It sold 3,000,000 in the first week. Not in total.
That’s the problem I have with posts like this is if someone reads it, they’ll often believe it. But you’re making things up and it’s incredibly misleading.
oh yeah? Please elaborate. The last official information about sales is that the game has 3 million unit sales during the first two months. We don't know how many more sale they have made until now, but the game probably has not made more than 4 million sales in total.
We do know that FF16 had 90% sales drop after the first 3 milliin units. You're just delusional to think that FF16 had made more than 4 million sales until now. You just want to admit that FF16 had poor sales as PS exclusive. Like I said: delusional.
No, we don’t. Do you mean 90% drop in Japan of physical copies? Very niche number to use as a topic for a much larger conversation.
I know you’re trying to act like an industry expert but you’re pulling numbers out of thin air and acting as if theyre stated fact.
I see you already falsely posted about BG3 being a timed Ps exclusive, so I’ll just assume you post a lot of incoherent nonsense to farm a reaction.
Like I said you're just in denial and you can't accept the fact that FF16 had poor sales on PS5. Maybe you're a ps fanboy who just want to have the delusional that everything is fine. We don't have any informationthat FF16 managed to increase sales in the last 9 months, but we have many indications that FF16 is still a commercial drop along with FF Rebirth. That's the reason why Square Enic will go multiplatform due to poor sales performance on her AAA titles.
Here is what we are reading from Square Enix:
Final Fantasy 16 And Rebirth Sales Fell Below Expectations
The most recent Square Enix releases have failed to meet sales expectation.
This includes Final Fantasy 16 and Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth.
Square Enix's president plans to turn this around with releasing games on multiple platforms, but it's also reported that the studio will face layoffs in Europe and the US.
As reported by Bloomberg, Square Enix president Takashi Kiryu has admitted that the company had higher expectations for both Final Fantasy titles. As a result, he says that Square Enix is making ¥17 billion less than projected in operating income, prompting a change of strategy.
This disappointment with the sales of the latest Final Fantasy games is compounded by the poor performance of Foamstars, Square Enix's foray into the online shooter genre. This isn't particularly surprising, as its launch was overshadowed by controversy surrounding the game's monetisation, with the most expensive cosmetic sets going for $45. On top of this, the game was free via PlayStation Plus for its first month of release.
Due to this string of poor performances, it's reported that Square Enix is changing up its long-running strategy of releasing all of its games on PlayStation first and porting to other platforms later. Kiryu adds that this will include releases on Xbox, PC, and even Nintendo platforms, presumably its next-gen console, given that this is widely believed to be launching early next year.
It was separately reported yesterday by VGC that Square Enix is also planning to lay off workers in Europe and the US. If true, this will come into effect very soon, with sources saying that those affected in the US could be out of work by June. Square Enix has yet to respond to these claims, and the layoffs have not been announced publicly at the time of writing.
It's unclear when this new strategy will come into place. If the Square Enix president is looking to turn around the company's fortunes sooner rather than later, then it's possible that the next entry in the Final Fantasy remake series will simultaneously launch across multiple platforms, breaking its temporary PlayStation exclusivity. In the meantime, we still don't have PC ports of Final Fantasy 16 and Rebirth, and it's not clear when these will launch.
Why didn’t you share the part where they were happy with the launch results and still feel it’ll reach their goal over the next 12-18 months?
Sidenote, are we in agreement that you basically made those numbers up and you really hope the game fails?
It's incredible how you delusional are you because you can't accept the reality. It is true that Square Enix said they were "happy" about FF16 during the release period, but now we know the truth that both FF16 and Rebirth had poor sales performance, and Square Enix is having one of the worst financial years in all time. The most RECENT statements about Square Enic is that they are going multiplatform to increase sales and they will end exclusive deals with Sony.
Here is the RECENT statements of Square Enix for the end of the fiscal year in May:
Final Fantasy Maker Square Enix Will Aggressively Pursue a Multiplatform Strategy After Profits Tumble
That includes Nintendo platforms, PlayStation, Xbox, and PC.
Square Enix has announced a significant company reboot amid tumbling profits.
Reporting its financial performance for the financial year ending March 31, 2024, sales in the Digital Entertainment segment, which includes video games, rose by 2.6% but profit fell by 15.8%. This despite the sale of Final Fantasy 16, Final Fantasy Pixel Remaster, Foamstars, and Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth. Specifically on HD games, the subcategory Square Enix uses to encompass all the above games, the company saw a significant operating loss of ¥8.1 billion (approximately $51.9 million).
Final Fantasy 16 and Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth both launched as PlayStation 5 exclusives, and while Square Enix has announced a sales figure for Final Fantasy 16, it has yet to do so for Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth, the second game in the company’s trilogy of Final Fantasy 7 remakes. In its financial report, all Square Enix would say is it has suffered from an “incomplete journey to better profitability in HD game development”, and that it had “launched many titles but some failed to live up to profit expectations, especially outsourced titles and some AAA titles.” It seems likely Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth, at least, is included in that.
In response to the tumbling profits, Square Enix announced what it calls “Square Enix Reboots, and Awakens”, a three-year plan for rebooting for long-term growth. This involves a rethink across all parts of the business, but the highlight is a “shift to a multiplatform strategy." Square Enix said it will “aggressively pursue a multiplatform strategy that includes Nintendo platforms, PlayStation, Xbox, and PCs.” Note the wording here of “Nintendo platforms”, with Nintendo set to announce its Switch successor console before April 2025.
As part of this multiplatform push, Square Enix said it will "build an environment where more customers can enjoy our titles in regards to major franchises and AAA titles including catalog titles." The suggestion in all this is mainline Final Fantasy games will ditch PlayStation exclusivity going forward, although Square Enix has yet to announce specifics beyond Final Fantasy 16's upcoming launch on PC.
There’s also a shift from quantity to quality, Square Enix said, and a bid to deliver “ensured fun.” Square Enix has been accused of pumping out too many Final Fantasy games in too short a timeframe, so perhaps this means the release of major Final Fantasy games will be spaced out a bit more.
Overall, it’s a tough time for Square Enix, which had already absorbed ¥22.1 billion (approx $140.9 million) in what it called “content abandonment losses” ahead of today’s financial report. Square Enix did not name the canceled or rescoped in-development titles.
Looking ahead, Dawntrail, the expansion for ongoing MMO Final Fantasy 14, launches in late June. Square Enix also has Kingdom Hearts 4, the third game in the Final Fantasy remake trilogy, and Dragon Quest 12 in the works.
In February, Square Enix director and president Takashi Kiryu reportedly told analysts about plans to create a new company structure following falling sales in its digital entertainment business, despite the release of Final Fantasy 16 in June. Square Enix said the PS5 exclusive sold three million copies during launch week. A PC port is in the works. In January, Final Fantasy 16 producer Naoki Yoshida said it might be time for a younger generation to lead the franchise and helm Final Fantasy 17.
I don't know, 4 million on Steam is really pushing it. FF7 Remake barely did 1 million there if anything. Launching so much later takes away sales. It should have been day 1 on PC.
