OT2 also had much less marketing than the first one thanks to not having Nintendo marketing and SE not making up for it
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I think honestly it just sold worse because a lot of people who played the first game were like "ok I get it" and didn't want another game that's basically the exact same game but with a couple gameplay tweaks. OT2 is the textbook definition of a "next verse, same as the first" kind of game and I don't think that you can keep recycling that idea over and over again with different characters without losing a lot of people. Once the HD-2D gimmick's novelty wears off it doesn't have that much going for it.
This is a sales thread about sales in Japan. Nobody is forcing you to post here if you're not interested in discussing sales of the game in Japan.
7 million copies is still a respectable number. Should it be considered a failure because it sold less than XV? You say it's not sustainable but do you have the balance sheets to show that Square Enix missed their profit targets? How do you know it's not sustainable? If Square Enix is still making a healthy profit (which neither you or I have the data for) then why shouldn't they continue to aim high? We don't even have the data for the digital and western sales figures for Rebirth yet. What other platforms do you suggest it should have been on to quell the "floundering"?
iteration would help with diminishing costs, and it is a more organical way of finding the breakout hit but, just for throwing it out there, iteration wont magically solve it's sales issues. more people wont buy your game just because its...similar to the past one.
hmmm i dont agree with that at all. Remake could have absolutely sold bonkers, and it would have brought in massive amounts of new people to the franchise, that a sequel or more games in that fashion would be perfect for them. in fact, most people....literally thought that would've happened, but it didnt for a plethora of reasons
That's not what I said. I said we don't need to CATASTROPHIZE about it and act like "oh the series should just change everything about what it is solely to increase sales in this one specific territory".
We can look at the numbers and understand long-term regional industry trends without coming up with snap judgments that mostly revolve around going "well if Square just did everything differently, then the numbers would be bigger!"
Selling poorly in your home country but great abroad may not have short-term consequences, but it can have long-term consequences.
We know that the job market for video game developers is extremely competitive in Japan and that companies fight each other to hire the brightest from each university class.
In the long term, it can affect your ability to choose the best of each generation if they are people who have zero prior connection to your company or your franchise. Especially in a country that is as reluctant to hire foreigners as Japan.
We know that the job market for video game developers is extremely competitive in Japan and that companies fight each other to hire the brightest from each university class.
In the long term, it can affect your ability to choose the best of each generation if they are people who have zero prior connection to your company or your franchise. Especially in a country that is as reluctant to hire foreigners as Japan.
JRPG aren't dying is just that in Japan they prefer to play them on mobile.
Players that used to buy them during the PS1/PS2 era moved on to gacha gaming.
What people seem to miss is that not even 4 years ago Remake sold at launch around 30% of global sales in Japan. Long-market trends are, by definition, long-term and don't cause such huge effects in such a short timespan. Japan has always been traditionally a big market for Final Fantasy, with the only exception being XV and, until now, XVI.
MHW was the first new mainline HD entry, multiplatform and global launch. It took a lot of risk and changed the formula, which allowed it to jump to heaven. The same can't be said for whatever new FF. The graphical showcase JRPG, which many say is the series identity, simply isn't as impactful anymore as the jumps in fidelity are less and less perceived. When others JRPGs are selling way better than FF while having a fraction of the budget, something needs to be looked out and rethought. Heck, the most succesful FF of the past years is FF XIV and that isn't whay we can call a graphical showcase at all.That's not the point though. The discourse at the time was that Monster Hunter was a series that belonged on portable consoles and could only sell well on there. I remember at the time the Famitsu editor was laughed at and mocked because he suggested the series could sell over 10 million.
The game has gone on to sell over 25 million copies. Capcom took a huge risk by being ambitious and it paid off for them. Lowering the standards is not the way to increase the sales for Final fantasy.
Hirokazu Hamamura: Monster Hunter World Could Sell 10 Million Copies
He mentions that Final Fantasy XV is at around 7 million copies worldwide. More at the link: https://www.dualshockers.com/monster-hunter-world-sales-10-million-copies/www.resetera.com
This. Japan still matter a lot for FF. Even for XVI it still accounted for 10% of the global sales. Japan alone had 30% share (1M+) of FF7 Remake sales at launch. You can't simply forego of these sales and hope that WW sales will make up for it easily.
What's there even to change at this point though? Seriously, the only thing that unites the last 5 mainline games of the series is that they were high budget lol
Capcom seems to be just fine so far so I don't think it's all too bad really.
I don't like XV either, but there's definitely something about it Square needs to learn from, whether its the full open world approach or the massive marketing campaign or what.
