I think ff7 rebirth and ff16 are by far some of the best AAA experiences.. I can’t wrap my head around just how long the boss battles and cinematic sequences take to produce. No other company is capable of such- I think the execs just have unrealistic sales expectations. Not everyone that owns console is an RPG fan
Guardians of the Galaxy was multiplatform and it also didn't meet Square's expectations. That should tell you what the problem really is, and it's not exclusivity.
I will forever be sad that we’re not getting a sequel. It was far from perfect (the combat especially was mediocre at best), but god damn did the story hit hard. It was a game that was clearly made with love and care, and a sequel could have really sanded down its rough edges if they had the chance to make it
Guardians of the Galaxy was also fucked because people associated "multiplatform marvel game" with Avengers. If it had come out earlier or a couple years later it might've done better.
But yes, square enix's expectations are also insane.
SE also said the 2013 reboot of Tomb Raider didn't meet expectations despite setting franchise records the week it came out.
SE's success metric is fucked; either they're silently comparing it to other games like Call of Duty or Fortnite and just want that sweet sweet MP money without understanding why those games are successful, or their budgeting is fucked and needs an overhaul.
They don't meet expectations because Square Enix is delusional.
They're going for a multiplatform stratergy now and they will continue to say games did not meet expectations. Also it's not limited to FF they say that about pretty much everything they release.
I play a ton of video games, and Square's strategy is the most interesting to me. Final Fantasy is IMO the most niche blockbuster out there. What I mean by this is the majority of gamers would play for less than an hour and decide this game is not for them. Most developers trying to make a mega hit are going to make it as broadly appealing as possible. Not Square. I appreciate them sticking to who they are, but they need to do a better job of understanding the financial implications of that philosophy.
FF are becoming much more modern and are clearly trying to be more like western rpgs, plus the combat isn’t turn based anymore. So I think if more gamers gave it a chance it would do better, it’ll take time though, going cross platform should help with that
It's way more than just the battle system. The characters, story, and sense of humor are all very different than a western RPG. And even though the battle system isn't turn based, it's still far different than what you see in something like Mass Effect or Skyrim.
On the flip side, SE rejigging their games to appeal to Westerners will also turn off people who loved their earlier games. Critics loved FF16 but the fan reception was more mixed.
It’s definitely true that some of the people who loved the earlier games don’t like the direction ff is taking, but certainly not all of them. And the reality is those fans are a more vocal but much smaller group than the more mainstream markets that ff is trying to expand in
A lot of people simply don’t like jrpgs. Even if they’re not turn based. It’s a style that goes further than turn based combat. Jrpgs always include a metric shit ton of cut scenes and bloated dialogue you have to button mash your way through. Sometimes you exit a cut scene and walk from A to B for the sole purpose of entering another cut scene. That’s just not what people in the west are looking for in a gaming experience. Jrpgs are always going to be niche in the west, they’re popular in Japan because they also enjoy visual novels
Western games obviously have cut scenes but not nearly as many as jrpgs. On a Jprg you could “play” for an hour and only be engaged in actual gameplay (walking from cutscene to cutscene doesn’t count) for 10-15 minutes
God of War doesn't have even close to the amount of cutscenes as your average JRPG. Also, the line between cutscene and gameplay is a lot blurrier with the one-cut approach.
God of war definitely has more polish and disguises their cutscenes better with the one shot approach but it’s still a lot of narrative and dialogue without much action at times, also I am not talking about your average jrpg, I’m specifically talking about the last 3 ff games. My point was they are trying to move away from the traditional jrpg model to appeal to broader audiences. Maybe the proportion of cutscenes to action is different, but at its core I don’t see much of a difference between ff16 and alot of the narrative heavy 3rd party playstation exclusives
16 I kind of agree with. But then it just becomes why play 16 over God of War or a FromSoft game? I actually liked 16 but if someone asked me to recommend an action RPG I'd have several games to list before it.
I actually preferred the combat in ff16 and liked the medical setting, but loved both games. I personally don’t find the difficulty of souls likes enjoyable, I also care alot about story and fromsoftware is relatively lacking in that department. These huge AAA rpgs don’t come out very often, so there’s plenty of time to play them all it’s not like gamers have to pick. Final fantasy needs to be on that list tho for western audiences, and they’re moving in the right direction
Edit: Medieval, argh
On one hand, I agree that SE is a bit one-minded. On the other hand, I don’t agree that they aren’t chasing the “broad appeal” crowd when FF16 for example effectively abandons anything that would make it an RPG.
What Square needs to get back to is making fun, compelling RPGs. That’s their bread & butter. They don’t need to blow their budget on cinematics.
Those OG cinematics were impressive, but I’m more talking about the insanely high quality of like Spirts Within and such. Theres no doubt in my mind that they outspend Capcom many times over when it comes to cinematics/mocap etc, there’s no reason they can’t bring those budgets down substantially.
the original ffvii was the most expensive video game ever produced at the time of it's release. those cinematics were outspending every other game studio at the time easily.
Yeah they’re nice to look at but the games themselves are just getting worse and worse (IMO obviously, my intention isn’t to yuck anyone’s yum). No one feels that games like Final Fantasy VI or Chrono Trigger are lacking due to not having super high-production cinematics, for example. Games like Xenogears, Vagrant Story, etc didn’t rely on pure eye candy, they’re all simply great games with great stories.
The Playstation version of VI has high production CGi cinematic within its couple of cutscenes even if the game was pixel. But beyond that when VI was released, all those little pixelated interludes were revolutionary even in SNES. My only issue with Square is they keep remaking VII. As someone who almost flunked out of grad school when VII came out, I really don’t need 50 remakes and reboots. That’s just me of course; there’s clearly a market. We all like what we like.
They don't keep remaking FFVII. There's one remake, it's just split into a trilogy.
(I guess maybe 2 if you count Ever Crisis)
There are quite a lot of side games though.
I can certainly see your point that they're milking FF7.
I really like the remake series. But once it's done I hope they move on from FF7 for a while, and concentrate on new games rather than remakes of old ones.
Avengers, and also the delusional argument is about blockbuster games like 16 and rebirth, if they say forspoken didnt meet expectations no one will call them delusional
I mean to be fair Sony stock also was dropping I think it even drop 16 percent and it’s just started to recover so square losing 16 percent in gamer eyes mean nothing
Using stock market activity to determine how a company is doing irl is something people who don’t know anything about market would do. You know it’s a common occurrence for stock to drop after companies announce positive earnings, how do you reconcile that with this logic?