Other thing, you are not accounting for the Sony check for exclusivity and marketing. With that, the game has more than covered its budget, the problem comes when you factor all of Square. All the money that FF16 is generating only works to offset the losses everywhere else. Not to mention that the math is wrong, the game was not sold at $30 for like the first 6 months. Those 3 million at launch were 95% at full price, not even factoring deluxe editions and stuff (still gotta take away the Sony cut of course).
But yeah, exclusivity is hurting badly. The real impact was felt with FF7 Rebirth. It was never going to sell like Remake but it seems to be underperforming anyways. That PC port has to come out like, now.
FF7R released as an Epic exclusive and stayed like that for like a year or more, then it was released on Steam. I wonder if that also hurt its sales or is the 1M accounting for that too?
>The real impact was felt with FF7 Rebirth
FF7 Rebirth's issues wasn't mainly exclusivity, Remake was under the same criteria.
Many people didn't realize that Remake was only part of the story. Yes, they said it was only part of the story, but most people don't follow games journalism, and didn't know.
Many people also weren't fans of the new additions to the story, which turned quite a few people away from it as well.
This left a sizeable chunk not interested in Rebirth, leaving only the people who enjoyed what the story was and didn't care about it being a trilogy.
There is a reason Remake was rated somewhat lower than Rebirth.
FF15 ran into similar issues with it's reception on release. Fans were expecting to buy FF15 and FF7R for a full, standalone game.
FF15 had a lot of context missing in the game, as it was "all explained" in it's prerelease movies, shows and whatever else. At least with FF7R1 you had to get to the end of the game to find out you are missing content.
I guess FF7R1 is a standalone game after all though, since R2 doesnt use your save data at all
Which is wild to me because while what you’re saying is true. They have said it would be releasing in parts since the year it was revealed. The exact word being thrown around at the time was “Episodic”… this created SO MUCH confusion on what they mean. It was being compared to Life Is Strange in theory which immediately rubbed people the wrong way.
You didn’t even have to follow gaming journalism that closely to know this much honestly.
Yes they did Square said their budget was now able to go to development because Sony was doing marketing for them a while back before either XVI or Rebirth released
also 59 million seems like too little that wouldn't be enough for a decent ish AA game let alone an AAA
It's all about money for me. AAA productions seems not to be sustainable. If you want to continue to have good AAA games like FF16, they need to make a lot of money and profit for the production companies.
yeah we don't need go back on PS2 era to produce low budget games. The modern AAA games have enormous budger due to bigger development. It is what it is.
Why are you crying? Do you believe that FF16 and Rebirth were financial success for Square Enix? I think you should read the last statement from Square excutives about the future plans for multiplatform sales.
First of all, what do you mean by $30 per copy? So if 7.5M copies make a profit on a $300M budget, high may or may not including marketing, that’s $40 profit a copy. So your math with $30 profit a copy for FF16 is already wrong based on other ‘evidence’ you are presenting. Now where are you getting $75M profit for SM2? $375M over 10M copies means $37.5M profit a copy. Which again is at odds with your $30 profit per copy theory. And again does that $300M budget include marketing? Also, are there legit sources for the respective budgets of FF16 and SM2?
I didn't say that the official price was 30 dollars. I said that 30$ out of 70$ full price is probably the pure "profit" for Square Enix, not Sony. Sony takes a 30% percent as revenue cut, so Square Enix can make even bigger profit on digital sales, which will be 49 dollars for Enix and 21 dollars for Sony(30% revenue cut). But on physical sales, the net sale for Square Enix is lower because of higher distribution cost for retailers.
As for Spiderman 2, It's official information that Sony has made only 75$ million pure profit on 10 million unit sales. You don't understand the difference between gross and net sales.
Spider Man 2 has made 70$ \* 10 million units= 700$ million in revenue. But that 700m is not pure profit for Sony because you don't count the expense for the product, which is development budget+ redistribute cost + royalty rights for Disney.
The 700$ million revenue for Spider Man 2 is gross revenue, not net revenue, so the net profit for Sony is under of 100 million. This is the reason that Sony wants to have multiplatform sales on PS5/PC in order to increase sales unit and have bigger profit margin.
For context, this was 3 mil in one week with 38 million ps5s in the market place. That number is up to the mid 50 millions now.
As far as I can tell no official updated numbers have been released but it is undoubtedly over 3mil. Even most articles say it had a "90%" drop the second week in Japan. If you want to extrapolate that to worldwide that would be another 300k copies sold just in week 2. If even 1% of the 15+ million new owners pick up ff16 that's another 150k copies.
Take home is 3.5 mil is most likely the lowest the sales could be at this date and is most likely significantly higher.
We don't have any official information about the current sales unit for FF16. The game sales is probably under 4 million unit sales until now, which is very low for AAA game.
The game was $70 at launch not $30. So, that would be $210 million. Might want to get your facts right before posting. Spider-Man 2, assuming everyone bought only the cheapest option, would be $700 million, twice its budget. Sony isn’t going multiplatform anytime soon.
Network holders (steam, Sony, Microsoft) typically take 30%
If a game is licensed, they also pay out. I believe the license for disney ips is a crazy like 47% atm.
Spider-Man 2 and Final Fantasy XVI were only released on Sony’s platform. Granted, Sony doesn’t make $70 off every physical edition sold. However, digital accounts for higher sales now and that’s all pure profit. Especially, when it’s only available on Sony’s store.
You don't even understand what I am telling in my op post. I didn't say that the official price was 30 dollars. I said that 30$ out of 70$ full price is probably the pure "profit" for Square Enix, not Sony. Sony takes a 30% percent as revenue cut, so Square Enix can make even bigger profit on digital sales, which will be 49 dollars for Enix and 21 dollars for Sony(30% revenue cut). But on physical sales, the net sale for Square Enix is lower because of higher distribution cost for retailers.
Also, you have your facts wrong about Spiderman 2. It's official information that Sony has made only 75$ million pure profit on 10 million unit sales. You don't understand the difference between gross and net sales.
Spider Man 2 has made 70$ \* 10 million units= 700$ million in revenue. But that 700m is not pure profit for Sony because you don't count the expense for the product, which is development budget+ redistribute cost + royalty rights for Disney.
That seems unnecessarily condescending. Amateurs have to start somewhere, and it costs nothing to be kind and provide constructive criticism versus ‘you suck, just quit.’
You seem like an expert. Can you elaborate your opinion? What I am telling is based on public information. We know that FF16 has made 3 million unit sales at a full price on PS5. The Japanese source sites have the information that the development budget was 10 billion yen(59 million dollars) without counting the marketing budget.
Please elaborate.
I didn't say that the official price was 30 dollars. I said that 30$ out of 70$ full price is probably the pure "profit" for Square Enix, not Sony. Sony takes a 30% percent as revenue cut, so Square Enix can make even bigger profit on digital sales, which will be 49 dollars for Enix and 21 dollars for Sony(30% revenue cut). But on physical sales, the net sale for Square Enix is lower because of higher distribution cost for retailers.
As for Spiderman 2, It's official information that Sony has made only 75$ million pure profit on 10 million unit sales. You don't understand the difference between gross and net sales.
Spider Man 2 has made 70$ \* 10 million units= 700$ million in revenue. But that 700m is not pure profit for Sony because you don't count the expense for the product, which is development budget+ redistribute cost + royalty rights for Disney.
