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vio55555

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Apr 11, 2024
281
Do any games even have good legs besides Mario Kart, Mine Craft, GTA and Elden Ring? :D
I feel like the most impressive pair of games this gen is Animal Crossing NH and Luigi's Mansion 3. We expect the traditional biggest brand AAA titles to sell well, but those 2 feel like they made a big leap this gen.

You pretty much expect Mario Kart and Smash to have a high attach rate because new console buyers always consider those 2 (and they get console packaged often).

Animal Crossing and Luigi's Mansion 3 though have been shocking at how well they've sold and are still selling. AC NH could hit 50 million next year, which is a mind-boggling feat, and LM4 is going to get the proper treatment that an expected 10-20 million seller gets.
 

Hero

One Winged Slayer
Member
Oct 25, 2017
7,098
I feel like the most impressive pair of games this gen is Animal Crossing NH and Luigi's Mansion 3. We expect the traditional AAA titles to sell well, but those 2 feel like they made a big leap this gen.

You pretty much expect Mario Kart and Smash to have a high attach rate because new console buyers always consider those 2 (and they get packaged often).

Animal Crossing and Luigi's Mansion 3 though have been shocking at how well they've sold and are still selling. AC could hit 50 million next year, which is a mind-boggling feat.

Never forget this legendary thread.

https://www.resetera.com/threads/th...al-crossing-vs-final-fantasy-7-remake.156673/


View: https://imgur.com/I5O6dX7
 

vio55555

Member
Apr 11, 2024
281

That shows the leap AC has taken; I'd probably have picked AC (given its DS and 3DS iterations both hit 10+ million and Switch was already at 50m+) by a small margin.

Now, it's hard not to pick AC above Mario 3D or Pokemon which feels absurd. Only caution I suppose is that is the title that benefited most from the pandemic. I can't even imagine a more perfect pandemic release than how that went with the game providing a substitute for social interactions; perfect game meeting situational world moment, so perhaps a more "normal environment" results in sales a fair bit closer to or even under Mario 3D or Pokemon.

Feels almost guaranteed that the next one will sell 20-30% less.
 

Man God

Member
Oct 25, 2017
38,417
Kinda weird to mention Switch leggy games without Breath of the Wild. The game that was there day one and the one where the equally impressive sequel came out and...goosed its numbers even higher.
 

jblanco

Member
Oct 27, 2017
1,502
Do we have an updated number of FF16 sales? The 3 million number was from last year, right?

Also, which game do you all think was more expensive to make? FF16 or FF7:Rebirth?

FF7:Rebirth probably cut a lot of costs because many assets were already done from Remake, plus the dev team was already familiar with the engine, etc.

Still, FF7:Rebirth being open-worldish makes it seem more expensive, but I honestly have no clue.
 

idiotmode

Member
Jul 30, 2022
215
Do we have an updated number of FF16 sales? The 3 million number was from last year, right?

Also, which game do you all think was more expensive to make? FF16 or FF7:Rebirth?

FF7:Rebirth probably cut a lot of costs because many assets were already done from Remake, plus the dev team was already familiar with the engine, etc.

Still, FF7:Rebirth being open-worldish makes it seem more expensive, but I honestly have no clue.
No updates nah, hopefully we get something for XVI and Rebirth on Monday.
 

vio55555

Member
Apr 11, 2024
281
Do we have an updated number of FF16 sales? The 3 million number was from last year, right?

Also, which game do you all think was more expensive to make? FF16 or FF7:Rebirth?

FF7:Rebirth probably cut a lot of costs because many assets were already done from Remake, plus the dev team was already familiar with the engine, etc.

Still, FF7:Rebirth being open-worldish makes it seem more expensive, but I honestly have no clue.
Hard to trust any estimates out there since most are just wild guesses, but most put the cost of these games somewhere well above $100 million each ($120-150 million is the typical range of guesses).

Shared costs with Remake does help Rebirth (and will help the 3rd game) but it's always hard to know exactly how much. It stands to reason that sequels are a fair bit cheaper to make with same engine/assets, which is why Lightning Returns got made just to get another 13 game out despite 13-2 sales dropping considerably compared to 13.