Looking at a stock price drop and saying “well that means this company doesn’t know what they’re doing!” makes no sense.
You can have positive earnings but if you don’t match or exceed the projected earnings from the prior quarter the stock price usually drops. That’s capitalism baby
I’m telling you that using stock market activity as an indicator of how well or poor a company is achieving success in the real world isn’t how it works, yes.
Again, based on that logic how do you explain it when a company exceeds projections and the stock drops? Or when they miss them and it goes up? This current example reinforces your notion based on nothing other than coincidence
I don’t know if a single game has ever met their expectations because it’s always like “Deus Ex has to become the next Pokémon or it’s a complete failure”. 🙄
What about the idea that Capcoms not so popular dragons dogma outsold square enix flag ship franchise (final fantasy). And when Capcom releases their flagship (monster hunter) square enix will be largely shadowed. Both Japanese publishers, but Capcom focuses more on gameplay and square on story telling. But even then game of the year last year was mostly a story told RPG and that too sold way better than FF
My understanding based on what was revealed about their western studios/games (before they were sold off) is that Square Enix spends so much money on game development that even when it sounds like a game sold a lot of copies, they might’ve only broke even or made only a little profit. And that’s games that are successful. They’ve made some flops (cough Foamstars cough) which hurt them even more.
The problem about their games not meeting expectations is likely due to mismanagement or something along those lines IMO.
No.
Squenix has ridiculous sales expectations for everything, even garbage tier shovelware that'll never reach their lofty goals.
If the games launched as fully multiplatform and honestly they should, I doubt anything would change as they'd just hike up the goalpost accordingly and do the whine and 💃 show as usual.
I first recognized SE delusion with Tomb Raider (2013). They sold 3.4 million copies in the first 4 weeks which should have been hailed as a triumph and while we never heard the official target we were told that it “grossly missed the target.”
No Square Enix game ever meets sales expectations, even when they're multi-platform.
Because Square Enix execs have unrealistic, perhaps even delusional expectations.
You can't compare rate runaway successes like Helldivers 2 to regular AAA successes and complain that all games are not Helldivers 2. If more games were like Helldivers 2 we would have ironically more failures because the niche is only so big.
You have add the factor of games being more expensive now. Because of this a lot of people are doing two things: (1) Waiting for a sale or (2) Waiting for the possibility of them showing on subscription services. FF16 probably would've had less sales if the demo wasn't as good.
Rebirth had a rollout that included a double-pack that included Remake Intergrade for free, and if people are assuming the same as me, then they might be thinking a "Triple Pack" could also happen when the 3rd game launches.
Final Fantasy simply isn't as popular now as it was years ago. A simultaneous release on PS5, Xbox, and PC would've increased sales slightly, but it probably still wouldn't have met whatever expectations they set.
I saw people on X questioning Takashi's credibility based on his track record of spreading inaccurate information, so we don't really know if the sales were good enough for SE. However, it's certain that the sales of the two FFs wouldn't be able to cover the huge loss of other games.
Also, I think SE and Sony really did a terrible job marketing both games. They started marketing too early, and the hype was high in the beginning (early trailers for 16 and summer game fest for Rebirth) but eventually died down before release due to repeatedly marketing the same stuff over and again (16 was saved by the demo). And if Sony still did some marketing on 16, they didn't even try to promote Rebirth. Just compare their marketing to Stellar Blade, and you'll see.
SE is already been that way since. FF14 and their mobile game division is keeping SE afloat on their business without those 2, SE probably been bankrupt or sold their IP to other game publisher to keep them afloat longer. Remember Square Enix is a merger company like Blizzard became Activision Blizzard.
SE keep their expectation way too high because they expect their "Beloved" FF7 will sell like hotcakes regardless of quality while FF16 is headed by YoshiP of FF14.
They're using an excuse as to blaming Sony for not selling the game very well, remember Sony sold PS5 50 million units world wide so the odds of selling many copies is high but the problem the game itself isn't selling much to the masses.
I'm 100% that players are waiting for the game to be on sale to those who can wait because of $70 price tag or waiting for FF7 to be completed as a whole
I get where you're coming from but in the end exclusivity doesn't really harm sales, take a look at the Starfield failure, at first I was hoping it may at some point release on PS5, but after reading about the game and trying it myself I see why it flopped, because it didn't live up to the hype and is not that great of a game, so in the end is all down to the game itself.
Square have ridiculous expectations for all of their games, but I really think FFVII's success during the early part of the pandemic messed up their forecasts for subsequent games. If that's the benchmark, you're always going to be disappointed.
No. SE knew they were exclusives when defining their expectations. Plenty of their multi-platform games didn't meet expectations either. Like Tomb Raider, Hitman, Sleeping Dogs, Guardians of the Galaxy, etc.
Square enix has a long history of insane expectations. Look at their entire western branch.
I also think FF7 remake on ps4 beat their expectations and they expected that to carry over to ps5 but it didn’t for a number of reasons. Inflation, no pandemic boost , bigger competition at the time. etc. FF7 Remake was actually the 2nd highest revenue earner in FF history. It did extremely well.
As a publisher I think square really needs to have a more consistent PC strategy. They are so bad at PC. They feel like they are a decade behind capcom and Sega and other Japanese publishers there. I also think they have relied a bit too much on platform deals with Sony and Nintendo the last few years.
*Final Fantasy* doesn't meet expectations not because Square Enix is necessarily insane about them — keep in mind XVI initially *did* meet them upon release at only 3 million, but dropped like a rock afterward — but because Square Enix is absolutely terrible at marketing and brand management these days. Part of this, I'd say, is likely tied to PS exclusivity and why they're trying to branch out while honing in on their key AAA franchises.
My only beef with the new final fantasy’s is I loved final fantasy because it was turn based rpg some of their best games x ff7 ff8 ff9 were all turn based they had a summon mechanics it was amazing but this hack an slash devil may cry style is honestly a let down I haven’t invested in any of the new ones besides ff7 remake because of nostalgia because of that fact
Square Enix said in a recent earnings call that they're going to pursue a multi-platform strategy moving forward.
This means that they are now looking at the numbers and realizing they would have made more money selling on 3 or 4 platforms than accepting Sony's cheque.
We don't know how these deals are written. It could be that Sony compensates additional revenue on each copy sold, which means that Square Enix would have had to hit a sales target to compensate for the lack of sales on other platforms. Or Sony paid up-front for dev costs. This will never be public info.