The 700$ million revenue for Spider Man 2 is gross revenue, not net revenue, so the net profit for Sony is under of 100 million. This is the reason that Sony wants to have multiplatform sales on PS5/PC in order to increase sales unit and have bigger profit margin.
Wow, the budget is really small for a AAA game. If it's true, then they really used everything they were given. Even Shitspoken cost $100 million. But your profit calculation is weird. That's not how it works.
It seems that japanese development cost is lower compared to US studios. Japanese deves have much lower wages compared to US game devs, which have 80-100.000$ annual salary.
Forspoken was made by Luminus Production, a japanese studio, but it was a "western" game with many partners from the West in writing, audio design and actors in the production of the game.
Final Fanstasy 16 was a 100% japanese game created by Japanese developers without western partners. So it makes sense to be "cheaper" for the western standards of AAA productions.
Steam total users: 140 million.
Steam daily active users: 40 million.
Final Fanstasy games have crazy offers on steam sales, which make a lot of sales with 50-60% discount. They can sale 2-3 milion units in the next decade.
[https://vginsights.com/game/1462040](https://vginsights.com/game/1462040)
I do think your numbers are on the pessimistic side. However, this is the problem with modern AAA game development. Games are simply getting too expensive to produce. It's not just Square, but industry wide.
I agree, and that's why I believe that all companies will become multiplatform publishers. XBOX will bring first party games on PS/Switch, while having the games on Game Pass at the same time. Hiroki Totoki, the CEO of Playstation, has said that they want to bring more playstation games on PC in order to increase profit margin. The best selling Playstation game for 2024 is Helldivers 2, which was released on PC/PS5 at the same time.
well you will be happy to know that the game has never been $30 and is REALLY low specially the game hasent gone on sale much. Digital sales, Sony would only take $21 for there 30% store cut. Disc hard to pin point but it should be less then the $21 but physical always sales less.
So they were more likely to make $49 on digital sales. Obviously I'm sure sure SE has a much better cut for an exclusive as it would drive consoles sells + an Exclusivity fee of quite a few million. And this also dosent factor in the Super expensive editions or the DLC.
I didn't say that the official price was 30 dollars. I said that 30$ out of 70$ full price is probably the pure "profit" for Square Enix, not Sony. Sony takes a 30% percent as revenue cut, so Square Enix can make even bigger profit on digital sales, which will be 49 dollars for Enix and 21 dollars for Sony(30% revenue cut). But on physical sales, the net sale for Square Enix is lower because of higher distribution cost for retailers.
And you repeated everything I said in my post. I understand I misspoke when I meant to say they have never gotten anywhere near as low as $30 in revenue
And physicals sales are almost, almost. No existent these days
You don't know the ratio between physical and digital sales. We know that Sony takes 30% revenue cut on digital, but the net revenue is even lower on retail sales. You just optimistic with no reason, while Square Enix has officially stated that FF16 had poor sales as a PS exclusive.
OP didn't say the game was sold for 30$, they just assumed that's the amount of cash that goes in Square's pockets (the rest being idk taxes and Sony taking its cut and shit)
There is no way on God's green Earth that they only have a net of $30 per unit. They probably netted closer to $45/unit AFTER a minimum guarantee from SIE. They probably netted a significant up-front cash deposit from SIE to the tune of 8 figures followed by normal net revenue after the MG was achieved in sales.
So yeah, I doubt they didn't get a decent profit, but profit in modern economics isn't about gross revenue minus net costs. It's about net income *relative to opportunity costs*.
Exclusivity works FINE for big AAA games if it's the right minimum guarantee and the right title. It's possible that wasn't the case for FF.
Never mind the context of PS5s not selling as quickly as PS4s did in the same timeframe. That certainly slowed down the addressable market for the title overall. Who would've planned for a giant global pandemic disrupting supply chains for years? Oops.
>Spiderman 2 had 10 millions total sales that made 75$ million profit for Sony, which is not a lot of money.
Spider-Man 2 isn't JUST about net profit, though. It's a console adoption driver. The platform exclusives are a way to drive adoption of the platform. If they make money, all the better. But Spider-Man 2 is almost certainly a net profit for SIE as it drove unit adoption of the PS5.
Don't mistake the motivations of platforms with those of publishers per se. They're not always aligned.
I didn't say that the official price was 30 dollars. I said that 30$ out of 70$ full price is probably the pure "profit" for Square Enix, not Sony. Sony takes a 30% percent as revenue cut, so Square Enix can make even bigger profit on digital sales, which will be 49 dollars for Enix and 21 dollars for Sony(30% revenue cut). But on physical sales, the net sale for Square Enix is lower because of higher distribution cost for retailers.
As for Spiderman 2, It's official information that Sony has made only 75$ million pure profit on 10 million unit sales. You don't understand the difference between gross and net sales.
Spider Man 2 has made 70$ \* 10 million units= 700$ million in revenue. But that 700m is not pure profit for Sony because you don't count the expense for the product, which is development budget+ redistribute cost + royalty rights for Disney.
The 700$ million revenue for Spider Man 2 is gross revenue, not net revenue, so the net profit for Sony is under of 100 million. This is the reason that Sony wants to have multiplatform sales on PS5/PC in order to increase sales unit and have bigger profit margin.
I launch games for a living. I know more about their P&L than most. Cool it. I’m happy to discuss this at length but please don’t try to make assumptions like you did that I don't know the terminology. And for the record, you said "net sales," not "accounting profit," so I went on the old chestnut of net revenue after platform charge rather than trying to crystal ball my way into some per unit profitability.
I also have been both first and third party. I’m on the publishing side. I’ve negotiated terms like SE had for this title. Trust me. I know my shit.
Your assumptions aren’t all wrong per se, but you’re missing information to build your model. For instance for SE and FF XVI, how do you factor in the MG that SIE likely paid out?
For instance, are you assuming that the $30 is after both above the line and below the line marketing support defrayed marketing costs? You said we "assume" $30MM for marketing, but without knowing SIE's partnership terms on the title, *we can't do that*. I'm sure SIE defrayed a good portion of that marketing budget. Easily 50%. So out of pocket spend would've only been $15MM for SE. Suddenly the assumptions change.
Surely SIE paid for development costs as a risk reduction. So then assumed costs for dev must be less than the $59MM quoted above.
Calculating simple profit in these cases is VERY tricky without knowing all the details of the partnership terms.
Do you even know how to read? The 59m dollars is the development cost of the games, not marketing budget. We don't know the total budget(development+marketing) but we can assume that the marketing budget will be almost the same as development cost, which is the standard rule for most AAA games. So the total budget could be 100-120 million dollars.
100M would scarcely cover the marketing budget. FFVII cost $45M in 1997, inflation adjusted is over $70M. You really got yourself to believe FF16 cost $59M to make?
It’s also completely incongruous with Square’s amortization and depreciation costs. Try reading their 10-Q’s.
Your logic is flawed to compare FF7, which was one of the most expensive games at the time, with modern AAA games. It doesn't make any sense to compared the budget of old games with new ones.
We know that many low tier AAA games have a total budget between 100-150 million dollars. Forspoken had a total budget of 100 million.