If you save $20-30 million in development costs, that's a huge savings...

Of course, Rebirth does look a lot more polished than 13-2/Lightning Returns and we can probably expect the same from the 3rd, so it's hard to really know if they're actually saving anything.

Kinda weird to mention Switch leggy games without Breath of the Wild. The game that was there day one and the one where the equally impressive sequel came out and...goosed its numbers even higher.

Yeah BotW started it all and transformed Zelda into being equal to Mario 3D and Pokemon title-for-title, which is an almost ridiculous feat for a game that hadn't had a 10 million seller before.

TotK will suffer something of a sequel drop, but it appears to be way stronger than Majora's Mask and should get something like 80+% of BotW's sales number if it gets an upgraded Switch 2 port or DLC.
 

Mephissto

Member
Mar 8, 2024
608
Hard to trust any estimates out there since most are just wild guesses, but most put the cost of these games somewhere well above $100 million each ($120-150 million is the typical range of guesses).

Shared costs with Remake does help Rebirth (and will help the 3rd game) but it's always hard to know exactly how much. It stands to reason that sequels are a fair bit cheaper to make with same engine/assets, which is why Lightning Returns got made just to get another 13 game out despite 13-2 sales dropping considerably compared to 13.

If you save $20-30 million in development costs, that's a huge savings...

Of course, Rebirth does look a lot more polished than 13-2/Lightning Returns and we can probably expect the same from the 3rd, so it's hard to really know if they're actually saving anything.



Yeah BotW started it all and transformed Zelda into being equal to Mario 3D and Pokemon title-for-title, which is an almost ridiculous feat for a game that hadn't had a 10 million seller before.


Can't imagine them not saving anything. They save dev time at the very least which also is quite a bit of money, no?
 

vio55555

Member
Apr 11, 2024
281
Can't imagine them not saving anything. They save dev time at the very least which also is quite a bit of money, no?
Yeah, only question is whether they're just plowing time savings back into polishing other parts of the game.

Rebirth looks a lot more polished than 13-2/Lightning Returns for example (where I'd assume the budgets were a bit lower than 13).

TotK for example, I'd imagine any savings from it being a sequel to BotW likely got spent; the amount of development hours was probably similar based on what Aonuma has said about the size of the team and length of time BotW took (plus it's hard to untangle the pandemic from all this).

The thing about this is that it's so different from say movie-making where you actually get significant savings from shooting movies back-to-back and can spread a lower overall cost across 2+ movies than making each separately (though this typically only happens with the biggest of blockbusters where the budgets are the biggest anyways due to actor salaries and everything else). We've seen that with Infinity War/Endgame or Harry Potter 7 or LOTR or the newer Avatar movies.
 
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Slatsunus

Member
Nov 2, 2017
3,264
Rebirth is so much bigger the XIII-2 or LR that its not a great comparison.

Obviously having Remake to build off of would help with cost a bunch, but Rebirth is so big I wonder how much.

XVI is one of the most budget conscious AAA games ever I wouldnt be surprised if it was cheaper then Remake
 

Hero

One Winged Slayer
Member
Oct 25, 2017
7,098
Can't imagine them not saving anything. They save dev time at the very least which also is quite a bit of money, no?

Exactly. Shaving off 2-3 years of development time is huge. They also went with Unreal Engine 4 to speed up the process versus making a proprietary engine.

Edit: Never stopped to think about it but I bet that's why Remake was EGS exclusive
 
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vio55555

Member
Apr 11, 2024
281
Rebirth is so much bigger the XIII-2 or LR that its not a great comparison.

Obviously having Remake to build off of would help with cost a bunch, but Rebirth is so big I wonder how much.

XVI is one of the most budget conscious AAA games ever I wouldnt be surprised if it was cheaper then Remake
Only issue though is development time; they do appear to have saved up to 2 years on each of these trilogy games compared to say 16 or presumably 17 (theoretically that should imply savings for Remake/Rebirth budgets).