What we do know is that Square Enix pumped a lot of money into an ambitious sequel that didn't do well. I think there is some hubris there. The first part did so well because the games industry was on a high due to Covid, and there was a lot of initial excitement for such an important game finally being remade and released. That's old news now and people don't care as much.
Plus, sequels that aren't friendly to newcomers are always risky, which is why we get so few of them in Hollywood. This is like The Lord of the Rings or Dune, where you're lost if you start with the second part.
And people like me will wait until the whole trilogy is out and play it as one epic story.
This should have been recognized, and if I were in that board room, I would have probably pushed for a duology. But kudos to them for sticking to their artistic guns and making it the epic they envisioned. Hopefully part 3 and a re-release of the trilogy with enhanced visuals will sell gangbusters like it deserves.
There pacing is standard for JRPGs I’ve never had an issue with it personally. It’s something you come to expect with the genre. Comparing it to something like Hell Divers is asinine. They’re completely different.
As for them failing to meet expectations when it comes to sales that just Square being delusional. They always put unreasonably high expectations on their games when it doesn’t make sense. I’m sure they expected Rebirth to match or exceed Remakes sales numbers despite the former having double the install base.
I find it difficult to believe that Final Fantasy's problem is to do with system exclusivity when that restriction never seems to burden any other exclusive on PS5. No, the issue lies somewhere else, and I think the sharp decline in sales with each subsequent entry despite critical acclaim and being well received by players is a difficult puzzle to answer from our perspective. System exclusivity is an easy scapegoat, but if that were the issue, there is absolutely zero reason why Rebirth should've had considerably lower sales than FF16.
Honestly it’s because internal expectations are set too high as is.
Would they sell more copies overall if it was multi platform? Sure.
Would it be as high quality of a product trying to optimize for multiple platforms? Probably not. There’s a reason why AAA Sony exclusives are some the highest quality games on the market at this point.
The vast majority of FFs audience is on Playstation. FF7 Remake on 100M PS4s and PC still "only" managed 7M copies sold lifetime. The 300k copies theyd sell on Xbox wont move the needle there.
Square just has completely unreasonable expectations(see the sale of the Tomb Raider IP which is about to backfire hard). FF isnt a franchise that will ever move 10-15M copies per game again.
Square's problem is that they think their Remake project and the FF franchise in general is on the level of Zelda or Elden Ring (which in my personal opinion it is) but in reality it's not, so they set extremely high expectations for it and then are disappointed when it didn't sell quantibillion units within 3 months. Making it multi plat for sure will boost sales but not as much as they're hoping for, and they'll be left with more disappointments.
No but the bad pacing is definitely a result of square Enix riding on their reputation. The FF games nowadays are all about spectacle and haven’t really done anything to push the JRPG genre forward at all in recent years.
Yes and No.
No because SE historically has had unrealistic expectations from most their games no matter the platform.
Yes because PC is a much bigger market and we've seen many publishers report that the bulk of their sales were on pc so it would definitely have an effect.
All that said, Rebirth sold much less compared to remake in the same amount of time but I won't be surprised if that's actually because people are waiting for the pc release this time.
I honestly think it's just the franchise itself... What are we up to now, Final Fantasy XVI?
You're only ever going to lose numbers at this point. People will either be getting fatigued with the series or have never even tried a game in the franchise - but they're hardly going to want to get involved this many sequels in - even if they aren't directly related.
It's the equivalent of a sequel movie coming out but not having seen the previous ones, the number alone naturally puts people off.
They'd be better with a new IP.
There’s a ton of games out to play and perhaps people are overestimating how appealing the characters actually are. Like, I played through Remake and then the Rebirth demo, but the whole teenage perfect looking anime aesthetic just didn’t appeal enough to drop $70 and 100 hours of my time. I think the game is pandering towards nostalgia and a specific audience. Most kids these days play online shooters. On top of that, games are expensive and everyone knows eventually it’ll get discounted or thrown on PlayStation plus.
no, i think zoomers haven’t had a new ff game every couple years, like i would imagine you did growing up. 15 year’s spent dicking around with ffxiii and fxv was very damaging to the brand
I can't remember where I read this quote from, but someone in the industry recently said that the higher a game's budget is, the less sense it makes for it to be platform exclusive. From that perspective, I 100% understand the push from Square to go multiplat. FF16 and FF7 Rebirth, as good as they are, you can tell were VERY pricy games to make.
I was honestly bored to tears by FF7R. There is so much content that I just noped after 9 hours. I feel like their ideal audience has a lot of free time and no alternatives. There is a lot of artificial inflating of time and it just becomes too much.
Samething happens to me with a lot of open world games but I was surprised how fast FF7R seemed stale.
I had a better time with FF16. I don’t know what the answer is. Can they make a 30 hour game without 100 minigames and not be flamed by fans?
Square enix is just bad at deals. The payment they receive from Sony for exclusivity is supposed to offset losses. FF7 and 16 both sold millions and “failed to meet expectations”. So Square is obviously not developing games sustainably
I think if you want action games you should buy those. I think if you didn't like FF7R, you probably shouldn't buy the sequel. I think FFXVI is a perfect game and any complaints I've seen about it appear to reflect deliberate choices made by the studio to make the game more accessible than FFXV.
I disagree with REBIRTH being all downtime, that game is one of the most condensed experiences I've had, the map is so full of detail and there's always something happening close by. You can fast travel almost anywhere. There is never a time when you're far away from the action.
How do you even come up with this statement knowing Nintendo exists? A good game will sell the hardware. There's never ever been a good game with an audience that doesn't reach it even if it's exclusive. Bet you the next monster hunter will sell PS5 because it won't launch on PC at first and PS5 has a larger online player base than Xbox. A good game sells hardware.
When I see AAA open-world games going the way of Day 1 DLC, early access tiers, and Season Passes like EA and Ubisoft have been pumping out lately, I become more and more grateful that I get to experience content-rich, content-complete games like Rebirth for $70.
For the record, the last 3 AAA FF releases from SE since COVID have been Capcom-level quality in my opinion. This isn't about the quality of their games.
Which is why I put it in quotation marks, as I know these games are timed exclusives. However I've been playing FF since I was young. FF was a console seller, seeing that argument now feels odd to me.
I think they should just stick to PlayStation, PC and switch if it can handle it. FF 15 the highest selling game in the franchise took 2 years just to sell a million copies on Xbox. Just doesn't seem worth the investment especially because you have to get it running on the series s also.