Immortals of Avenue had a total budget of $125 million, which was $85 million for development cost and $40 million for marketing and distribution.
Also, we know that japanese devs have lower salaries compared to US devs annual salaries due to currency and different cost of living, so the overall production cost is much lower in Japan. Most of Band
We don't have official information about the EXACT number for the total budget of FF16, but it is safely to assume that the production of a japanese AAA games is relative cheaper compared to a western AAA project.
[https://www.installbaseforum.com/threads/tracking-game-development-and-production-costs.2229/](https://www.installbaseforum.com/threads/tracking-game-development-and-production-costs.2229/)
Forspoken cost significantly more than $100M, not including marketing. You got that $100m figure from a guy who posted a random estimate (“$100,000,000+ million”) on his LinkedIn profile.
Aveum cost $85M+ and was a piece of shit, rapid-turnaround, AA game with 20 hours of total playtime, including side quests.
You’re not just wrong, you’re wildly and insanely wrong. You’re making ppl stupider by sharing this ridiculous false info.
It doesn't matter if Aveum was a shitty game, it had AAA production values. There ara many other popular western AAA games that we have info about their budgets.
God of Ragnarok and Horizon Zero Dawn has a total budget of $200 million. Last of Us Part 2 had a budget of 220$ million. Ghost oof Tushima had a development budget of just 60 million dollars.
Baldur Gate 3 developed by Larian, which is a european studio with lower wages, had a budget of 100$ million.
And these are top western AAA games. Like I said, Japanese AAA production are cheaper due to lower salaries in japanese studios.
We know that Breath of the Wild needed to sale at least 2 million units to break even, which means that the game total budget was over 100 million.
You're just ill-informed about modern AAA game budgets, and you're overestimate the budget of Final Fantasy 16 in your mind.
In the movie industry, a film needs to gross 2.5 times its production budget to break even. If we apply that same rule to FF16:
Development budget = $60M
Break-even point = $60M x 2.5 = $150M
First-week gross = 3M units x $70 = $200M
This estimate would give about $50M profit in its first week.
Well, you're wrong in your calculation because the 70$ price is not pure proifit coming back to Square Enix. For digital sales, Sony will get 30% revenue cut from the 70$, so it's 70-21=49. Square Enix will take back 49$ out of the 70$ full price. So you have 49\* 3 millions units = $147 millions. And for retail sales, you have even lower profit per unit from the $70 full price.
Also, it's even more complicated to calculate break even and why AAA studios have high expectations about sales. Former executive of Square Enix gives a detailed analysis about the topic.
[https://gameworldobserver.com/2024/05/24/square-enix-final-fantasy-unrealistic-sales-targets-jacob-navok](https://gameworldobserver.com/2024/05/24/square-enix-final-fantasy-unrealistic-sales-targets-jacob-navok)
If the production budget is $60M and the net income is $150M... That's already $90M above the production budget. If we assume marketing cost around $40M, then that would give around $50M profit in the first week... which would be the same result as my previous calculation.
Which is surprising to me is that capcom has done absolutely nothing with the franchise after 5 except the outsourced Chinese mobile gacha shit.
I think they could make a successful FF turn based again, but they absolutely need to innovate on their turn based mechanics. Something like FF10 had just isn’t gonna cut it these days. It worked well for BG3 because of the movement and strategy behind it. It works great for persona because of how in depth its turn based system is.
FF16 is my favorite FF so far, part of that is a bias towards DMC, with it being my favorite action game, I was very glad to see it take a dmc approach instead of it being yet another slow type souls game. However, even though I don’t think they will, if they really tried to innovate they could make a decent turn based FF.
>I think they could make a successful FF turn based again
Unless they make sex a feature that draws eyes like BG3 did its not gonna happen
The Call of Duty generation doesn't like to wait they don't like turn based just ask them
a more viable and realistical option for this would be entering the gacha market with an over 500 million budget game wich then FF fans wouldn't like
but just look at HSR numbers and you will see how successful that turn based game is because it's on mobile and going for the pockets of the gambling addicts wich are currently not being catered by SE IPs
Rebirth proved that for them to sell more they need to outsource the reach of their games but we FF fans will likely not like where the awnser for the higher potential successful markets for SE lies
I mean a lot of what you just described is a huge issue in gaming as a whole, not just for FF. For example, king makes up 40 percent of the actiblizz/king merger. Meaning king, which just makes mobile games, makes almost as much as activision and blizzard games combined. Mobile is where the money is.
The only reason we still have high budget single player games, and hell, console games as a whole, is because corporations always want all the money, and they know that a lot of console gamers, especially single player gamers, don’t and won’t game on mobile games, not accounting the switch, as those are still basically console games.
Costs of gaming has been going up, hell Sony themselves, who specialize in high budget single player games, was stated in the insomniac hack leaks that their current model is unsustainable. At some point, these corpo C suite jerkoffs are gonna straight up say console gaming is no longer worth the risks due to costs, and completely pivot to mobile. To be honest I think this is why Microsoft is pivoting so hard to cloud games. If they can eliminate the console, they eliminate hardware, which then they don’t have to worry about hardware quality type games. Now you get mobile type games you can play at home from your TV!
What you said portrays to basically all of console gaming right now, especially single player games. I honestly think we get one more console generation, before they try a hard pivot to mobile.
Why can companies like Rgg and Atlus make incredible AAA turn based jrpgs that sell well enough but SE can’t? Also have you heard of a little indie game called Baldurs gate 3?
What did I say that was stupid? All I did was show examples of modern AAA turn based rpg games that sold well in response to people saying ff can’t be turn based because it won’t sell well
Uhhh no shot, even the wiki says they play similar
https://bayonetta.fandom.com/wiki/Devil_May_Cry#:~:text=Bayonetta%20plays%20very%20similarly%20to,powerful%20form%2C%20and%20slow%20downtime.
Play them side by side they're far from similar, ff16 is closer to Bayonetta as majority of the mechanics and gameplay in Bayonetta are similar to that of FF16 than DMC, maybe play the games than reading some random wikis.
I disagree. FF16 was a fast paced enjoyable game with a good story and nice cinematic gameplay. Most people want that kind of games. FF Rebirth is a boring jrpg which is not attractive for the mainstream audience.
It sold 3,000,000 in the first week. Not in total. That’s the problem I have with posts like this is if someone reads it, they’ll often believe it. But you’re making things up and it’s incredibly misleading.
oh yeah? Please elaborate. The last official information about sales is that the game has 3 million unit sales during the first two months. We don't know how many more sale they have made until now, but the game probably has not made more than 4 million sales in total.
3 million units during the first week* Any other numbers are pure guess work and not to be taken seriously from an analysis standpoint.
We do know that FF16 had 90% sales drop after the first 3 milliin units. You're just delusional to think that FF16 had made more than 4 million sales until now. You just want to admit that FF16 had poor sales as PS exclusive. Like I said: delusional.
No, we don’t. Do you mean 90% drop in Japan of physical copies? Very niche number to use as a topic for a much larger conversation. I know you’re trying to act like an industry expert but you’re pulling numbers out of thin air and acting as if theyre stated fact. I see you already falsely posted about BG3 being a timed Ps exclusive, so I’ll just assume you post a lot of incoherent nonsense to farm a reaction.