It's just impossible to untangle from how many people are working/how many hours and all of the rest that goes into this process.

It does feel like bringing the time down to 4 years-ish for Remake/Rebirth and presumably 3rd should result in significant savings, but if it's also with a much larger team than 16, then the savings is likely being spent.

But we don't really know the specifics unless somebody talks about it in an interview.
 

TheMerv

Member
Jan 1, 2022
1,608
I think there's also a question of how much Square sees current Final Fantasy entries as R&D for the future even if they'd vastly prefer reasonable sales success.

FF16 served as a fairly low scale, relative to something like Versus XIII, target so that they can develop an in house engine for single player Final Fantasy. Rebirth serves as a way to develop a way to translate the scale and scope of old Final Fantasy into modern terms. It's fairly easy to imagine a mainline Final Fantasy feeling like a full adventure with the exact amount of explorable biomes, towns, dungeons, and setpieces as Rebirth.

I wonder if part 3 might seem worth it just for squaring how a modern AAA airship could work and further iteration on this world style.

Theoretically future Final Fantasy directors and producers should be able to choose when to deviate from the series norm instead of having to essentially create everything from whole cloth.
 

Naiad

Member
Aug 27, 2020
1,092
XVI is one of the most budget conscious AAA games ever I wouldnt be surprised if it was cheaper then Remake

It was actually dropped in an interview for a bit that XVI was given a pretty large budget and Yoshida was actually surprised that SE approved it.


View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DyCKsd9Y5Mk

Timestamp at 12:34 when they're asked "What are you most proud about Final Fantasy XVI?" and Yoshida answers first

Well, I was producer this time around so it's coming from that perspective. I'm proud that we were able to take the concept and story that we came up with in the beginning and create a game without deviating from that. Of course, while we were making the game, we'd go through twists and turns, but I think that we did well to really stay true to our course. It might sound strange coming from my position, but I really admire the team. I'm proud of them for seeing it through and creating the game to its fullest. So, that's one. The second thing...is that I'm impressed the company approved this development costs. I can't say how much, but I have to hand it to them that we were allowed to spend this much. As such, I do feel a little pressure in terms of wanting to pay it back, but it was really incredible.

This makes me believe that it was a lot of money that went into XVI.
 

Kuro

Member
Oct 25, 2017
21,153
It was actually dropped in an interview for a bit that XVI was given a pretty large budget and Yoshida was actually surprised that SE approved it.


View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DyCKsd9Y5Mk

Timestamp at 12:34 when they're asked "What are you most proud about Final Fantasy XVI?" and Yoshida answers first



This makes me believe that it was a lot of money that went into XVI.

Probably in relation to what he gets for XIV expansions which makes sense. Its an easy $100+ million endeavor although they certainly did seem careful with not going over scope and reused their tools from XIV and VII Remake for a lot of things like NPC conversations and cutscene scripting.
 

Hero

One Winged Slayer
Member
Oct 25, 2017
7,098
Rebirth is so much bigger the XIII-2 or LR that its not a great comparison.

Obviously having Remake to build off of would help with cost a bunch, but Rebirth is so big I wonder how much.

XVI is one of the most budget conscious AAA games ever I wouldnt be surprised if it was cheaper then Remake

It was actually dropped in an interview for a bit that XVI was given a pretty large budget and Yoshida was actually surprised that SE approved it.


View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DyCKsd9Y5Mk

Timestamp at 12:34 when they're asked "What are you most proud about Final Fantasy XVI?" and Yoshida answers first



This makes me believe that it was a lot of money that went into XVI.


Lol I don't know where the narrative came from that XVI was 'cheap.' They made a completely proprietary engine and was in development for very long time. 3971 people were credited in the game. Of course, not all of that is full timers, but its the biggest single player game investment for the franchise.

For comparison:

FFXIII - 1000
FFXV - 2516 People
FFVII Remake - 2369
FFVII Rebirth - 3463

Probably in relation to what he gets for XIV expansions which makes sense. Its an easy $100+ million endeavor although they certainly did seem careful with not going over scope and reused their tools from XIV and VII Remake for a lot of things like NPC conversations and cutscene scripting.