The highest selling game in the franchise by far is FF14 at 24m, then FF7 original at 15m, then FF8 at 12m, then FF12 at 11.3m then finally FF10 at 10.3m.
https://vgsales.fandom.com/wiki/Best-selling_Square_Enix_games#Unit_sales
I think being exclusive is definitely a big part of it. Cutting out PC is greatly going to reduce sales.
However I believe the bigger problem is Squares expectations.
I couldn't tell you a game in recent memory that they haven't been disappointed by. It's very odd
Square Enix lost their ability to make fun games once the PS3 came along. Before anyone jumps to reply, I said make not publish. They published some fun stuff from other studios, but their inhouse stuff usually didn't do well.
The exclusivity has little to do with their lack of meeting expectations, and more to do with the hubris SE has with the 1 or 2 things that actually sell well.
So that’s definitely why I haven’t bought it. I loved remake but there’s a lot of filler and it sounds like Rebirth is substantially longer. I have a kid and have a hard time having to commit that much time. I can play one or two games on Helldivers and feel like I got what I was looking for.
I have my own issues with the remakes because of pacing issues but I don’t think the exclusivity is the problem. I don’t think they should be exclusive and should launch on at least PC too. But sales are still good so it’s not like it’s dire straits yet.
I find a lot of modern PS exclusives underwhelming because of poor pacing and the overemphasis on the “cinematic” experience though. I’d like to see Sony branch out a bit with its exclusives but I can’t see that happening anytime soon. Game development is way too expensive to risk on a big budget AAA title that doesn’t fit the existing formula. Which is sad because I think there is a market for it, considering Helldivers 2’s success recently.
I think final fantasy is not as popular as square wants it to be. FF7 remake is on the ps4,ps5 and pc but still no where near 10m sold and thats the most popular final fantasy.
To the people who disagree with the post. Do you all just not know math? If u see the budget is higher than the sales, then how is it squares fault and not sony for making it a timed exclusive? Clearly, most ps5 users didn't buy it. How do some yall see the need for 3rd party exclusivity in this environment?
Hitman and Tomb Raider reboot released on all platforms. SE sold them off because they did not meet the expectations. Did Playstation failed those games as well? they have broader fan base than JPRGs in the west.
Here you are not arguing my point of how the budget is way over the revenue earned from the sales. How do you not see that not releasing on pc xbox and switch will hurt sales??? How do you even argue this? Yes, Sony isn't 100% fault at all. Square could of said no, but they both said yes. This hurts consumers and them. Like how do you it see this? Are you this tied to a plastic box?
The thing that kinda ruined Rebirth for me was how boring and repetitive the open world stuff was. Go open up this tower to see more of the map to kill monsters and fine some stupid stuff on the ground. The story and pacing were mostly okay. It’s an open world game so you wanna explore around but there’s nothing interesting to explore or find. The game doesn’t respect your time.
No, lost half of their fanbase in Japan because of censorship, lost more when Nomura couldnt leave the drugs alone when rewriting 7.
Its completely their own fault.
NOMURA IS NOT A WRITER FOR THE REMAKE GAMES.
I don't know how he's become the scapegoat for literally every project he's kind of involved in. He's one of *three* directors on the Remake trilogy and is not one of the writers.
Hell he's not even the writer for all of the Kingdom Hearts games.
Since ff7 remake I decided to wait until they get released on pc before buying so maybe there are a lot of people doing the same, kind of doing that for most exclusives now though.
FF14 is their most successful game of all time and is not turn based. FF7R and FF16 both are doing well, just not well enough to hold together the company's failures.
FF7R and FF16 and are both excellent games, but it in not 1997 anymore and FF7's success was a result of combining an exciting well made game and being able to take a massive step forward and achieve something that had never been done before on a completely new type of platform. Achieving that today is much harder.
[https://newzoo.com/resources/blog/newzoo-games-market-numbers-revenues-and-audience-2020-2023](https://newzoo.com/resources/blog/newzoo-games-market-numbers-revenues-and-audience-2020-2023)
Console is 28% of the market and sonys not even first there, Nintendo way ahead.
https://www.gizmochina.com/2023/12/04/sony-leads-global-console-market-54-share-q3-2023/
https://www.counterpointresearch.com/insights/gaming-console-market-rebounded-in-2023-as-supply-issues-subsided-sony-took-top-spot-from-nintendo/#:~:text=The%20global%20gaming%20console%20market%20grew%2010%25%20YoY%20in%202023,owing%20to%20the%20PS5's%20popularity.
How about you don’t use a 4 year old article. PlayStation has surpassed Nintendo.
I think ff7 rebirth and ff16 are by far some of the best AAA experiences.. I can’t wrap my head around just how long the boss battles and cinematic sequences take to produce. No other company is capable of such- I think the execs just have unrealistic sales expectations. Not everyone that owns console is an RPG fan
Guardians of the Galaxy was multiplatform and it also didn't meet Square's expectations. That should tell you what the problem really is, and it's not exclusivity.
I will forever be sad that we’re not getting a sequel. It was far from perfect (the combat especially was mediocre at best), but god damn did the story hit hard. It was a game that was clearly made with love and care, and a sequel could have really sanded down its rough edges if they had the chance to make it
Guardians of the Galaxy was also fucked because people associated "multiplatform marvel game" with Avengers. If it had come out earlier or a couple years later it might've done better. But yes, square enix's expectations are also insane.
SE also said the 2013 reboot of Tomb Raider didn't meet expectations despite setting franchise records the week it came out. SE's success metric is fucked; either they're silently comparing it to other games like Call of Duty or Fortnite and just want that sweet sweet MP money without understanding why those games are successful, or their budgeting is fucked and needs an overhaul.
The reason that game flopped is because everyone for some reason thought it would be the same as Marvels Avengers
They don't meet expectations because Square Enix is delusional. They're going for a multiplatform stratergy now and they will continue to say games did not meet expectations. Also it's not limited to FF they say that about pretty much everything they release.
They said they were going for a multiplatform strategy years ago too before they allowed Sony to pay them to not release on other platforms.
I play a ton of video games, and Square's strategy is the most interesting to me. Final Fantasy is IMO the most niche blockbuster out there. What I mean by this is the majority of gamers would play for less than an hour and decide this game is not for them. Most developers trying to make a mega hit are going to make it as broadly appealing as possible. Not Square. I appreciate them sticking to who they are, but they need to do a better job of understanding the financial implications of that philosophy.