Not automatically and not immediately, but, if you keep the quality up, it can widen your audience if you keep pleasing your core audience enough to meme it into the stratosphere. That's how the Souls series broke out. It's no guarantee at all though.
This is not actually true, Gran Turismos 1, 3, and 4 all sold better than the top Final Fantasy on their respective platforms.
Mobile did impact console sales and consumer behavior. But JRPGs are still widely popular in Japan and have a lot of successful stories in the past few years. We just had Shiren example some weeks ago, being one of the best selling games in the franchise ever and still selling very well despite being impacted by shortages.
A few weeks ago they increased salaries for new workers by 25% in order to attract more talent. Of course it is a positive thing, but it is not something that a company does if it does not have certain problems filling vacancies.
Of course there's no silver bullet but iteration would make the FF name actually mean something and importantly have knowledge carry over. Also iteration can take many forms, Rockstar, Bethesda, Persona all iterate but in different ways.
Oh wow thanks a lot for this, it's exactly what I was looking for!
So I managed to gather some statistics from a list of PS5 games in order to give a general idea
| Title | Week 1 Sales | Week 2 Sales | % Drop | Total LTD |
| Marvel's Spider-Man 2 | 77,348 | 12,509 | 83 | 295,171 |
| Hogwarts Legacy | 67,196 | 36,958 | 45 | 187,840 |
| Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth | 102,940 | 15,388 | 85 | 136,452 |
| Resident Evil 4 | 89,662 | 18,510 | 79 | 140,889 |
| Gran Turismo 7 | 73,399 | 10,106 | 86 | 348,793 |
| Elden Ring | 90,017 | 14,746 | 83.5 | 151,490 |
| Tales of Arise | 50,482 | 6,431 | 87 | 74,038 |
It did the opposite for me, Already didn't love Remake and Rebirth is more of that.
yeah, even in PS Yakuza and Persona are doing fine still
My brother in Sakaguchi, what term do you want to use for a franchise that is showing a clear and steady decline? Have you not been paying attention to all the layoffs the past year? AAA costs are ballooning out of control. Its not hard to see that they can't continue with their strategy to have cutting edge technological showpieces be console exclusive with declining sales.
The thing is, XVI was made the way it was because it was meant to gain more mainstream appeal, but it appears to have failed at doing that in Japan and also worldwide.
This is a funny thing to argue about the very week a VanillaWare game releases on Switch day 1 for the first time ever and they are reaping massive benefits from this choice. But according to your reasoning it should have been PS5 only because the fanbase is the fanbase and Unicorn Overlord on Switch would just make the game worse. It's possibly the worst week to try and have this argument.
A genuinely think a Final Fantasy 8 Remake that's all in one game and fixes some of the story problems would make a killing.
I don't want to make assertions based on incomplete data. If the worldwide sales are decent then they'll be fine. At this point in time I reject the notion that Final Fantasy needs to cut back in scope in order to survive. It's an assertion based purely on conjecture. Final fantasy doesn't have to break sales records every time. It just has to sell enough.
i've seen some people using the userbase argument to explain the drop and even that doesn't work that well since the PS5 already has more than half of the PS4's LTD in japan and Rebirth was way below even half of Remake's sales.
i guess those F2P games are really eating a chunk of the people that would buy these traditional games. ngl but Genshin's value is way too big currently vs a game like Rebirth. a game you can clear all the way for free vs a game that is over $70 and is shorter when all is said and done. and that's just one of the F2P games on the console. then you get on the problem of Rebirth needing older games to play properly (i thought maybe a physical Twin Pack with both games would have helped but the brand is so damaged that even that wouldn't have helped)
while there's many games that can survive on a single platform, FF hasn't been one fo these for a while and it's really hurting them badly now. they need to bring them back to Nintendo consoles to regrow the userbase before it's too late and also be day and date on PC (have they ever released PC numbers for the entries that have been released there?).
i guess those F2P games are really eating a chunk of the people that would buy these traditional games. ngl but Genshin's value is way too big currently vs a game like Rebirth. a game you can clear all the way for free vs a game that is over $70 and is shorter when all is said and done. and that's just one of the F2P games on the console. then you get on the problem of Rebirth needing older games to play properly (i thought maybe a physical Twin Pack with both games would have helped but the brand is so damaged that even that wouldn't have helped)
while there's many games that can survive on a single platform, FF hasn't been one fo these for a while and it's really hurting them badly now. they need to bring them back to Nintendo consoles to regrow the userbase before it's too late and also be day and date on PC (have they ever released PC numbers for the entries that have been released there?).