100 is way too low. 150m is probably the low end.
 
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Rutger

Member
Oct 25, 2017
9,687
Yeah, nothing about FFXVI has ever come off as cheap.

That idea often seems derived from people not liking certain design decisions like stock animation in less important cutscenes.
 

Kuro

Member
Oct 25, 2017
21,153
Considering the game broke even and met Square's expectations at just launch with 3 million sold that would put the budget under ~$145 million (not accounting for Sony's money hat) which is what Remake was estimated to cost before pandemic dev cost inflation.

Credits number doesn't really tell too much on budget since studios across the industry all have their own way of crediting.

Also the site with credits is missing the large voice cast for Rebirth's Japanese and other languages. It only lists the English and French main voice cast for some reason. That's hundreds of people missing.
 

Clippy

Member
Feb 11, 2022
2,228
Lol I don't know where the narrative came from that XVI was 'cheap.' They made a completely proprietary engine and was in development for very long time. 3971 people were credited in the game. Of course, not all of that is full timers, but its the biggest single player game investment for the franchise.

For comparison:

FFXIII - 1000
FFXV - 2516 People
FFVII Remake - 2369
FFVII Rebirth - 3463
I don't think it's cheap, but the proprietary engine is likely a modified version of one they use. And pretty much all big studios modify their engines in many ways, even those using Unreal and the likes. It might have been even more expensive to use a licensed engine, because you'd have to familiarize staff with a completely new environment. Quoting Digital Foundry:
Square has been remarkably tight-lipped, but it's likely we're seeing an evolution of work done originally for Final Fantasy 14, albeit greatly enhanced.
 

Hero

One Winged Slayer
Member
Oct 25, 2017
7,098
Considering the game broke even and met Square's expectations at just launch with 3 million sold that would put the budget under ~$145 million (not accounting for Sony's money hat) which is what Remake was estimated to cost before pandemic dev cost inflation.

Credits number doesn't really tell too much on budget since studios across the industry all have their own way of crediting.

Also the site with credits is missing the large voice cast for Rebirth's Japanese and other languages. It only lists the English and French main voice cast for some reason. That's hundreds of people missing.

I don't recall where it was stated that it broke even. SE uses amortization for the cost of domestic games and their quarterly report took a big hit when they paid off XVI. So they paid it off in full at the onset and so any sales of XVI are considered to be 'profit.'

Yoshi P has said in multiple interviews XVI was a very expensive game.

https://www.square-enix-games.com/en_US/news/final-fantasy-xvi-interview-creating-rpg

We're now just weeks away from the launch of FINAL FANTASY What elements of the game are you most proud of?

Yoshida-san:
I have such respect for the development team for seeing it through to the end and completing development of the game and respect for Square Enix for approving this budget (laughs)

https://www.reddit.com/r/FFXVI/comments/13y6imc/weekly_ochiais_interview_question_with_naoki/

Ochiai: This might be a weird question to ask but since you have put so much passion and effort into creating this game, when it comes to management, how do you approach on the sales aspect here (read: translate it into profits and sales)? In terms of timing and your target audience and so on.
YoshiP: So when it comes to product, when I first submit my proposal, it's a given that I would attached together with the budget documentation, like this will be the platform where the game will be released, development wise it'll take a grand total of this amount, when the game will be released, the cost for marketing and PR will take this much, and the projected profit will be around this much...these will of course be included into the documentation...but I can tell you that I wouldn't want to look at the first week sales for FFXVI (laughs).

