again, could have very likely been made up for in naturally more sales of the game on PS5.
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{insert code here}
Member
Yeah FF7-Part 3 is what it is. Too late to scale that game back to something reasonable. My suggestion for Square was strictly tied to their future games and/or remakes.
It's actually kind of interesting because in the past the big problem used to be working within the constraints of the hardware whether that was the Super Nintendo, the OG PlayStation, etc. I think now that just because you have powerful hardware doesn't mean you should push it so far that it's going to cost you $400M and take a team with hundreds and hundreds of people, six plus years to get the game to the customer.
I think the focus should be something like, okay let's take 50 of our best guys and give them a ~75M budget and 2-3 years and those are your only constraints and let's see what they can do. I want to see more of THAT.
Squeare Enix need a big reset
Imagine being the king of rpg during the 90s-20s ending up like this
Every other company you can see increased in quality of their games like Atlus SMT and Persona series,heck even Koei Tecmo new Atelier games also looks 100% times better than any SE slop now
Last game i like was Legend of Mana remake,and that was only "okay" ish,
Tried supported them again by buying the so called Valkyrie aprofile game due to "we need to biy this game to show SE we want games like this" ,turns out the game was a piece of turd and FF 16 was lackluster.
Honestly i have more fun playing chinese gacha games like WuWa and Star Rail,makes u wonder why the heck does SE the so called king of rpgs in the past cant even make games with those sort of quality as chinese gacha games
Imagine being the king of rpg during the 90s-20s ending up like this
Every other company you can see increased in quality of their games like Atlus SMT and Persona series,heck even Koei Tecmo new Atelier games also looks 100% times better than any SE slop now
Last game i like was Legend of Mana remake,and that was only "okay" ish,
Tried supported them again by buying the so called Valkyrie aprofile game due to "we need to biy this game to show SE we want games like this" ,turns out the game was a piece of turd and FF 16 was lackluster.
Honestly i have more fun playing chinese gacha games like WuWa and Star Rail,makes u wonder why the heck does SE the so called king of rpgs in the past cant even make games with those sort of quality as chinese gacha games
ArtHands
Thinks buying more servers can fix a bad patch
Must be pretty good that they decided to start bringing their Playstation exclusive console game over.
ArtHands
Thinks buying more servers can fix a bad patch
In fact DQ3 dropped like a rock on PS5 in Japan going by the weekly sales chart. Perhaps the issue is releasing on PS in the first place.
Foamstar, Final Fantasy XV, Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, and now Dragon Quest 3.
If you think Chinese gacha games are better than FF7 Rebirth then we probably have very different tastes in gaming.