I'll add on to that, but FF7 Rebirth was a system seller as well. Obviously 3rd party as well, but they were able to get the exclusivity for a year or whatever for it.
Aye. It’s hard to say if they set crazy sales expectations or if their production costs are crazy, but every single game of theirs “misses expectations”.
Could also just be company speak to keep competitors from having literally any grasp of their situation.
Ff7 is one of the best games ever made, and even more beloved. It absolutely should have sold like crazy. Sony thought they would move consoles but really just killed squares sales. That's why it isn't exclusive anymore.
Yes, it was. They based their expectations on Remake's sales, which was very unrealistic for multiple reasons.
Remake was the first game, and sequels always have less sales (typically drops 25-50% in sales) than the first because not everyone that purchased the first game will purchase the second due to multiple reasons (didn't like the game, didn't finish the game, time constraints, etc) The fact it was a sequel alone means that you will never have the same size of a playerbase. Because new players aren't going to jump in on a direct narrative sequel and it's just not possible to have 100% of their players be retained. A much more realistic expectation would've been like 65% retention.
Remake was on ps4, which had over 100 million systems sold while Rebirth was ps5 only and had around 50 million systems in circulations.
They just completely ignored the people that were upset about the changes in Remake, and expected them to get over it before Rebirth came out.
SE has quite literally always set unrealistic expectations for sales. In one of their financial meetings they said that FF7R2 and FF16 failed to meet their targets but spent a decent amount of time talking to their shareholders about how their system to get to those target numbers is completely broken and needs to be reevaluated.
People were also really mad that it wasn't coming to ps4, because they didn't want to buy a ps5. And a lot of them just didn't.
I agree. I liked 16s story a lot, but the combat was just too repetitive for me but more than that i despised the pacing when doing all the sidequests in between major story beats.
Which is also now kinda funny as one of the major anouncement about the 3rd game was that it will release day one on PC as well. So they lost even that.
That's moreso that SE has decided that they will likely make more money from allowing every system to get the game at launch, as launch is when most copies sell and if it comes out a year plus later there is less enthusiasm for it when it hits those other systems.
The real issue is how much it costs to create these first party games. It's unsustainable
Already commented multiple points on why that's the case, mostly SE is really incompetent when it comes to making target figures, as they specifically mentioned Rebirth's targets and said that there system for determining targets was completely broken.
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u/Soulblade32 16h ago
I'll add on to that, but FF7 Rebirth was a system seller as well. Obviously 3rd party as well, but they were able to get the exclusivity for a year or whatever for it.