Ochiai: (laughs) But still, I take that the board of directors came together and approved the budget you're issuing during the meeting I assume

YoshiP: Yes that was indeed the case, but when it comes to FF, there are places where you can't turn back once you get into it. but I'm being quite drastic here, and precisely because I'm a creator here, I have to be particular about the business aspect, and if I'm just creating this game out of self-satisfaction, it will definitely not connect to the next. So even though if I get told that it was a fun game, but if this doesn't translate to sales then we won't be able to create the next game. So our policy at Creative Business Unit 3 here is that at the very least, create a game where you yourself think it's interesting, and make the game earn in black numbers (※A Japanese word meaning "profit", loss of profit is "red numbers"), even if it's just a little. By doing so, we will still get money and we'll be able to work on the games we like or things that we think are interesting so I think this time.......well......well if I think this wouldn't work out, I'd actually go destroy those projects myself, like, "I'm sorry this is impossible" and then work on other projects to supplement it, and yeah I would tell them to cancel this project. I mean, I've already done this numerous times throughout my career but still, yeah since I can't turn back this time when it comes to creating this game and I told them that we'll try to sell it all out so allow me to put this amount of budget I need for this game. The answer I got from them was "Yeah, do your best"...so...yeah. But then I've been generating profits from FFXIV anyway, and manage to contribute a lot to the company and it was thanks to the Warriors of Light that made it happen, so it was hard for the company to say "no" to what I've proposed I assume (laughs).
 

Kuro

Member
Oct 25, 2017
21,153
I don't recall where it was stated that it broke even. SE uses amortization for the cost of domestic games and their quarterly report took a big hit when they paid off XVI.

Yoshi P has said in multiple interviews XVI was a very expensive game.

https://www.square-enix-games.com/en_US/news/final-fantasy-xvi-interview-creating-rpg



https://www.reddit.com/r/FFXVI/comments/13y6imc/weekly_ochiais_interview_question_with_naoki/
Is ~$145 million not expensive to you? I'm not sure what you're trying to say here. Is this your roundabout way of once again insinuating Square was not being truthful about their expectations for XVI?
 

idiotmode

Member
Jul 30, 2022
215
My guess was 140-160 million. More than usual but not exactly like a 200 million develop budget. Their net revenue is about even with the FY2022's revenue as of the last report and there's only really 3 titles driving the revenue there so most likely it sold well I'd be surprised if it somehow didn't make its budget back at 3+ million sales at $70. Imo neither were cheap most likely. I do believe XVI was the more expensive of the two, though not by some massive amount. They're both still big AAA games after all.
 

Hero

One Winged Slayer
Member
Oct 25, 2017
7,098
I don't think it's cheap, but the proprietary engine is likely a modified version of one they use. And pretty much all big studios modify their engines in many ways, even those using Unreal and the likes. It might have been even more expensive to use a licensed engine, because you'd have to familiarize staff with a completely new environment. Quoting Digital Foundry:

I mean it does use their engine, just looking at most sidequests with unimportant NPCs and they use the XIV 'handover' animation, but its still heavily modified/customized.

Is ~$145 million not expensive to you? I'm not sure what you're trying to say here. Is this your roundabout way of once again insinuating Square was not being truthful about their expectations for XVI?

You started off by using "100m+" indicating 100m is the low end and I'm trying to tell you that you are vastly underestimating the floor for it. 150-ish is a more realistic floor. 100m was Forspoken money.

You and Toth really like to misrepresent me regarding 'SE expectations.' Expectations are a range. You give a low number (aka a floor) and a high number (aka a ceiling). So saying XVI met expectations is not me saying they are lying but my conclusion that it was on the lowish end. Hopefully we'll get an update on it next week.
 

Kuro

Member
Oct 25, 2017
21,153
I mean it does use their engine, just looking at most sidequests with unimportant NPCs and they use the XIV 'handover' animation, but its still heavily modified/customized.



You started off by using "100m+" indicating 100m is the low end and I'm trying to tell you that you are vastly underestimating the floor for it. 150-ish is a more realistic floor. 100m was Forspoken money.

You and Toth really like to misrepresent me regarding 'SE expectations.' Expectations are a range. You give a low number (aka a floor) and a high number (aka a ceiling). So saying XVI met expectations is not me saying they are lying but my conclusion that it was on the lowish end. Hopefully we'll get an update on it next week.
I've been on record saying it was likely similar to Remake's estimated 140 million dollar budget, don't fixate on me just throwing a big round 100+ number when we don't know exacts. Its just to give an idea of it being over 100 million and expensive.