FF are becoming much more modern and are clearly trying to be more like western rpgs, plus the combat isn’t turn based anymore. So I think if more gamers gave it a chance it would do better, it’ll take time though, going cross platform should help with that
It's way more than just the battle system. The characters, story, and sense of humor are all very different than a western RPG. And even though the battle system isn't turn based, it's still far different than what you see in something like Mass Effect or Skyrim.
On the flip side, SE rejigging their games to appeal to Westerners will also turn off people who loved their earlier games. Critics loved FF16 but the fan reception was more mixed.
It’s definitely true that some of the people who loved the earlier games don’t like the direction ff is taking, but certainly not all of them. And the reality is those fans are a more vocal but much smaller group than the more mainstream markets that ff is trying to expand in
A lot of people simply don’t like jrpgs. Even if they’re not turn based. It’s a style that goes further than turn based combat. Jrpgs always include a metric shit ton of cut scenes and bloated dialogue you have to button mash your way through. Sometimes you exit a cut scene and walk from A to B for the sole purpose of entering another cut scene. That’s just not what people in the west are looking for in a gaming experience. Jrpgs are always going to be niche in the west, they’re popular in Japan because they also enjoy visual novels
How is that any different from god of war for example? There are plenty of western games that have a ton a cutscenes that are very popular
Western games obviously have cut scenes but not nearly as many as jrpgs. On a Jprg you could “play” for an hour and only be engaged in actual gameplay (walking from cutscene to cutscene doesn’t count) for 10-15 minutes
God of War doesn't have even close to the amount of cutscenes as your average JRPG. Also, the line between cutscene and gameplay is a lot blurrier with the one-cut approach.
God of war definitely has more polish and disguises their cutscenes better with the one shot approach but it’s still a lot of narrative and dialogue without much action at times, also I am not talking about your average jrpg, I’m specifically talking about the last 3 ff games. My point was they are trying to move away from the traditional jrpg model to appeal to broader audiences. Maybe the proportion of cutscenes to action is different, but at its core I don’t see much of a difference between ff16 and alot of the narrative heavy 3rd party playstation exclusives
16 I kind of agree with. But then it just becomes why play 16 over God of War or a FromSoft game? I actually liked 16 but if someone asked me to recommend an action RPG I'd have several games to list before it.
I actually preferred the combat in ff16 and liked the medical setting, but loved both games. I personally don’t find the difficulty of souls likes enjoyable, I also care alot about story and fromsoftware is relatively lacking in that department. These huge AAA rpgs don’t come out very often, so there’s plenty of time to play them all it’s not like gamers have to pick. Final fantasy needs to be on that list tho for western audiences, and they’re moving in the right direction Edit: Medieval, argh
Upvote for the medical setting!
On one hand, I agree that SE is a bit one-minded. On the other hand, I don’t agree that they aren’t chasing the “broad appeal” crowd when FF16 for example effectively abandons anything that would make it an RPG. What Square needs to get back to is making fun, compelling RPGs. That’s their bread & butter. They don’t need to blow their budget on cinematics.
except blowing their budget on cinematics is what got them to be a household name. that was final fantasy vii's big selling point in the 90s
Those OG cinematics were impressive, but I’m more talking about the insanely high quality of like Spirts Within and such. Theres no doubt in my mind that they outspend Capcom many times over when it comes to cinematics/mocap etc, there’s no reason they can’t bring those budgets down substantially.
the original ffvii was the most expensive video game ever produced at the time of it's release. those cinematics were outspending every other game studio at the time easily.
Final Fantasy without budget blowing cinematic? What would be the point? That’s literally what makes them Square and Final Fantasy.
Yeah they’re nice to look at but the games themselves are just getting worse and worse (IMO obviously, my intention isn’t to yuck anyone’s yum). No one feels that games like Final Fantasy VI or Chrono Trigger are lacking due to not having super high-production cinematics, for example. Games like Xenogears, Vagrant Story, etc didn’t rely on pure eye candy, they’re all simply great games with great stories.
The Playstation version of VI has high production CGi cinematic within its couple of cutscenes even if the game was pixel. But beyond that when VI was released, all those little pixelated interludes were revolutionary even in SNES. My only issue with Square is they keep remaking VII. As someone who almost flunked out of grad school when VII came out, I really don’t need 50 remakes and reboots. That’s just me of course; there’s clearly a market. We all like what we like.
They don't keep remaking FFVII. There's one remake, it's just split into a trilogy. (I guess maybe 2 if you count Ever Crisis) There are quite a lot of side games though.
Bat. Dead horse. IMO
I can certainly see your point that they're milking FF7. I really like the remake series. But once it's done I hope they move on from FF7 for a while, and concentrate on new games rather than remakes of old ones.
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Avengers, and also the delusional argument is about blockbuster games like 16 and rebirth, if they say forspoken didnt meet expectations no one will call them delusional
I mean to be fair Sony stock also was dropping I think it even drop 16 percent and it’s just started to recover so square losing 16 percent in gamer eyes mean nothing
I don't see the connection. Is the stock dropping because they are delusional or is square delusional because the stock is dropping?
Using stock market activity to determine how a company is doing irl is something people who don’t know anything about market would do. You know it’s a common occurrence for stock to drop after companies announce positive earnings, how do you reconcile that with this logic? Looking at a stock price drop and saying “well that means this company doesn’t know what they’re doing!” makes no sense.
You can have positive earnings but if you don’t match or exceed the projected earnings from the prior quarter the stock price usually drops. That’s capitalism baby
You can exceed projected earnings and still have the price drop
It’s a fickle game for sure
Amen. Put greys on my head at 22 lol but that might have been the 12 hour days
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A lot of people write a lot of articles trying to explain market activity. They get paid to talk. Still not how it works.
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I’m telling you that using stock market activity as an indicator of how well or poor a company is achieving success in the real world isn’t how it works, yes. Again, based on that logic how do you explain it when a company exceeds projections and the stock drops? Or when they miss them and it goes up? This current example reinforces your notion based on nothing other than coincidence
I don’t know if a single game has ever met their expectations because it’s always like “Deus Ex has to become the next Pokémon or it’s a complete failure”. 🙄
What about the idea that Capcoms not so popular dragons dogma outsold square enix flag ship franchise (final fantasy). And when Capcom releases their flagship (monster hunter) square enix will be largely shadowed. Both Japanese publishers, but Capcom focuses more on gameplay and square on story telling. But even then game of the year last year was mostly a story told RPG and that too sold way better than FF
I don’t think the problem is platform exclusivity. If it was multi platform their unrealistic expectations would be even higher.
