Square Enix has made public its dissatisfaction with Final Fantasy 16 and Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth’s commercial performance, admitting neither game met profit expectations.
Sales expectations here don’t mean “we think this game is so good it will move x million units,” that thinking doesn’t exist anymore. It starts from the money they put in it, and they deduce “we’ll need to sell x million copies to get the money back with the profit we want.” There have been a few interviews specifically about these two games saying that.
It’s the same old idea that AAA products (movies, games, same excuse) cost more to make than they bring money back - although we never know exactly how much of that is actually “investors expect an x% return by week y” where x is just too high and y too short and they never want to think longer term, and we never know how far an investment actually goes. Especially in the case of the Remake trilogy where keeping the same engine and world is supposed to drastically reduce the cost of the last game compared to if they had started a new game from scratch with the same content - except part 3 is unlikely to sell more than part 2 given that it’s a sequel.
At any rate, we all know it’s true that development time and costs keep going up exponentially, and no one likes it (and yet everyone wants 4k 60fps somehow).
Sales expectations here don’t mean “we think this game is so good it will move x million units,” that thinking doesn’t exist anymore. It starts from the money they put in it, and they deduce “we’ll need to sell x million copies to get the money back with the profit we want.” There have been a few interviews specifically about these two games saying that.
It’s the same old idea that AAA products (movies, games, same excuse) cost more to make than they bring money back - although we never know exactly how much of that is actually “investors expect an x% return by week y” where x is just too high and y too short and they never want to think longer term, and we never know how far an investment actually goes. Especially in the case of the Remake trilogy where keeping the same engine and world is supposed to drastically reduce the cost of the last game compared to if they had started a new game from scratch with the same content - except part 3 is unlikely to sell more than part 2 given that it’s a sequel.
At any rate, we all know it’s true that development time and costs keep going up exponentially, and no one likes it (and yet everyone wants 4k 60fps somehow).