When I think of being within scope or more budget conscious its in relation to stuff like Sony's first party efforts that regularly hit over $250 million these days.
 

Hero

One Winged Slayer
Member
Oct 25, 2017
7,098
I've been on record saying it was likely similar to Remake's estimated 140 million dollar budget, don't fixate on me just throwing a big round 100+ number when we don't know exacts. Its just to give an idea of it being over 100 million and expensive.

When I think of being within scope or more budget conscious its in relation to stuff like Sony's first party efforts that regularly hit over $250 million these days.

I don't keep track of what every little thing every member says. You started off by saying 100m+ and then "under 145" and I'm saying that's grossly downplaying it. 100 million while expensive to me as an individual is really the bare minimum I would expect for a AAA game. Forspoken was a '100m+' game and there is a huge gap between it and XVI/Remake/Rebirth.

Most game dev costs are 'budget conscious' if you're comparing to to Sony's efforts so that's not really saying much imo.
 

idiotmode

Member
Jul 30, 2022
215
OI is apparently way under their projections so that bodes ill. But they haven't released the more digestible version of the IR yet so we'll see in like 15-20 minutes from this post. Also glad they are doing multiplat definitively with a mention on growing the PC market. It's like, finally they caught ya know.
 

Celestial Descend

Corrupted by Vengeance
Member
Aug 15, 2022
3,544
They saw Sega announced Persona franchise moved 2.5 million copies in first quarter and decided to save themselves from the embarrassment. I'm only half joking.
 

Risev

"This guy are sick"
Member
Oct 27, 2017
3,453
Pretty sure we'll not know the sales of Rebirth and 16 for years at this point
 

Kaworu

Member
Oct 28, 2017
373
That's great and all, but I think that includes Gamepass numbers which, for P3 remake, I suppose is a very big part of the overall sales being on both Xbox and Pc.

It doesn't. Sega reports that revenue in the Consumer/Other category instead that in the Consumer/Full Game one.

It also uses the expression number of players instead of sold when including subscription numbers as seen for Football Manager, etc.
 

AEF1907

Fallen Guardian Corrupted by Vengeance
Member
Dec 18, 2021
4,119
AFAIK Square Enix never mentions sales numbers of titles in their financial report. You guys have to wait for someone like Gibson to leak what they said about Rebirths performance in the shareholder Q&A. Or wait a month or so till they make the Q&A public.
 

Strings

Member
Oct 27, 2017
31,723
It doesn't. Sega reports that revenue in the Consumer/Other category instead that in the Consumer/Full Game one.

It also uses the expression number of players instead of sold when including subscription numbers as seen for Football Manager, etc.
The 2.4 million figure from Sega was specifically 'sold copies', so Game Pass players wouldn't be counted in that.
Not sure in this instance, but Sega juices their franchise sales numbers with F2P mobile downloads (not mentioned when they make celebratory milestone announcements, but there in their financial reports), so it's not inconceivable they'd add subscription downloads too. Examples include Sonic being reported at 1.6b sales (lol) and SMT at 19m (it's ~8.5-9m without the mobile game). We know this because we have their numbers immediately before it released:
www.gematsu.com

Persona series sales top 8.5 million, Megami Tensei series sales top 7.2 million

Total sales for the Persona series have topped 8.5 million units, and total sales for the Megami Tensei series have topped 7.2 million units, Sega’s 2017 annual report reveals.

And then from last year for comparison:

cinQEyE.png
 
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TheMerv

Member
Jan 1, 2022
1,608
So we started with Rebirth underperforming.

Then it was under 2 million at best.

And now it's bombed so badly it's wiped all profit from the rest of the HD division.

Is there literally any lower we could go here?
 

Toth

Member
Oct 26, 2017
4,149
So we started with Rebirth underperforming.

Then it was under 2 million at best.

And now it's bombed so badly it's wiped all profit from the rest of the HD division.

Is there literally any lower we could go here?

We don't know. Foamstar and DQ Kai may have the been a major reason why OI loss is so high despite better profits. FF R may have underperformed but not that poorly.
 
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