How about they stop making the franchise a real-time action RPG.
Wait, purposely excluding sizable segments of the market led to less sales? No way. Someone should note this down.
Well, you did change the story of ff7 a ton, which nobody asked for. I purposely bought the game from gamestop so Square Enix wouldn’t get my money for the game. ff16 on the other I bought on my ps5, and I thought it was great.
No lie, when I saw the ghosts in FF7: Remake or whatever … I forced myself to finish the game and there’s no way I’m likely to play any of the sequels.
Also, like, this is just me but I got into PlayStation games fairly late. I got a PS5 and I played God of War 4 and was gobsmacked about how good that game played and looked. When I played FF7: Remake, the game itself looked amazing and a younger me would have loved seeing those graphics. However, I felt the cinematics and storyline were SO lackluster. I think after seeing God of War 4 cinematics, the FF7: Remake ones felt so dated …
Btw, I actually enjoyed FF15, I know it’s like unfinished with drama and all that but I really did like playing that game.
Has any square Enix game in the past 5 years met their expectations?
This is usually the problem with them. They have great selling games, that always fall short of their “expectations”. I’m wondering if their expectations might be wrong.
I believe I read that, in other for them to consider a game successful, it has to generate more profits than if they had just invested all funds spent on the project.
I wonder if they’re comparing FFVII rebirth sales to the gains that they would have made in the stock market specifically from when they started development until release I.e. the post COVID stock boom. That would be truly difficult to materialise, as sales would have to be ridiculously large.
Sales expectations here don’t mean “we think this game is so good it will move x million units,” that thinking doesn’t exist anymore. It starts from the money they put in it, and they deduce “we’ll need to sell x million copies to get the money back with the profit we want.” There have been a few interviews specifically about these two games saying that.
It’s the same old idea that AAA products (movies, games, same excuse) cost more to make than they bring money back - although we never know exactly how much of that is actually “investors expect an x% return by week y” where x is just too high and y too short and they never want to think longer term, and we never know how far an investment actually goes. Especially in the case of the Remake trilogy where keeping the same engine and world is supposed to drastically reduce the cost of the last game compared to if they had started a new game from scratch with the same content - except part 3 is unlikely to sell more than part 2 given that it’s a sequel.
At any rate, we all know it’s true that development time and costs keep going up exponentially, and no one likes it (and yet everyone wants 4k 60fps somehow).
Before they sold Eidos, it was all the western studios’ fault. Now this. Seems like the wrong people are in charge.