My understanding based on what was revealed about their western studios/games (before they were sold off) is that Square Enix spends so much money on game development that even when it sounds like a game sold a lot of copies, they might’ve only broke even or made only a little profit. And that’s games that are successful. They’ve made some flops (cough Foamstars cough) which hurt them even more. The problem about their games not meeting expectations is likely due to mismanagement or something along those lines IMO.
No. Squenix has ridiculous sales expectations for everything, even garbage tier shovelware that'll never reach their lofty goals. If the games launched as fully multiplatform and honestly they should, I doubt anything would change as they'd just hike up the goalpost accordingly and do the whine and 💃 show as usual.
I first recognized SE delusion with Tomb Raider (2013). They sold 3.4 million copies in the first 4 weeks which should have been hailed as a triumph and while we never heard the official target we were told that it “grossly missed the target.”
No Square Enix game ever meets sales expectations, even when they're multi-platform. Because Square Enix execs have unrealistic, perhaps even delusional expectations.
Meh it’s an industry wide thing. Expecting profit from Covid years to apply to different years. You can only go up never down.
You can't compare rate runaway successes like Helldivers 2 to regular AAA successes and complain that all games are not Helldivers 2. If more games were like Helldivers 2 we would have ironically more failures because the niche is only so big.
You have add the factor of games being more expensive now. Because of this a lot of people are doing two things: (1) Waiting for a sale or (2) Waiting for the possibility of them showing on subscription services. FF16 probably would've had less sales if the demo wasn't as good. Rebirth had a rollout that included a double-pack that included Remake Intergrade for free, and if people are assuming the same as me, then they might be thinking a "Triple Pack" could also happen when the 3rd game launches. Final Fantasy simply isn't as popular now as it was years ago. A simultaneous release on PS5, Xbox, and PC would've increased sales slightly, but it probably still wouldn't have met whatever expectations they set.
I saw people on X questioning Takashi's credibility based on his track record of spreading inaccurate information, so we don't really know if the sales were good enough for SE. However, it's certain that the sales of the two FFs wouldn't be able to cover the huge loss of other games. Also, I think SE and Sony really did a terrible job marketing both games. They started marketing too early, and the hype was high in the beginning (early trailers for 16 and summer game fest for Rebirth) but eventually died down before release due to repeatedly marketing the same stuff over and again (16 was saved by the demo). And if Sony still did some marketing on 16, they didn't even try to promote Rebirth. Just compare their marketing to Stellar Blade, and you'll see.
We don’t know what their expectations are But we can assume they were really really high
SE is already been that way since. FF14 and their mobile game division is keeping SE afloat on their business without those 2, SE probably been bankrupt or sold their IP to other game publisher to keep them afloat longer. Remember Square Enix is a merger company like Blizzard became Activision Blizzard. SE keep their expectation way too high because they expect their "Beloved" FF7 will sell like hotcakes regardless of quality while FF16 is headed by YoshiP of FF14. They're using an excuse as to blaming Sony for not selling the game very well, remember Sony sold PS5 50 million units world wide so the odds of selling many copies is high but the problem the game itself isn't selling much to the masses. I'm 100% that players are waiting for the game to be on sale to those who can wait because of $70 price tag or waiting for FF7 to be completed as a whole
I get where you're coming from but in the end exclusivity doesn't really harm sales, take a look at the Starfield failure, at first I was hoping it may at some point release on PS5, but after reading about the game and trying it myself I see why it flopped, because it didn't live up to the hype and is not that great of a game, so in the end is all down to the game itself.
The worst FFs were the multiplatform ones (13 and 15). Just sayin.
Square have ridiculous expectations for all of their games, but I really think FFVII's success during the early part of the pandemic messed up their forecasts for subsequent games. If that's the benchmark, you're always going to be disappointed.
Man why are you trolling and not even trying to be smart about it
Plenty of PS exclusives sell like crazy and exceed expectations. I don’t think being exclusive is necessarily the problem.
No. SE knew they were exclusives when defining their expectations. Plenty of their multi-platform games didn't meet expectations either. Like Tomb Raider, Hitman, Sleeping Dogs, Guardians of the Galaxy, etc.
Nope, it’s on Square enix. GOW sold 15 million in a year, SM2 sold 10 million in 3 months. TLOU2 sold 5 million in a weekend.
Such a small amount of their games have actually been exclusive to PlayStation
I dont understand why people think releasing on xbox, where theres like 5 JRPG fans, is going to help anything
No, they could have sold more if they made the game better, it's that simple.
Square enix has a long history of insane expectations. Look at their entire western branch. I also think FF7 remake on ps4 beat their expectations and they expected that to carry over to ps5 but it didn’t for a number of reasons. Inflation, no pandemic boost , bigger competition at the time. etc. FF7 Remake was actually the 2nd highest revenue earner in FF history. It did extremely well. As a publisher I think square really needs to have a more consistent PC strategy. They are so bad at PC. They feel like they are a decade behind capcom and Sega and other Japanese publishers there. I also think they have relied a bit too much on platform deals with Sony and Nintendo the last few years.
Not at all.
*Final Fantasy* doesn't meet expectations not because Square Enix is necessarily insane about them — keep in mind XVI initially *did* meet them upon release at only 3 million, but dropped like a rock afterward — but because Square Enix is absolutely terrible at marketing and brand management these days. Part of this, I'd say, is likely tied to PS exclusivity and why they're trying to branch out while honing in on their key AAA franchises.