I didn't say anything about UO being PS5-exclusive. That game can run on anything, it isn't ambitious in any way technically. But for games that push technological limits, yes they would be worse if they need to start as "Switch games" and be ported up to other hardware.
As for"reaping massive benefits", we'll see how long its sales stay at the top of the charts. I bet it'll have a massive drop next week too, just like all JRPGs do.
It will have a massive drop because there are no copies on the shelves. And having a massive drop isn't even a bad thing per say. Old FF had frontloaded sales too, it didn't make them bad.
Right - the genre is frontloaded in general. Drops are normal. So what are we disagreeing about, then?
I don't think it's catastrophizing to say they don't have to sacrifice their once great sales in Japan to keep making Final Fantasy games. The rest is up to disagreements on how to bring sales back up.
Is the problem the PS5 exclusivity? Release the next game on Switch 2 and Steam.
Is the problem the genre? I don't think so, Dragon Quest and other series are still thriving and/or growing.
Is the problem the fact this game was part 2 of a remake trilogy? Maybe, but even 16 didn't do great
There's just SOMETHING they could try to improve sales instead of repeating the same strategy that they used for so long.
You're saying that the fanbase exists outside of the respective consoles and putting games on Switch doesn't matter for growth. Unicorn Overlord is a convenient example that disprove that. In a single generation Vanillaware went from PS only with Dragon's Crown, to Switch late port with 13 Sentinels and finally day one release with UO. They saw the trends, they adapted, and it's working out for them.
You know I was among the ones expecting Rebirth to do better than XVI in Japan, so those numbers are certainly disappointing.
Even so, just like in the previous thread, I think people are having some extremely wild takes here regarding the franchise's overall health.
And now those takes have somehow extended to the overall health of the JRPG genre as a whole which is ...annoying.
Doesn't help that a lot of you aren't exactly subtle about your platform warring.
That's ultimately what so much discourse on this forum regarding Final Fantasy boils down to, isn't it? (And I'm saying that as a massive Switch fanboy).
Even so, just like in the previous thread, I think people are having some extremely wild takes here regarding the franchise's overall health.
And now those takes have somehow extended to the overall health of the JRPG genre as a whole which is ...annoying.
Doesn't help that a lot of you aren't exactly subtle about your platform warring.
That's ultimately what so much discourse on this forum regarding Final Fantasy boils down to, isn't it? (And I'm saying that as a massive Switch fanboy).
Yeah, the userbase argument doesn't work. At the time of release for FF 13, 15, and 16, the console install base was quite a bit less than the console install base for PS5 when Rebirth released. Yet, 13, 15, and 16 outsold Rebirth by a big margin in its 1st week, especially 13. The reason for this is the software attach rate. The software attach rates for the Final Fantasy games have steadily been going down over the years.
And yes, these are all physical sales, but even if we include digital, I'm doubtful that's going to change the fact that the software attach rates are simply falling as time goes by.
| title | release date | 1st week units sold | install base at the time | software attach rate |
| final fantasy 13 | 12/17/09 | 1,501,964 | 4,276,480 | 35.12% |
| final fantasy 15 | 11/29/16 | 690,471 | 3,745,023 | 18.44% |
| final fantasy 16 | 6/22/23 | 336,027 | 3,803,183 | 8.84% |
| final fantasy 7 remake | 4/10/20 | 702,853 | 9,016,923 | 7.79% |
| final fantasy 7 rebirth | 2/29/24 | 262,656 | 5,345,349 | 4.91% |
I don't think the comparison works. Vanillaware already made games that can run on everything, they work within their means and don't try to push the envelope from a tech perspective. The difference is just that they started releasing their games on more screens. They didn't have to compromise anything, they just made another version of the same game. By comparison, I don't think Square should scale back their design or technical ambitions to focus their games around the Switch.
HOPEFULLY the Switch 2, whenever it actually comes out, actually has decently scalable hardware so that it can run some form of the same games people are already making for PS5, then everyone can be happy because nothing is being compromised. But if it's a generation behind again (and I hope it isn't), Square can't just go "OK, we're just making all our games around the Switch 2 now, everyone else on every other platform has to deal with up-ports". Letting one single platform - ANY platform, be that the PS3, the Series S or the Switch - dictate the design and technical performance of every platform's games isn't the right way to go.
But all of this is academic until Nintendo actually reveals the NSW2, isn't it? We can't know what it'll be like until they do.