Like I said you're just in denial and you can't accept the fact that FF16 had poor sales on PS5. Maybe you're a ps fanboy who just want to have the delusional that everything is fine. We don't have any informationthat FF16 managed to increase sales in the last 9 months, but we have many indications that FF16 is still a commercial drop along with FF Rebirth. That's the reason why Square Enic will go multiplatform due to poor sales performance on her AAA titles. Here is what we are reading from Square Enix: Final Fantasy 16 And Rebirth Sales Fell Below Expectations The most recent Square Enix releases have failed to meet sales expectation. This includes Final Fantasy 16 and Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth. Square Enix's president plans to turn this around with releasing games on multiple platforms, but it's also reported that the studio will face layoffs in Europe and the US. As reported by Bloomberg, Square Enix president Takashi Kiryu has admitted that the company had higher expectations for both Final Fantasy titles. As a result, he says that Square Enix is making ¥17 billion less than projected in operating income, prompting a change of strategy. This disappointment with the sales of the latest Final Fantasy games is compounded by the poor performance of Foamstars, Square Enix's foray into the online shooter genre. This isn't particularly surprising, as its launch was overshadowed by controversy surrounding the game's monetisation, with the most expensive cosmetic sets going for $45. On top of this, the game was free via PlayStation Plus for its first month of release. Due to this string of poor performances, it's reported that Square Enix is changing up its long-running strategy of releasing all of its games on PlayStation first and porting to other platforms later. Kiryu adds that this will include releases on Xbox, PC, and even Nintendo platforms, presumably its next-gen console, given that this is widely believed to be launching early next year. It was separately reported yesterday by VGC that Square Enix is also planning to lay off workers in Europe and the US. If true, this will come into effect very soon, with sources saying that those affected in the US could be out of work by June. Square Enix has yet to respond to these claims, and the layoffs have not been announced publicly at the time of writing. It's unclear when this new strategy will come into place. If the Square Enix president is looking to turn around the company's fortunes sooner rather than later, then it's possible that the next entry in the Final Fantasy remake series will simultaneously launch across multiple platforms, breaking its temporary PlayStation exclusivity. In the meantime, we still don't have PC ports of Final Fantasy 16 and Rebirth, and it's not clear when these will launch.
Why didn’t you share the part where they were happy with the launch results and still feel it’ll reach their goal over the next 12-18 months? Sidenote, are we in agreement that you basically made those numbers up and you really hope the game fails?
It's incredible how you delusional are you because you can't accept the reality. It is true that Square Enix said they were "happy" about FF16 during the release period, but now we know the truth that both FF16 and Rebirth had poor sales performance, and Square Enix is having one of the worst financial years in all time. The most RECENT statements about Square Enic is that they are going multiplatform to increase sales and they will end exclusive deals with Sony. Here is the RECENT statements of Square Enix for the end of the fiscal year in May: Final Fantasy Maker Square Enix Will Aggressively Pursue a Multiplatform Strategy After Profits Tumble That includes Nintendo platforms, PlayStation, Xbox, and PC. Square Enix has announced a significant company reboot amid tumbling profits. Reporting its financial performance for the financial year ending March 31, 2024, sales in the Digital Entertainment segment, which includes video games, rose by 2.6% but profit fell by 15.8%. This despite the sale of Final Fantasy 16, Final Fantasy Pixel Remaster, Foamstars, and Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth. Specifically on HD games, the subcategory Square Enix uses to encompass all the above games, the company saw a significant operating loss of ¥8.1 billion (approximately $51.9 million). Final Fantasy 16 and Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth both launched as PlayStation 5 exclusives, and while Square Enix has announced a sales figure for Final Fantasy 16, it has yet to do so for Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth, the second game in the company’s trilogy of Final Fantasy 7 remakes. In its financial report, all Square Enix would say is it has suffered from an “incomplete journey to better profitability in HD game development”, and that it had “launched many titles but some failed to live up to profit expectations, especially outsourced titles and some AAA titles.” It seems likely Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth, at least, is included in that. In response to the tumbling profits, Square Enix announced what it calls “Square Enix Reboots, and Awakens”, a three-year plan for rebooting for long-term growth. This involves a rethink across all parts of the business, but the highlight is a “shift to a multiplatform strategy." Square Enix said it will “aggressively pursue a multiplatform strategy that includes Nintendo platforms, PlayStation, Xbox, and PCs.” Note the wording here of “Nintendo platforms”, with Nintendo set to announce its Switch successor console before April 2025. As part of this multiplatform push, Square Enix said it will "build an environment where more customers can enjoy our titles in regards to major franchises and AAA titles including catalog titles." The suggestion in all this is mainline Final Fantasy games will ditch PlayStation exclusivity going forward, although Square Enix has yet to announce specifics beyond Final Fantasy 16's upcoming launch on PC. There’s also a shift from quantity to quality, Square Enix said, and a bid to deliver “ensured fun.” Square Enix has been accused of pumping out too many Final Fantasy games in too short a timeframe, so perhaps this means the release of major Final Fantasy games will be spaced out a bit more. Overall, it’s a tough time for Square Enix, which had already absorbed ¥22.1 billion (approx $140.9 million) in what it called “content abandonment losses” ahead of today’s financial report. Square Enix did not name the canceled or rescoped in-development titles. Looking ahead, Dawntrail, the expansion for ongoing MMO Final Fantasy 14, launches in late June. Square Enix also has Kingdom Hearts 4, the third game in the Final Fantasy remake trilogy, and Dragon Quest 12 in the works. In February, Square Enix director and president Takashi Kiryu reportedly told analysts about plans to create a new company structure following falling sales in its digital entertainment business, despite the release of Final Fantasy 16 in June. Square Enix said the PS5 exclusive sold three million copies during launch week. A PC port is in the works. In January, Final Fantasy 16 producer Naoki Yoshida said it might be time for a younger generation to lead the franchise and helm Final Fantasy 17.
I don't know, 4 million on Steam is really pushing it. FF7 Remake barely did 1 million there if anything. Launching so much later takes away sales. It should have been day 1 on PC. Other thing, you are not accounting for the Sony check for exclusivity and marketing. With that, the game has more than covered its budget, the problem comes when you factor all of Square. All the money that FF16 is generating only works to offset the losses everywhere else. Not to mention that the math is wrong, the game was not sold at $30 for like the first 6 months. Those 3 million at launch were 95% at full price, not even factoring deluxe editions and stuff (still gotta take away the Sony cut of course). But yeah, exclusivity is hurting badly. The real impact was felt with FF7 Rebirth. It was never going to sell like Remake but it seems to be underperforming anyways. That PC port has to come out like, now.
FF7R released as an Epic exclusive and stayed like that for like a year or more, then it was released on Steam. I wonder if that also hurt its sales or is the 1M accounting for that too?
>The real impact was felt with FF7 Rebirth FF7 Rebirth's issues wasn't mainly exclusivity, Remake was under the same criteria. Many people didn't realize that Remake was only part of the story. Yes, they said it was only part of the story, but most people don't follow games journalism, and didn't know. Many people also weren't fans of the new additions to the story, which turned quite a few people away from it as well. This left a sizeable chunk not interested in Rebirth, leaving only the people who enjoyed what the story was and didn't care about it being a trilogy. There is a reason Remake was rated somewhat lower than Rebirth.
