Former Square Enix Exec Reveals ALARMING Truth of Final Fantasy & AAA 

No worries. Also, any estimate on a pc release for Rebirth, yet? 'Cause I did not want to buy a console just for the FFVII remake. Not again. ( ¬_¬)'

Can you please avoid using gameplay footage when discussing SQEX topics. I wanted to look at some of them but there was too much spoilers.

m8 you say and misspell his surname wrong in the description despite it being right there in the screenshots lol

@@cindervile I'm dyslexic lol.

When you do all this research and can't even figure out 16 and Rebirth are PS5 EXCLUSIVE which most PS players do not have = low sales...

That’s deep.

Damn……..

Oh lord 😭

😮 fuck

That's... really depressing.

M

I mean square didnt do layoffs they just sold all their western studios. Considering the whole 360 era and how that effected japan I think that was inevitable. They just realised they dont have to pander to the west by copying american companies again

Square enix is keeping kitase as a producer when the man almost broke the company with the dev cost of the cristal engine, ff15, kh3, and ff7r wich was so badly produced that they had to start from 0 and its not even public how much money they did lost. Square having always games selling below expectations while selling millions became a meme, but the ones fire are devs and not directives

This is the most underrated comment. Square enix needs a manger development overhaul.

@@ericcortez8386 They just had one.

Yes, some times I thing of playing a game just to end up stuck in some RU-vid video Netflix serie or podcast, where in 2015 that was impossible to happen. Also they are competing with game pass and psplus extra, with so many games to play we just put the paid ones in the backlog because we know we can get them later and better because patches are out

Omg you are right! I didn't even thought of that! Makes sense. I now have more games to play than I have time remaining to live. I only played a fraction of the ps4 catalog, I'm nowhere near needing ps5

Not to mention, the market itself is hella saturated right now. 10k games are released each year, and unlike prev gen, the newer games also have to compete against prev game releases. The video game industry is hella competitive rn

You missed one important detail regarding why your time is valuable to these companies. There's a reason companies will spend millions of dollars developing, advertising, and supporting a "free" game. It's the same reason you also need a different account for every service you use... There's a TON of money to be made selling not only your personal information, but also your habits, likes, dislikes, tendencies, ect. to the data brokers.

And yet most of those companies are attacking their fans as if that works. It is exactly as you say, time is limited and money is tight so who wants to spend their time and money on a company that vocally hates them

And short attention spans

And they get their money from skins, extras, packages etc.

That would be for gatcha games, where the rewards are random (gambling).

That's true. Genshin is one such game. There's a lot to do but the devs made it so that even though the game is free, you'll inevitably pay tons of money to get new characters, weapons, and stronger characters.

Another trash talking because of jeaolusy. When i play ps games in 2000s era i also play like nonstop because it was fun and addicting but now everything is just trash DEI and political no wonder i don't even care with console games anymore.

It's ff14 and it's the only thing that's keeping them afloat and somehow they still put a shoe string budget on it.

@@SourPatchKun You're not wrong, but i feel like FF14 is in a good place.

First Soldier would have been a huge hit had they taken a different path instead of a generic battle Royale. A horde mode like Mass Effect 3's multiplayer would have done much better. Going on soldier missions in 4 person teams.

@@toddolsen4604 Yes, it was a miss on many levels imo, but the point is that they _did_ try.

First soldier is just mobile

Graphics never look better than real life and I don't need them to look as realistic as possible.

Yep totally agree

I've always been saying this since the PS3 era

I think people here would agree with you, but I think the issue is the majority of gamers who just play their one live service game and dont really follow any of this stuff.

I dont mind at all, you can still make great games even if they look like the came straight from the PS1 era. (actually i kinda want that as a throwback)

Also there's no such thing as a free product in our world. You are just paying for it some other way (usually your personal data).

yeah don't let em pay money for f2p games, let them pay money of square enix games where they pay a sub, extra for containers, forced to log to not lose a house, all while they already paid money for the expac, the base game and you get a shop which has all the cool items in it xD

My kids are not allowed to play anything like that. Started them on the classics. Pacman, original Mario, Zelad, etc.

​@@metalface_villain well as long as ppl recognize this greedy system and still pay for it while having fun it's kinda okay-ish. XIV is the only game I'd be willing to do that for, but still with clenched teeth bc there's no other option. But it's a game which accompanied me for many years and it holds big sentimental value, so I accept this rip off. But I've never do that twice. Ever. I wish they won't continue this system on the next mmo (XVII?) too 🥲

its hard to prevent tho they will play cs valorant fortnite those esports title since valorant grow so much that kids and woman play

Exactly. Don't jack up prices, instead reduce the budget. Square should go back to the drawing board and make more AA games. They don't cost as much to produce, are often times better than AAA in many ways, and you can concentrate on what makes a good game, i.e lore, story and characters. They don't need all this expensive technology. All they need is your heart being at the right place.