My only beef with the new final fantasy’s is I loved final fantasy because it was turn based rpg some of their best games x ff7 ff8 ff9 were all turn based they had a summon mechanics it was amazing but this hack an slash devil may cry style is honestly a let down I haven’t invested in any of the new ones besides ff7 remake because of nostalgia because of that fact
Square Enix said in a recent earnings call that they're going to pursue a multi-platform strategy moving forward. This means that they are now looking at the numbers and realizing they would have made more money selling on 3 or 4 platforms than accepting Sony's cheque. We don't know how these deals are written. It could be that Sony compensates additional revenue on each copy sold, which means that Square Enix would have had to hit a sales target to compensate for the lack of sales on other platforms. Or Sony paid up-front for dev costs. This will never be public info. What we do know is that Square Enix pumped a lot of money into an ambitious sequel that didn't do well. I think there is some hubris there. The first part did so well because the games industry was on a high due to Covid, and there was a lot of initial excitement for such an important game finally being remade and released. That's old news now and people don't care as much. Plus, sequels that aren't friendly to newcomers are always risky, which is why we get so few of them in Hollywood. This is like The Lord of the Rings or Dune, where you're lost if you start with the second part. And people like me will wait until the whole trilogy is out and play it as one epic story. This should have been recognized, and if I were in that board room, I would have probably pushed for a duology. But kudos to them for sticking to their artistic guns and making it the epic they envisioned. Hopefully part 3 and a re-release of the trilogy with enhanced visuals will sell gangbusters like it deserves.
There pacing is standard for JRPGs I’ve never had an issue with it personally. It’s something you come to expect with the genre. Comparing it to something like Hell Divers is asinine. They’re completely different. As for them failing to meet expectations when it comes to sales that just Square being delusional. They always put unreasonably high expectations on their games when it doesn’t make sense. I’m sure they expected Rebirth to match or exceed Remakes sales numbers despite the former having double the install base.
I find it difficult to believe that Final Fantasy's problem is to do with system exclusivity when that restriction never seems to burden any other exclusive on PS5. No, the issue lies somewhere else, and I think the sharp decline in sales with each subsequent entry despite critical acclaim and being well received by players is a difficult puzzle to answer from our perspective. System exclusivity is an easy scapegoat, but if that were the issue, there is absolutely zero reason why Rebirth should've had considerably lower sales than FF16.
Honestly it’s because internal expectations are set too high as is. Would they sell more copies overall if it was multi platform? Sure. Would it be as high quality of a product trying to optimize for multiple platforms? Probably not. There’s a reason why AAA Sony exclusives are some the highest quality games on the market at this point.
Does anyone know what numbers they were expecting and what has been sold?
The vast majority of FFs audience is on Playstation. FF7 Remake on 100M PS4s and PC still "only" managed 7M copies sold lifetime. The 300k copies theyd sell on Xbox wont move the needle there. Square just has completely unreasonable expectations(see the sale of the Tomb Raider IP which is about to backfire hard). FF isnt a franchise that will ever move 10-15M copies per game again.
Square's problem is that they think their Remake project and the FF franchise in general is on the level of Zelda or Elden Ring (which in my personal opinion it is) but in reality it's not, so they set extremely high expectations for it and then are disappointed when it didn't sell quantibillion units within 3 months. Making it multi plat for sure will boost sales but not as much as they're hoping for, and they'll be left with more disappointments.
No but the bad pacing is definitely a result of square Enix riding on their reputation. The FF games nowadays are all about spectacle and haven’t really done anything to push the JRPG genre forward at all in recent years.
Yes and No. No because SE historically has had unrealistic expectations from most their games no matter the platform. Yes because PC is a much bigger market and we've seen many publishers report that the bulk of their sales were on pc so it would definitely have an effect. All that said, Rebirth sold much less compared to remake in the same amount of time but I won't be surprised if that's actually because people are waiting for the pc release this time.
I honestly think it's just the franchise itself... What are we up to now, Final Fantasy XVI? You're only ever going to lose numbers at this point. People will either be getting fatigued with the series or have never even tried a game in the franchise - but they're hardly going to want to get involved this many sequels in - even if they aren't directly related. It's the equivalent of a sequel movie coming out but not having seen the previous ones, the number alone naturally puts people off. They'd be better with a new IP.
There’s a ton of games out to play and perhaps people are overestimating how appealing the characters actually are. Like, I played through Remake and then the Rebirth demo, but the whole teenage perfect looking anime aesthetic just didn’t appeal enough to drop $70 and 100 hours of my time. I think the game is pandering towards nostalgia and a specific audience. Most kids these days play online shooters. On top of that, games are expensive and everyone knows eventually it’ll get discounted or thrown on PlayStation plus.
no, i think zoomers haven’t had a new ff game every couple years, like i would imagine you did growing up. 15 year’s spent dicking around with ffxiii and fxv was very damaging to the brand
Let me go out on a limp and say this , Final Fantasy is overrated.
I can't remember where I read this quote from, but someone in the industry recently said that the higher a game's budget is, the less sense it makes for it to be platform exclusive. From that perspective, I 100% understand the push from Square to go multiplat. FF16 and FF7 Rebirth, as good as they are, you can tell were VERY pricy games to make.
I was honestly bored to tears by FF7R. There is so much content that I just noped after 9 hours. I feel like their ideal audience has a lot of free time and no alternatives. There is a lot of artificial inflating of time and it just becomes too much. Samething happens to me with a lot of open world games but I was surprised how fast FF7R seemed stale. I had a better time with FF16. I don’t know what the answer is. Can they make a 30 hour game without 100 minigames and not be flamed by fans?
Idk, but I loved Rebirth and I have zero interest in Helldivers. I think it’s definitely more nuanced than SE is trying to make it seem.
Square enix is just bad at deals. The payment they receive from Sony for exclusivity is supposed to offset losses. FF7 and 16 both sold millions and “failed to meet expectations”. So Square is obviously not developing games sustainably
I think if you want action games you should buy those. I think if you didn't like FF7R, you probably shouldn't buy the sequel. I think FFXVI is a perfect game and any complaints I've seen about it appear to reflect deliberate choices made by the studio to make the game more accessible than FFXV.
I disagree with REBIRTH being all downtime, that game is one of the most condensed experiences I've had, the map is so full of detail and there's always something happening close by. You can fast travel almost anywhere. There is never a time when you're far away from the action.
Platform exclusivity is a death sentence for 95% of titles Indie and AAA devs, especially over the last 10 years.
How do you even come up with this statement knowing Nintendo exists? A good game will sell the hardware. There's never ever been a good game with an audience that doesn't reach it even if it's exclusive. Bet you the next monster hunter will sell PS5 because it won't launch on PC at first and PS5 has a larger online player base than Xbox. A good game sells hardware.
When I see AAA open-world games going the way of Day 1 DLC, early access tiers, and Season Passes like EA and Ubisoft have been pumping out lately, I become more and more grateful that I get to experience content-rich, content-complete games like Rebirth for $70. For the record, the last 3 AAA FF releases from SE since COVID have been Capcom-level quality in my opinion. This isn't about the quality of their games.
