Honestly, ceilings are kinda a myth. People were literally saying that CRPGs couldn't be popular until BG3 came out. I also remember people saying the Souls couldn't be popular because they were too hard and unforgiving. Now we have several developers chasing after that Soulslike feel because it's so popular.
Part of the ceiling myth is pretending that now popular AAA games were always inherently popular, not games that were intentionally popularized over a long period by deliberate choices and nurturing (on part of both developers and publishers) until they hit breakout point.
There is a big difference when you are talking about crpgs like Pillars of Eternity, compared to BG3, which has many trappings of an AAA third person open zone rpg. Similarly Souls games grew in sales with every iteration, and ER really hit it off as an open world action rpg. The biggest games taking inspiration from Souls like GOW and Jedi, are again massive AAA games from popular franchises. Context is key.
Open worlds sell, that should not be a surprise. I think Rebirth's issues has less to do with Ubi flavour ones because they are still selling massively, especially Ubi's own.
I don't necessarily think the open world content is one of the reason's its not selling, but I just want to say that even Ubisoft's open worlds aren't as handholdy as Rebirth nowadays (or at least Valhalla wasn't, from what I remember, haven't played another Ubi open world since). I remember a lot more genuine exploration in Valhalla when compared to Rebirth, at least.
Lol no, but it could not hurt if they went open world with their next standalone right?
There is definitely a lot more to this than it being about the open world.
People were literally saying that in reference to BG3. And for souls when don't even have to look at Elden Ring, DS3 was way more popular than what people would have expected in the past.
i think the biggest point of contemption is that people talk about ceiling as if FF is hitting that ceiling. if there is one, it hit with XV and has been very obviously declining since then. there's really no other way around that fact, and strangely some people really don't want to accept that
i dont think it had a negative effect on sales, but it definitely didnt help much either. open worlds, sometimes, sell a lot of because of 1. the initial wave when a good open world is launched is huge, and massively affects wom (like botw, rdr2, elden ring); 2. a very interactive open world makes way for tons of content being made, which helps the longevity of a game
Design wise, not at all. Could have an affect where it launches, but that's gonna make no difference to fans of the game.
atleast pre-production on part 3 has been confirmed since early 2022, and the budget for it was accounted even beforehand, so yeah, it will affect little if nothing at all
I think you may be on to something there. Think about social media engagement with things like Elden Ring, like people posting videos of them randomly finding the elevator to Siofra River or even just "wtf there's a cave here" clips.
As someone who's enjoyed a few open world games over the past few years, I personally feel like Rebirth's is one of the lesser ones I've played in a while. It's beautiful, for sure, but the way it delivers content was actively detrimental to my immersion within it.
FF7 make 10 millions too (and 14 millions with remasterd and different port).
The Souls series grew with each iteration, so it does not really matter what the comments tried to make it out to be. BG3 as a mainstream success, look at what the game is and how it sells. Being a crpg alone does not give the full picture of how it became so successful.
Unless the name FF is somehow the problem, they are a gameplay or structural change away from attracting a bigger audience.
So why shouldn't they matter for souls when they apparently matter for JRPGs, or whatever genre people are discussing at the time? When people say there is a ceiling, it mean's that X game can't sell more than an arbitrary amout of copies because of a specific trait. It doesn't really matter what the game is doing differently. My point is there always seems to be a "ceiling" until something comes a long a proves that there really isn't one. Most of the time it's just about a good game having the right circumstance.
I am in agreement here that ceilings are meant to be broken with changes to a formula. Nothing is really ever set in stone and trends change, even if one genre has a long history of being signficantly popular or unpopular.
Capcom games inherently have a wider appeal than JRPGs, at least to the current gaming audience. That much isn't surprising.
We have more than 0 clue. Infinite Wealth opened at #9 on PlayStation in the Circana charts and #8 on Xbox. The PlayStation total number is gonna be higher than the Xbox one because it's just the bigger install base, but after controlling for population size and geography it doesn't seem that genre is as big of deal as people make it out to be.
Huh, that's decent enough and more or less in line with LaD's overall popularity. Granted, sales splits are still going to look atrocious due to Xbox's irrelevance in Asia, but that's asking for more than what they can possibly deliver. Decent enough performance in NA is good enough.
Sega has been supporting Xbox with Persona for years now trying to build a large a fanbase as possible for their eventually releases. If that doesn't move the needle, genuinely what will? If it doesn't sell well, then what JRPG franchise could possibly justify caring about the Xbox at that point? You would be left with maybe only Final Fantasy having the ability to potentially move units. Now Yakuza has apparently done decently, so that's probably a positive sign - but really? It's not a publishers job to cultivate a genre on an entire platform - ports to Switch sell well regardless of any pre-existing fanbase or not.
It was also selling on the idea of it being an actual remake (which is, yknow, a better starting point for new fans) and not a pseudo sequel
I feel like this whole post isn't really responding to what I said, but okay.
www.gamesindustry.biz
A real dichotomy where the biggest games on the platform seem to be f2p live service, but premium games are heavily physical leaning.Japanese physical sales neared $3bn in 2023 | Japan Annual Report
Almost $3 billion was spent on boxed games and hardware in Japan last year, according to Famitsu's annual report.The to…
sorry, maybe i am dumb and missing it. i only see this article describing the physical sales total, but not in relation to the digital sales. so it doesn't tell us the distribution between physical and digital salesJapanese physical sales neared $3bn in 2023 | Japan Annual Report
Almost $3 billion was spent on boxed games and hardware in Japan last year, according to Famitsu's annual report.The to…
There was a thread about the article as well, but it didn't generate much discussion.
There is no reason to believe that there's an extra $3 billion or more unaccounted for making up a share of digital sales in that market (which is what your prior estimate of a 50/50 split would imply).
do you have numbers for the total market? otherwise you're just making an assumption and passing it off as data. i mean, i would love for you to be right, because i much prefer games on physical media over digital versions, but you're kinda pulling your thesis out of your ass
Then you can go scouring for them yourself if that's going to be how you answer me.
i mean i didn't mean to be rude, but if you didn't have the answer to my initial question, why did you answer it. i was asking for data, not gueaswork, because i am lacking the data myself. i just don't think we should assume the digital/physical split is heavily tilted towards physical, just because it has been in the past. that was the case elsewhere as well, and then the market shifted. maybe japan is different from everywhere else, but we don't know that
...the game still sold millions of copies. I'm not expecting a reduction in production values for the final installment.
To this day, it makes me mad every time I boot up Chrono Phantasma.
And that's the lesson I hope they take from this. Take this formula and make a FFXVII out of it. Or hell make it a side story like Versus XIII was going to be but give it a subtitle that doesn't have a number. Or make it a new IP entirely so the title can live on its own and so the FF name doesn't confuse or scare away the new audience, but still be within the FF meta like the way Persona games are SMT games or those GamsBoy games that were FF spin offs.
We still had the dub in Chrono Phantasma, but it was disappointing to see it gone by the time they ended the story with Central Fiction.
Lol I play the game every other month and still forget CF is the name of the last game. CP is just such an unfortunate initialization it's burned into my brain.