@@Equinoksl They cut out the AA games. They can keep on making AAA games, they just need to cut down the budgets and advertising. They don't need to make near realistic graphics to sell the game, nor do they need to have advertisements for the game on billboards, on buses, or have celebrities in commercials.

Totally agree, reducing the budget for a game is a must, Increasing the cost will just lose them more money/potential revenue as it will turn some people off buying the game.

I truly believe the only way to lower budgets is for gaming to become less mainstream. People say they shouldn't put so much effort on high end graphics, but I've seen plenty of casual and hardcore gamers complain about graphics not being good enough. I have personally made a couple game recommendations to co-workers that got brushed off because it didn't look real enough. I've seen people complain about games not being suitable for current consoles/ higher end PCs because they didn't look good enough. "Consoles/previous gen consoles are holding back gaming because devs have to program for them instead of making the best looking games they could". They could invest less in marketing, but I've seen people who have basically gone with the mindset of "If I haven't heard of it/mainstream, it's likely not worth my time". This is also an industry that has, in the past, shown that a good enough marketing campain can go a long way, for better or for worse. Maybe spend less on well known actors... but this is *marketing*, which is meant to catch eyes. Plus it's not like Video games has much of any widely known names outside of the IPs themselves. And, let's be fair, a lot of us like a little spectacle. I think the solution to the problem, without some major crash somewhere, would require effort on both the corporate and consumer sides. Both sides have their good points (I mean, FF7Rebirth is a really good game and, reasonable or not, people are finding ways to trash it), but I've seen too many issues on both sides to just sit here and put all the blame on corporate interests.

I think a.i. Is generally going to be used to control the living heck out of people, to the point that the world will become “smaller” as people will trust information even less than they do now. However, for games it’ll help with the cost to make them.

If you like watching someone else playing a game more so then playing it yourself you are not a gamer in the first place. Lets play RU-vid channels exist mostly because not everybody has the money to play all the latest and greatest. So they watch someone else play it.

@@Odder-Being That or you are saving money. There are some games, I'm not interested in playing or have better games to play with the limited time I can play and so I'll watch a streamer/youtuber play it when I'm on a break from gaming.

Streaming is a free advertisement. Some Dev. even paid streamer to play their game. If the gameplay is fun, they will buy your game. Except those story-driven game, with generic gameplay.

​@Odder-Being Or the time. I know tons of people, me included who just don't have the time to play anymore. Thankfully I made the time for Rebirth, but it was very difficult and took me a while. I cannot replay. I have to watch other people do things i could not inbetween other things during my busy week. Games just require so much time and involvement and there's more urgency to complete them quicker now to keep up with everyone else. Doesnt apply to everyone, but I bought it simply because it's FFVII. I didn't even finish Remake. I love Tekken and couldn't even finish 8 and haven't played in months after being a hermit for a weekend. I just can't game anymore like I did in the past. Several others I know stopped altogether but we really enjoy watching other people do it when we can. Money is not an issue for everyone, but time is when you have a family or are trying to start one, a high demanding job, and then by time you get started it's already completed x 5 by other people online. It's crazy.

@@OGBabygurl Yeah and games weren't as long as they use to be now. Like when I started playing JRPGs back in 2000, the max time it took was for my first playthroughs were between 50 and 60s hrs and the times would lesson significantly with new playthroughs. I remember in recent years when I finally finished Zelda's Breath of the Wild (and I didn't even 100% it) easily over 200 hrs and it shocked me. Most games I play now are from the indie sector because you're getting good quality games for lower prices and they don't take so long to complete. If I wasn't a lifelong Nintendo fan or diehard Kingdom Hearts fan, I'd probably stop getting their games.