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But that's already what's happening now. The PS5 alone is dictating the design and technical performance of Final Fantasy games. You're just fine with it because that's how it's always been
This is incredibly disrespectful to a great game in OT2, I can only hope you haven't played it. Even then, calling the visual style a "gimmick" is utterly shortsighted.
Pack it up folks, sequels sharing the same visual style are over.
(You also probably haven't played Octopath Traveller 2, judging by your post).
They did. It's true that Octopath 2 is very similar to Octopath 1. They even used the exact same jobs and half the abilities are the same, stat system works identically, etc. The biggest improvement is that the stories are a lot more interesting with more varied chapters, but it's ultimately 80% the same game.
That said I think the visual style is fine if only because it reduces the budget a lot. I just want them to add character portraits like Sea of Stars does (but higher quality with more expressions).
Of course I played it. I liked Temenos (fantasy Columbo is my jam, and more games should have a fantasy Columbo in them), but beyond that I didn't feel like it was a majorly improved sequel in most regards, possessing almost all of the exact same core issues that bothered me about OT1, and virtually none of the improvements made it better for me.
Helping Partitio invent the shopping mall was fun, though.
Which JRPG's are selling 'way better 'worldwide as Final Fantasy?
Western RPG's, sure. But Japanse RPG's?
Pre-orders were being accepted up until a week before launch. If you waited longer than that, then you simply have to wait.
Ultimately Square could at least attempt to do a Capcom approach (ala MHW/MHR) with having an ambitious graphic entry available to more platforms (Xbox, Steam) at launch while providing a Switch-tailored mainline entry that also releases on the other consoles at a later date.
I think it should be somewhat clear at this point that this single-console exclusivity strategy is not helping to expand the Final Fantasy brand.
I think it should be somewhat clear at this point that this single-console exclusivity strategy is not helping to expand the Final Fantasy brand.
Let's go splatoon:)
Cmon atlus your audience is on switch, OU could have done much better(still pretty decent:)).
Cmon atlus your audience is on switch, OU could have done much better(still pretty decent:)).
I'd imagine the result is that most of the brightest and best devs would naturally get absorbed by Nintendo, though with the Switch 2 I expect many IPs to see a resurgeance in Japan... if their AAA games release on it I mean, though they might have a slow start at first.
Persona, Dragon Quest, Pokémon, Fire Emblem, Kingdom Hearts, Nier all had mainline entries in the recent years that sold better than the latest FF. Then you have stuff like Tales Of or Xenoblade that are starting to come closer to FF sales and have even surpassed FF in Japan.
All these JRPGs (Sans maybe KH) have a fraction of FF budget yet had higher or closer to sales of latest FF. That's the crux of the argument: FF used to be a 10M seller at minimum since FF7 breakout, with sales as high as 3.5M in Japan. While the post X games haven't achieved the same acclaim as the golden days, the series was still selling well with FF XIII (8+M) and FF XV (10+M). Then, the series suddenly reversed course while every major JP IP achieved ever higher growth.
IMO the first step for SQEnix should be let it go of PS exclusivity and release day and date on PC and Xbox to foster a fanbase on these platforms. Nintendo too if they can. Longer term, they need to look at what worked with XV, 7R and XVI and plan the next mainline accordingly as to renew their fanbase and expose the series to new players.
There's no successor so there's no saturation. It's a mature console that appeals to everyone and can be found at a low price, specially in face of the inflation. It also has an amazing and very appealing library and the vast majority of games in Japan are still being released for the console. It's clear Nintendo has succesfully been able to expand the market given that Switch became the best selling console ever in Japan and will also be the one with the highest amount of software sold and the highest amount of 5M+ seller software for a single console.
Well, we're entitled to our opinions and sorry if I sounded antagonistic, I'm sorry you didn't like the game very much. It's just that I can't agree with the idea that the visuals they went for are in anyway a gimmick or heck even the major selling point in the game, not with that insane OST and fun combat. For me I look at HD-2D games or anything of that sort as a viable alternative for JRPGs. I don't think it's a gimmick at ALL, I think it's a good way to do these games while keeping the budgets in check. Sure, OT2 felt too iterative to fully expand on that design sensibilities, but stuff like the recent Star Ocean 2 remake posits a way forward for this kinds of games. While it wouldn't work for Final Fantasy, I would LOVE for series like Breath of Fire and Arc the Lad to return in that style and I would have preferred if the Mana series went for that look instead of the modern 3D look.
Heck, I may be in the extreme minority here, but I would LOVE for a pixel styled Pokémon game instead of the N64 looking ones we currently get.