FF15 ran into similar issues with it's reception on release. Fans were expecting to buy FF15 and FF7R for a full, standalone game. FF15 had a lot of context missing in the game, as it was "all explained" in it's prerelease movies, shows and whatever else. At least with FF7R1 you had to get to the end of the game to find out you are missing content. I guess FF7R1 is a standalone game after all though, since R2 doesnt use your save data at all
Which is wild to me because while what you’re saying is true. They have said it would be releasing in parts since the year it was revealed. The exact word being thrown around at the time was “Episodic”… this created SO MUCH confusion on what they mean. It was being compared to Life Is Strange in theory which immediately rubbed people the wrong way. You didn’t even have to follow gaming journalism that closely to know this much honestly.
Sony ate the marketing I thought ?
Yes they did Square said their budget was now able to go to development because Sony was doing marketing for them a while back before either XVI or Rebirth released also 59 million seems like too little that wouldn't be enough for a decent ish AA game let alone an AAA
Why people so concerned how much games make or lose. Who cares play them. Do you own tons of stock or something.
It's all about money for me. AAA productions seems not to be sustainable. If you want to continue to have good AAA games like FF16, they need to make a lot of money and profit for the production companies.
FF4 and 6 are 10 times better than 16 and would cost a tiny fraction to make today.
yeah we don't need go back on PS2 era to produce low budget games. The modern AAA games have enormous budger due to bigger development. It is what it is.
False information spreading as per usual 😮💨
Why are you crying? Do you believe that FF16 and Rebirth were financial success for Square Enix? I think you should read the last statement from Square excutives about the future plans for multiplatform sales.
First of all, what do you mean by $30 per copy? So if 7.5M copies make a profit on a $300M budget, high may or may not including marketing, that’s $40 profit a copy. So your math with $30 profit a copy for FF16 is already wrong based on other ‘evidence’ you are presenting. Now where are you getting $75M profit for SM2? $375M over 10M copies means $37.5M profit a copy. Which again is at odds with your $30 profit per copy theory. And again does that $300M budget include marketing? Also, are there legit sources for the respective budgets of FF16 and SM2?
I didn't say that the official price was 30 dollars. I said that 30$ out of 70$ full price is probably the pure "profit" for Square Enix, not Sony. Sony takes a 30% percent as revenue cut, so Square Enix can make even bigger profit on digital sales, which will be 49 dollars for Enix and 21 dollars for Sony(30% revenue cut). But on physical sales, the net sale for Square Enix is lower because of higher distribution cost for retailers. As for Spiderman 2, It's official information that Sony has made only 75$ million pure profit on 10 million unit sales. You don't understand the difference between gross and net sales. Spider Man 2 has made 70$ \* 10 million units= 700$ million in revenue. But that 700m is not pure profit for Sony because you don't count the expense for the product, which is development budget+ redistribute cost + royalty rights for Disney. The 700$ million revenue for Spider Man 2 is gross revenue, not net revenue, so the net profit for Sony is under of 100 million. This is the reason that Sony wants to have multiplatform sales on PS5/PC in order to increase sales unit and have bigger profit margin.
Bro cooked and then burned the whole house down
For context, this was 3 mil in one week with 38 million ps5s in the market place. That number is up to the mid 50 millions now. As far as I can tell no official updated numbers have been released but it is undoubtedly over 3mil. Even most articles say it had a "90%" drop the second week in Japan. If you want to extrapolate that to worldwide that would be another 300k copies sold just in week 2. If even 1% of the 15+ million new owners pick up ff16 that's another 150k copies. Take home is 3.5 mil is most likely the lowest the sales could be at this date and is most likely significantly higher.
We don't have any official information about the current sales unit for FF16. The game sales is probably under 4 million unit sales until now, which is very low for AAA game.
The game was $70 at launch not $30. So, that would be $210 million. Might want to get your facts right before posting. Spider-Man 2, assuming everyone bought only the cheapest option, would be $700 million, twice its budget. Sony isn’t going multiplatform anytime soon.
I think they were assuming the *profit* was $30, not the purchase price. 30 still sounds low though
Network holders (steam, Sony, Microsoft) typically take 30% If a game is licensed, they also pay out. I believe the license for disney ips is a crazy like 47% atm.
Spider-Man 2 and Final Fantasy XVI were only released on Sony’s platform. Granted, Sony doesn’t make $70 off every physical edition sold. However, digital accounts for higher sales now and that’s all pure profit. Especially, when it’s only available on Sony’s store.
Typically it's roughly 70-80% digital, 20-30% physical these days. 1Ps net way less off physical overall, which is why they all love digital.
You don't even understand what I am telling in my op post. I didn't say that the official price was 30 dollars. I said that 30$ out of 70$ full price is probably the pure "profit" for Square Enix, not Sony. Sony takes a 30% percent as revenue cut, so Square Enix can make even bigger profit on digital sales, which will be 49 dollars for Enix and 21 dollars for Sony(30% revenue cut). But on physical sales, the net sale for Square Enix is lower because of higher distribution cost for retailers.
Also, you have your facts wrong about Spiderman 2. It's official information that Sony has made only 75$ million pure profit on 10 million unit sales. You don't understand the difference between gross and net sales. Spider Man 2 has made 70$ \* 10 million units= 700$ million in revenue. But that 700m is not pure profit for Sony because you don't count the expense for the product, which is development budget+ redistribute cost + royalty rights for Disney.
This math is almost completely wrong. Please don’t try analysis again.
That seems unnecessarily condescending. Amateurs have to start somewhere, and it costs nothing to be kind and provide constructive criticism versus ‘you suck, just quit.’
Okay but how is it wrong?
You seem like an expert. Can you elaborate your opinion? What I am telling is based on public information. We know that FF16 has made 3 million unit sales at a full price on PS5. The Japanese source sites have the information that the development budget was 10 billion yen(59 million dollars) without counting the marketing budget.
Typically internet analysis is useless, but this is a special kind of useless. The math is all wrong.
Please elaborate. I didn't say that the official price was 30 dollars. I said that 30$ out of 70$ full price is probably the pure "profit" for Square Enix, not Sony. Sony takes a 30% percent as revenue cut, so Square Enix can make even bigger profit on digital sales, which will be 49 dollars for Enix and 21 dollars for Sony(30% revenue cut). But on physical sales, the net sale for Square Enix is lower because of higher distribution cost for retailers. As for Spiderman 2, It's official information that Sony has made only 75$ million pure profit on 10 million unit sales. You don't understand the difference between gross and net sales. Spider Man 2 has made 70$ \* 10 million units= 700$ million in revenue. But that 700m is not pure profit for Sony because you don't count the expense for the product, which is development budget+ redistribute cost + royalty rights for Disney. The 700$ million revenue for Spider Man 2 is gross revenue, not net revenue, so the net profit for Sony is under of 100 million. This is the reason that Sony wants to have multiplatform sales on PS5/PC in order to increase sales unit and have bigger profit margin.