If you include preproduction, dev time is longer than 5 years

You realize without marketing a product loses all presence in the market noise. A perfect example of this was the Starbury Basketball shoe. Those sold for super cheap like $20 and initially benefited from being attached to an NBA player at the time Stephon Marbury and excellent word of mouth. After the initial buzz around the Starbury's died down after a couple of months the sales dropped to almost zero instantly. People need advertisement to be reminded a product exist because all the competition to that product is blasting you with their presence day in and day out. Also how do you expect a Project to get finished with little management? The people who make games are artist and if you left it to them they would take 20 + years tweaking a game to perfection. Moreover everything would be weird like Death Stranding. Management pulls in the reigns and allow games with actual widespread appeal to get made in a somewhat timely fashion. Even in the past in gaming when everybody claims there was so much passion there was massive amount of money poured into marketing and sales, even more relative to the cost of development expenses back then as games took about a year to develop with a 20 person team.

this is my area of expertise every company out there, for every dollar they spend on marketing, they get more than a dollar back. marketing wouldn't exist and wouldn't be done if it wasn't profitable. if you don't have a marketing team, you don't know that a game is coming out, you don't get the trailers to show off the game, you don't get the articles in Kotaku and other magazines discussing the upcoming games. you're right about other leeches on the companies, though if you really want to look at the biggest problem, look at the share holders more than anything since they're the ones that are demanding that video game companies make more money making games than they would playing the stock market. in fact most of the high executive pay and bonuses are set by the share holders, and the share holders reward the executives with these bonuses for delivering short term profit

This guys saying marketing is useless has no idea 😂 w/o marketing your product fails.

Focus on story and characters and not chase the west trends. Make it have flashy character designs like those flashy gatcha titles.

I agree 100% bro i hope Square ennix sees that if not they doomed

I wish it was that simple

@@OmegaKatanaXIII i think SE is their own worst enemy since they themselves are chasing the graphics trend like, men if we want realistic graphics, might as well make it a movie.

If the game comes out looking like ever crisis, will you pay 60 dollars for it?

Become as. Gods. Become as. Gods. Become as. Gods. Become as. Gods. Become as. Gods. Become as. Gods.

16's fail keeps haunting Square. 16 was just a disaster of a game

Beat me to it

@@vorpalinferno9711 you mean 15, right? That game was far from quality, and I’d wager that the experience of it turned many people off to even trying 16, or getting a PS5 for the FF exclusives.

​@@vorpalinferno9711Square has been failing since FF12. The moment they pushed Matsuno out, Square was done. The rest was inevitable. Matsuno was the last real talent they had.

No that isn’t what killed sales lol. You’re saying that if it wasn’t exclusive that they’d have made enough to complete with stuff like fortnite. Exclusivity does not make THAT massive of a difference. It would have made more money, but still nowhere near fortnite money.

because ur 2 dumb to understand that profits need to be bigger than costs

ffs this is gaming not a luxury brand just what the heck does all these CEOs does in a game industry anyway stop ruining the fun in the world with your profit cold blooded shittery like all those financial big conglomerate can just go poof and I would not care fuck them

When multiple more billions of dollars was spent on development and marketing, it's completely normal

multiple billions is a failure because ceos are not able to gift themselves as big of a bonus as they would want to for doing absolutely 0 work and sabotaging their own games with each and every moronic choice they make

it's a failure year if the CEO can't buy a new jet

It's funny because, accounting for inflation, that's roughly what rpgs cost to buy back in the 90s. If games start costing that now, I would only be able to buy like, one game a year. 😅

I would rather have quality games for a slightly higher price than devs bring down budgets. I want gaming to push forward and not with psyop methods like woke SBI agendas or a huge marketplace of addiction exploiting micro-transactions and pop culture references. I feel the recent inflation in all aspects of my life so I agree that increasing prices is not a good idea in general, but I am only ok with it if we are talking huge and complete games like FF7 Rebirth that doesn't drip feed DLC.

They're already around that where I am. I pretty much only buy 1 game a year... Rarely 2

@@lpstweetytv5242 not even I think Phantasy Star IV was actually $100 when it came out not even adjusted for inflation...

@digitalrex5 Yeah it was lol

Yep! All these rotten aaa companies will eventually be replaced (at least for us hardcore gamers) by studios of new or old talent of people that come together to serve their actual costumers and create what we want to consume. You can already see this with i.e. the new "old rocksteady" studio. I bet my ass their first game is gonna be bonkers.

16's fail keeps haunting Square. 16 was just a disaster of a game

Hell, marketing is overpaid as well. For example, I remember when FF14 Shadowbringers released, there was that commercial for the game with Tom Holland in it. It was a good commercial, but when I watched it, I was thinking 'man that must have been expensive to make and it won't even bring in many new players to warrant the cost.'

preach 👏

Eh. I get taking a knock at big corporate companies and executives who are loyal only to their stakeholders. Those stakeholders in turn are ultimately loyal to big banks that hold their money, and those banks are beholden to a central bank that inflates the money supply. It’s pretty croniest. Capitalism as just what is voluntary exchange still is a two way street. At the end of the day despite all of the effort put into controlling where the flow of generated wealth goes, the customer is still king. If someone doesn’t like the quality of product or service being put out, they’re not obligated to buy it. Hence crashes in industry. Corporations can hope to generate a following often by buying up IP’s left and right, but they don’t own customers. The mentality in assuming the latter is hubris, and I’m all for the smaller and AA companies out there taking over the market amidst the AAA crash. Crashes are really a reorganization of industry.