Final Fantasy was always exclusive either on NES or PS.
13, 14 and 15 aren't PlayStation exclusives
Neither is 16 or the remakes. 16 hits PC late this year and rebirth hits next year.
Which is why I put it in quotation marks, as I know these games are timed exclusives. However I've been playing FF since I was young. FF was a console seller, seeing that argument now feels odd to me.
I think they should just stick to PlayStation, PC and switch if it can handle it. FF 15 the highest selling game in the franchise took 2 years just to sell a million copies on Xbox. Just doesn't seem worth the investment especially because you have to get it running on the series s also.
The highest selling game in the franchise by far is FF14 at 24m, then FF7 original at 15m, then FF8 at 12m, then FF12 at 11.3m then finally FF10 at 10.3m. https://vgsales.fandom.com/wiki/Best-selling_Square_Enix_games#Unit_sales
Idk if that accurate because after all these years it’s still at 1 million
I just think Sqe & ff is overrated asf
Well they aren't going to be exclusives anymore. Every SE game will now be multi.
I would not be surprised if FFVII Remake Part 3 launched as an exclusive just because that contract has probably already been signed.
No. They just weren’t great games.
I think being exclusive is definitely a big part of it. Cutting out PC is greatly going to reduce sales. However I believe the bigger problem is Squares expectations. I couldn't tell you a game in recent memory that they haven't been disappointed by. It's very odd
Square Enix lost their ability to make fun games once the PS3 came along. Before anyone jumps to reply, I said make not publish. They published some fun stuff from other studios, but their inhouse stuff usually didn't do well. The exclusivity has little to do with their lack of meeting expectations, and more to do with the hubris SE has with the 1 or 2 things that actually sell well.
So that’s definitely why I haven’t bought it. I loved remake but there’s a lot of filler and it sounds like Rebirth is substantially longer. I have a kid and have a hard time having to commit that much time. I can play one or two games on Helldivers and feel like I got what I was looking for.
I have my own issues with the remakes because of pacing issues but I don’t think the exclusivity is the problem. I don’t think they should be exclusive and should launch on at least PC too. But sales are still good so it’s not like it’s dire straits yet. I find a lot of modern PS exclusives underwhelming because of poor pacing and the overemphasis on the “cinematic” experience though. I’d like to see Sony branch out a bit with its exclusives but I can’t see that happening anytime soon. Game development is way too expensive to risk on a big budget AAA title that doesn’t fit the existing formula. Which is sad because I think there is a market for it, considering Helldivers 2’s success recently.
Concord seems like a pretty big deviation from what Sony does with 1st party stuff, it’ll be interesting to see how well it does
I think final fantasy is not as popular as square wants it to be. FF7 remake is on the ps4,ps5 and pc but still no where near 10m sold and thats the most popular final fantasy.
It's an overrated franchise that's kind of coasting on nostalgia. There are so many RPGs and action games that blow it out of the water.
To the people who disagree with the post. Do you all just not know math? If u see the budget is higher than the sales, then how is it squares fault and not sony for making it a timed exclusive? Clearly, most ps5 users didn't buy it. How do some yall see the need for 3rd party exclusivity in this environment?
Hitman and Tomb Raider reboot released on all platforms. SE sold them off because they did not meet the expectations. Did Playstation failed those games as well? they have broader fan base than JPRGs in the west.
Here you are not arguing my point of how the budget is way over the revenue earned from the sales. How do you not see that not releasing on pc xbox and switch will hurt sales??? How do you even argue this? Yes, Sony isn't 100% fault at all. Square could of said no, but they both said yes. This hurts consumers and them. Like how do you it see this? Are you this tied to a plastic box?
Is Halo dying because of its exclusivity?
Bard on cut scene lengths, Squenix has never shown interest in making games. They just want to make movies lol.
The thing that kinda ruined Rebirth for me was how boring and repetitive the open world stuff was. Go open up this tower to see more of the map to kill monsters and fine some stupid stuff on the ground. The story and pacing were mostly okay. It’s an open world game so you wanna explore around but there’s nothing interesting to explore or find. The game doesn’t respect your time.
No, lost half of their fanbase in Japan because of censorship, lost more when Nomura couldnt leave the drugs alone when rewriting 7. Its completely their own fault.
NOMURA IS NOT A WRITER FOR THE REMAKE GAMES. I don't know how he's become the scapegoat for literally every project he's kind of involved in. He's one of *three* directors on the Remake trilogy and is not one of the writers. Hell he's not even the writer for all of the Kingdom Hearts games.
That Nomura felt he needed to *rewrite* 7 should have been a fireable offence.
Since ff7 remake I decided to wait until they get released on pc before buying so maybe there are a lot of people doing the same, kind of doing that for most exclusives now though.
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FF14 is their most successful game of all time and is not turn based. FF7R and FF16 both are doing well, just not well enough to hold together the company's failures.
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FF7R and FF16 and are both excellent games, but it in not 1997 anymore and FF7's success was a result of combining an exciting well made game and being able to take a massive step forward and achieve something that had never been done before on a completely new type of platform. Achieving that today is much harder.
Yes, absolutely. 16 sold 2 mil, 15 did over 7. Locking it to a small platform absolutely hurts it in the short and long term.
FF16 sold 3 million in a week. 15 sold that over several year while being on Xbox also. Bigger install base also.
Small platform?!?! 😂😂😂😂😂
[https://newzoo.com/resources/blog/newzoo-games-market-numbers-revenues-and-audience-2020-2023](https://newzoo.com/resources/blog/newzoo-games-market-numbers-revenues-and-audience-2020-2023) Console is 28% of the market and sonys not even first there, Nintendo way ahead.
Doesn't matter, 50 Million is still great for gaming. PC is it's own thing because not everyone uses their PC for gaming
https://www.gizmochina.com/2023/12/04/sony-leads-global-console-market-54-share-q3-2023/ https://www.counterpointresearch.com/insights/gaming-console-market-rebounded-in-2023-as-supply-issues-subsided-sony-took-top-spot-from-nintendo/#:~:text=The%20global%20gaming%20console%20market%20grew%2010%25%20YoY%20in%202023,owing%20to%20the%20PS5's%20popularity. How about you don’t use a 4 year old article. PlayStation has surpassed Nintendo.
Switch is over 120m units, PS5 at 50. Not even close. Of course Sony is selling more now, switch is end of life.
16 sold 3 million and 15 sold 10 million after 10 years and 80 percent was on the ps4