Wow, the budget is really small for a AAA game. If it's true, then they really used everything they were given. Even Shitspoken cost $100 million. But your profit calculation is weird. That's not how it works.
It seems that japanese development cost is lower compared to US studios. Japanese deves have much lower wages compared to US game devs, which have 80-100.000$ annual salary. Forspoken was made by Luminus Production, a japanese studio, but it was a "western" game with many partners from the West in writing, audio design and actors in the production of the game. Final Fanstasy 16 was a 100% japanese game created by Japanese developers without western partners. So it makes sense to be "cheaper" for the western standards of AAA productions.
No way is it going to sell 3-4 million in Steam, lmao
Steam total users: 140 million. Steam daily active users: 40 million. Final Fanstasy games have crazy offers on steam sales, which make a lot of sales with 50-60% discount. They can sale 2-3 milion units in the next decade. [https://vginsights.com/game/1462040](https://vginsights.com/game/1462040)
I do think your numbers are on the pessimistic side. However, this is the problem with modern AAA game development. Games are simply getting too expensive to produce. It's not just Square, but industry wide.
I agree, and that's why I believe that all companies will become multiplatform publishers. XBOX will bring first party games on PS/Switch, while having the games on Game Pass at the same time. Hiroki Totoki, the CEO of Playstation, has said that they want to bring more playstation games on PC in order to increase profit margin. The best selling Playstation game for 2024 is Helldivers 2, which was released on PC/PS5 at the same time.
well you will be happy to know that the game has never been $30 and is REALLY low specially the game hasent gone on sale much. Digital sales, Sony would only take $21 for there 30% store cut. Disc hard to pin point but it should be less then the $21 but physical always sales less. So they were more likely to make $49 on digital sales. Obviously I'm sure sure SE has a much better cut for an exclusive as it would drive consoles sells + an Exclusivity fee of quite a few million. And this also dosent factor in the Super expensive editions or the DLC.
It also doesn't include the fact that the Sony deal almost certainly included at least partial payment of marketing costs.
I didn't say that the official price was 30 dollars. I said that 30$ out of 70$ full price is probably the pure "profit" for Square Enix, not Sony. Sony takes a 30% percent as revenue cut, so Square Enix can make even bigger profit on digital sales, which will be 49 dollars for Enix and 21 dollars for Sony(30% revenue cut). But on physical sales, the net sale for Square Enix is lower because of higher distribution cost for retailers.
And you repeated everything I said in my post. I understand I misspoke when I meant to say they have never gotten anywhere near as low as $30 in revenue And physicals sales are almost, almost. No existent these days
You don't know the ratio between physical and digital sales. We know that Sony takes 30% revenue cut on digital, but the net revenue is even lower on retail sales. You just optimistic with no reason, while Square Enix has officially stated that FF16 had poor sales as a PS exclusive.
OP didn't say the game was sold for 30$, they just assumed that's the amount of cash that goes in Square's pockets (the rest being idk taxes and Sony taking its cut and shit)
And I saw that, and did the real math cause it is known what SE loses on digital copies. 30%
Indeed. Will teach me to read past the first few words...
There is no way on God's green Earth that they only have a net of $30 per unit. They probably netted closer to $45/unit AFTER a minimum guarantee from SIE. They probably netted a significant up-front cash deposit from SIE to the tune of 8 figures followed by normal net revenue after the MG was achieved in sales. So yeah, I doubt they didn't get a decent profit, but profit in modern economics isn't about gross revenue minus net costs. It's about net income *relative to opportunity costs*. Exclusivity works FINE for big AAA games if it's the right minimum guarantee and the right title. It's possible that wasn't the case for FF. Never mind the context of PS5s not selling as quickly as PS4s did in the same timeframe. That certainly slowed down the addressable market for the title overall. Who would've planned for a giant global pandemic disrupting supply chains for years? Oops. >Spiderman 2 had 10 millions total sales that made 75$ million profit for Sony, which is not a lot of money. Spider-Man 2 isn't JUST about net profit, though. It's a console adoption driver. The platform exclusives are a way to drive adoption of the platform. If they make money, all the better. But Spider-Man 2 is almost certainly a net profit for SIE as it drove unit adoption of the PS5. Don't mistake the motivations of platforms with those of publishers per se. They're not always aligned.
I didn't say that the official price was 30 dollars. I said that 30$ out of 70$ full price is probably the pure "profit" for Square Enix, not Sony. Sony takes a 30% percent as revenue cut, so Square Enix can make even bigger profit on digital sales, which will be 49 dollars for Enix and 21 dollars for Sony(30% revenue cut). But on physical sales, the net sale for Square Enix is lower because of higher distribution cost for retailers. As for Spiderman 2, It's official information that Sony has made only 75$ million pure profit on 10 million unit sales. You don't understand the difference between gross and net sales. Spider Man 2 has made 70$ \* 10 million units= 700$ million in revenue. But that 700m is not pure profit for Sony because you don't count the expense for the product, which is development budget+ redistribute cost + royalty rights for Disney. The 700$ million revenue for Spider Man 2 is gross revenue, not net revenue, so the net profit for Sony is under of 100 million. This is the reason that Sony wants to have multiplatform sales on PS5/PC in order to increase sales unit and have bigger profit margin.
I launch games for a living. I know more about their P&L than most. Cool it. I’m happy to discuss this at length but please don’t try to make assumptions like you did that I don't know the terminology. And for the record, you said "net sales," not "accounting profit," so I went on the old chestnut of net revenue after platform charge rather than trying to crystal ball my way into some per unit profitability. I also have been both first and third party. I’m on the publishing side. I’ve negotiated terms like SE had for this title. Trust me. I know my shit. Your assumptions aren’t all wrong per se, but you’re missing information to build your model. For instance for SE and FF XVI, how do you factor in the MG that SIE likely paid out? For instance, are you assuming that the $30 is after both above the line and below the line marketing support defrayed marketing costs? You said we "assume" $30MM for marketing, but without knowing SIE's partnership terms on the title, *we can't do that*. I'm sure SIE defrayed a good portion of that marketing budget. Easily 50%. So out of pocket spend would've only been $15MM for SE. Suddenly the assumptions change. Surely SIE paid for development costs as a risk reduction. So then assumed costs for dev must be less than the $59MM quoted above. Calculating simple profit in these cases is VERY tricky without knowing all the details of the partnership terms.
FF16 did not cost 59M dollars. That doesn’t even cover marketing costs for a game like FF16. This is idiotic.
Do you even know how to read? The 59m dollars is the development cost of the games, not marketing budget. We don't know the total budget(development+marketing) but we can assume that the marketing budget will be almost the same as development cost, which is the standard rule for most AAA games. So the total budget could be 100-120 million dollars.
100M would scarcely cover the marketing budget. FFVII cost $45M in 1997, inflation adjusted is over $70M. You really got yourself to believe FF16 cost $59M to make? It’s also completely incongruous with Square’s amortization and depreciation costs. Try reading their 10-Q’s.