14.5% is the yearly return. With compound interests, it's multiplication by 1.145^5 so approx 1.97. 100 millions invested, expected return 197 millions.

​@@GerBessa As someone who is in the stock market... That 14% is if you buy at the low sell at the high... The stock market doesn't have compound interest by itself. You need to have money managers actively going in and out every few months to make real money. Just buying and holding nets you that 87% gain. It's not compounding

@@GerBessa Or you could just go, "What is the 5 year return of the S&P" to get the exact number.

You need to factor in compound interest

@@GoldChocobo77 When you take a 5 year sample you can't compound 5 years. There has only been 1 cycle.

Not really. There's plenty of success stories being experienced by Indy developers on Steam. Square Enix just makes games like a dinosaur, and FF hasn't been good for a long time.

@@captainthunderbolt7541 Oh! OK, I agree with your statement, and in my opinion I am a fan of the two Final Fantasy VII Remakes, and I the first game I bought on my PS5 console was the Final Fantasy VII Rebirth game for full price of $129.99, and I going to buy Final Fantasy XVI sometime this year.

I bought FF VII remake on Epic when it launched, I literally couldn't play it because of DRM, on Epic it requires constant internet connection or can't play a singleplayer game. Never agaim buying from there. Bought it on steam and zero issues playing offline.

Look at it like this, If you decide to be multiplatform on epic/steam. Lets say you sell 100k units on each store at 69 a pop (6.9 million). You only pay epic 828k vs steams (2.7 million). Epic also now has a feature where if you make it exclusive on epic for only six months you can forgo that 12 percent. So instead it becomes (0). This is why all the other big studios don't care if they release on steam later down the road because just a single sale is worth it.

@@markth078 Epic doesn't force it the always online connection, its set up by developer preference. Square did it with all their games on epic as a sort of drm.

Would you be willing to accept the price on EGS being like $60 and $100 on Steam then? I think people would complain.

@@WachpwnskiYou can't do it that anyway because of steams price parity rule. But if you could a lot of developers would do that. The price parity rule is anti-competitive in nature. It would be like hey this platform allows me to earn more so its cheaper here vs this store. So I would be okay with that.

I think part of it is the shareholders and investors demand constant growth or they’ll pull their investments, modest games with modest budgets may be less expensive but they won’t sell more.

@@jairekambui7738 And that's the big thing the CEO needs to emphasize when a company becomes big enough to not get that constant growth. Emphasize that the company is now more of a long-term investment company now so don't expect that constant growth. The CEOs don't want to do that because then they pretty much stop getting those big bonuses and such.

First and foremost they need to make good games and target an audience that exists and stop expecting the audience to just show up. Most of the failures are less the cost and simply making a bad game or one people couldn't even be bothered to care about. Too many pushing games as an art rather than as a game first too.

elden ring, a game that most people shouldn't even be playing since it's so hard, popped off, they literally just drop trailers with no warning and everyone flocks to watch them and why is that? because fromsoft's top priority was to make a great game. when u make a great game u don't need as much marketing spending since the quality speaks for itself and once u launch a couple of those, people trust u and will buy ur next game too. the other studios on the other hand make hot trash and throw in shops, nfts, soon ads and all that nonsense because they want to milk ur pocket instead of focusing on the game's quality. another problem is, what is actually the cost of the game? are the games really not profitable or are the ceos and execs not making as much money as they wished they would? in a normal world all those useless ceos and execs would not even exist to siphon the money from the hard working people making the games and have the audacity to complain about money on top.

And everyone will bitch about it. Like they do about all other lower budget games...

Their lower budget games really didn't do that great, so it's not really surprising they want to focus on the big sellers even if they have high costs in development.

or maybe cut costs on stupid marketing, implementing silly stuff that no one asks for, start making good games that people want to play and reduce ceo pays instead of firing the workers. just throwing some crazy ideas out there.

@@zero1343 Their lower budgets failed because of lack of marketing and the dumbass decision to release many of them close to each other. Diofield Chronicle, Valkyrie Elysium, Star Ocean: The Divine Force, and Harvestella all flopped due to ALL of them releasing within the same Sept-Nov period. That's THEIR fault.

🤦🏽‍♂️

Tired nostalgia cringe comment, drink🍺

No one wants a 12k Terra statue... Tell me you don't know the Fandom without telling me you don't know the fandom...