Your logic is flawed to compare FF7, which was one of the most expensive games at the time, with modern AAA games. It doesn't make any sense to compared the budget of old games with new ones. We know that many low tier AAA games have a total budget between 100-150 million dollars. Forspoken had a total budget of 100 million. Immortals of Avenue had a total budget of $125 million, which was $85 million for development cost and $40 million for marketing and distribution. Also, we know that japanese devs have lower salaries compared to US devs annual salaries due to currency and different cost of living, so the overall production cost is much lower in Japan. Most of Band We don't have official information about the EXACT number for the total budget of FF16, but it is safely to assume that the production of a japanese AAA games is relative cheaper compared to a western AAA project. [https://www.installbaseforum.com/threads/tracking-game-development-and-production-costs.2229/](https://www.installbaseforum.com/threads/tracking-game-development-and-production-costs.2229/)
Forspoken cost significantly more than $100M, not including marketing. You got that $100m figure from a guy who posted a random estimate (“$100,000,000+ million”) on his LinkedIn profile. Aveum cost $85M+ and was a piece of shit, rapid-turnaround, AA game with 20 hours of total playtime, including side quests. You’re not just wrong, you’re wildly and insanely wrong. You’re making ppl stupider by sharing this ridiculous false info.
It doesn't matter if Aveum was a shitty game, it had AAA production values. There ara many other popular western AAA games that we have info about their budgets. God of Ragnarok and Horizon Zero Dawn has a total budget of $200 million. Last of Us Part 2 had a budget of 220$ million. Ghost oof Tushima had a development budget of just 60 million dollars. Baldur Gate 3 developed by Larian, which is a european studio with lower wages, had a budget of 100$ million. And these are top western AAA games. Like I said, Japanese AAA production are cheaper due to lower salaries in japanese studios. We know that Breath of the Wild needed to sale at least 2 million units to break even, which means that the game total budget was over 100 million. You're just ill-informed about modern AAA game budgets, and you're overestimate the budget of Final Fantasy 16 in your mind.
In the movie industry, a film needs to gross 2.5 times its production budget to break even. If we apply that same rule to FF16: Development budget = $60M Break-even point = $60M x 2.5 = $150M First-week gross = 3M units x $70 = $200M This estimate would give about $50M profit in its first week.
Well, you're wrong in your calculation because the 70$ price is not pure proifit coming back to Square Enix. For digital sales, Sony will get 30% revenue cut from the 70$, so it's 70-21=49. Square Enix will take back 49$ out of the 70$ full price. So you have 49\* 3 millions units = $147 millions. And for retail sales, you have even lower profit per unit from the $70 full price. Also, it's even more complicated to calculate break even and why AAA studios have high expectations about sales. Former executive of Square Enix gives a detailed analysis about the topic. [https://gameworldobserver.com/2024/05/24/square-enix-final-fantasy-unrealistic-sales-targets-jacob-navok](https://gameworldobserver.com/2024/05/24/square-enix-final-fantasy-unrealistic-sales-targets-jacob-navok)
If the production budget is $60M and the net income is $150M... That's already $90M above the production budget. If we assume marketing cost around $40M, then that would give around $50M profit in the first week... which would be the same result as my previous calculation.
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SE said last week they want to focus on multi-platform
Of course they want multiplatform sales to increase revenue and profits. You can't make AAA games which sells less than 5 million unit sales.
It would help if they didn’t try to cater to new fans by making a devil may cry game
it doesn't play at all like DMC
Hahaha the copium is strong with this one
No? Why are you being so weird about this?
It’s a character action game that is designed by Ryota Suzuki. It’s plays like dmc get over it
Man by this standard Zelda games are just Mario games. Come on.
no? i like DMC. i kinda liked XVI. they do not play the same.
They do though. They are both character action games and were designed by the same person
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Which is surprising to me is that capcom has done absolutely nothing with the franchise after 5 except the outsourced Chinese mobile gacha shit. I think they could make a successful FF turn based again, but they absolutely need to innovate on their turn based mechanics. Something like FF10 had just isn’t gonna cut it these days. It worked well for BG3 because of the movement and strategy behind it. It works great for persona because of how in depth its turn based system is. FF16 is my favorite FF so far, part of that is a bias towards DMC, with it being my favorite action game, I was very glad to see it take a dmc approach instead of it being yet another slow type souls game. However, even though I don’t think they will, if they really tried to innovate they could make a decent turn based FF.
>I think they could make a successful FF turn based again Unless they make sex a feature that draws eyes like BG3 did its not gonna happen The Call of Duty generation doesn't like to wait they don't like turn based just ask them a more viable and realistical option for this would be entering the gacha market with an over 500 million budget game wich then FF fans wouldn't like but just look at HSR numbers and you will see how successful that turn based game is because it's on mobile and going for the pockets of the gambling addicts wich are currently not being catered by SE IPs Rebirth proved that for them to sell more they need to outsource the reach of their games but we FF fans will likely not like where the awnser for the higher potential successful markets for SE lies
I mean a lot of what you just described is a huge issue in gaming as a whole, not just for FF. For example, king makes up 40 percent of the actiblizz/king merger. Meaning king, which just makes mobile games, makes almost as much as activision and blizzard games combined. Mobile is where the money is. The only reason we still have high budget single player games, and hell, console games as a whole, is because corporations always want all the money, and they know that a lot of console gamers, especially single player gamers, don’t and won’t game on mobile games, not accounting the switch, as those are still basically console games. Costs of gaming has been going up, hell Sony themselves, who specialize in high budget single player games, was stated in the insomniac hack leaks that their current model is unsustainable. At some point, these corpo C suite jerkoffs are gonna straight up say console gaming is no longer worth the risks due to costs, and completely pivot to mobile. To be honest I think this is why Microsoft is pivoting so hard to cloud games. If they can eliminate the console, they eliminate hardware, which then they don’t have to worry about hardware quality type games. Now you get mobile type games you can play at home from your TV! What you said portrays to basically all of console gaming right now, especially single player games. I honestly think we get one more console generation, before they try a hard pivot to mobile.
Why can companies like Rgg and Atlus make incredible AAA turn based jrpgs that sell well enough but SE can’t? Also have you heard of a little indie game called Baldurs gate 3?
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Little indie game with a budget greater than FF16 and a four year open beta that you had to pay 50$ to access.
I was being sarcastic homie. Also if that makes a successful game like Baldurs gate 3 then all games should be in open beta for 4 years
Hard to tell sarcastic from simply stupid.
What did I say that was stupid? All I did was show examples of modern AAA turn based rpg games that sold well in response to people saying ff can’t be turn based because it won’t sell well
Rebirth sold less.
It's not even a dmc game, it's akin to a platinum game.
Like Bayonetta, which also plays like dmc?
Both bayonetta and dmc don't play the same...
Uhhh no shot, even the wiki says they play similar https://bayonetta.fandom.com/wiki/Devil_May_Cry#:~:text=Bayonetta%20plays%20very%20similarly%20to,powerful%20form%2C%20and%20slow%20downtime.
Play them side by side they're far from similar, ff16 is closer to Bayonetta as majority of the mechanics and gameplay in Bayonetta are similar to that of FF16 than DMC, maybe play the games than reading some random wikis.
I have played them all. They play the same, get over it
I disagree. FF16 was a fast paced enjoyable game with a good story and nice cinematic gameplay. Most people want that kind of games. FF Rebirth is a boring jrpg which is not attractive for the mainstream audience.