Square has pretty good merchandising, it's just not widely available. They should include marketing materials with the games (like with pack-in manuals) that have some shirts, figures, guides, art books, music, and key chains advertised inside.

@@RaifSeverence Who needs a Terra statue?

Yeah, I rarely buy a game at $70 as it is because the quality of AAA in general is still crap at launch and usually by the time it's fixed, the game is discounted. If the price of AAA went up to $100, I would never buy any game at launch again.

One fallacy I find with the way they determine the games success is they just seem focused on the game itself and not the IP as a whole. Like say ok, FF7 Rebirth made 3million sales and that part is no profitable however, what about the merchandise sales from that IP. The merchandise sales shoudl count towards the success of the IP because one can not exist without the other. You can't sell Merchandise of FF7 Rebirth, like say music or character if they don't exist and it's the fact that the game exist that that merch can be sold. So when it comes to the overall success of a game, I don't think a binary way of looking at it is accurate/as simple as X game sold Y so it failed, it should be X game sold Y units and Z merchandise for A amount of profits/losses. Then you can fully gauge the suggest the success of an IP but if they only want to focus on the game itself, that's a losing battle, the whole point of a game and subsequent Merchandise is to capitalize on the success of a series and have people want to support the product by buying other supplemental material.

i agree 70 dollars is reasonable however 100 for the base game would be crazy.

@@supersaiyaman11589 A lot of it is the overall economy and literally the cost of living. Many SNES games adjusted for inflation would cost well over $100 in today's dollars. But it was semi-affordable because everything else was cheaper, our parents could spend a larger percent of their income on entertainment.

I generally don't buy games until they've been held a year. They are cheaper at that point, they've been patched, and they have whatever extra content is going to be released usually. Why would I pay upfront for hype for an inferior game?

Old games are great, but it’s sad to see these companies and franchises struggling. Final Fantasy is the most popular, primer jrpg franchise. If FF is struggling you know the industry is in a bad state. FFXV likely sold more just on PS4 back in 2016-2018 than FFXVI and 7 Rebirth combined.

Same vein. One of my fav genres are the farming sims and my most anticipated game for this year falls in that genre and it was just announced for early access this August. The price- almost $15!! That's a steal and I have enough money in my Steam account to get it. The ONLY AAA games I am interested in are some of Nintendo's flagships and Kingdom Hearts 4 (but even I am worried how much that game will cost if Square keeps going on this track).

That's your tastes. Personally I play exclusively on PS5, and I love the ergonomics of it, particularely the PS5 controller. The only problem is the games I like don't come out enough. The likes of Elden Ring are just very rare.

Indy games are absolutely killing it right now! All the doom and gloom of console players sounds pretty ridiculous if you spend any time of Steam!

That doesn't say anything of value. Direct currency conversions aren't a good indicator of how much things cost in different countries due to multiple factors. For instance, those $70 in the US are before taxes, meaning American pay more than that, while prices in Europe always include taxes, no exceptions. But there's also purchasing power and cost of living. 90$ in the US doesn't have the same value as the equivalent of 90$ in the UK because of that.

@@XanderVJ ok

The issue is really just exclusivity. FF7 Remake sold more than 7 million, I guarantee it would have been 10+ if they just released it on Xbox, PS4 and PC day 1. Also didn't cheap out on the PC version for as far as I can tell no reason. The other thing is Rebirth isn't even that expensive of a game compared to its contemporaries, they made it in three years which is actually pretty quick nowadays.

Answer to 4 is Black Rock and Vanguard so you are behind.

​​@@SLAMTUCKER Astral Chain is such a great game but there it is locked on the Switch I think after breaking with Sony they will try to go your way, I was expecting FF XVI for PC and I need Team Ninja to follow the same path, I do not care about other companies, Capcom, Namco, Sega and the others are not producing anything of value, well, Capcom is at a times but they went back to censorship, cheapness and monetization.

@dontbothertoreply9755 Black Rock and Vanguard don’t address anything in point 4 but go off I guess 😂

Your first point is not an unrealistic expectation on the part of the investors who provide the budget to make the development of these games possible. The money to develop a game has to come from somewhere, and it sure as hell isn’t from the development team. The point is: why would investors dump money into developing a game when they could get more money by investing in the stock market instead?

i don't care about fortnite either but just cuz it's not the type of game that you prefer it doesn't mean that it's killing art, at least not cuz of its gameplay. one would argue that the most important part of a game is the gameplay, not the story and music, those are there to elevate the gameplay, not to be the gameplay. the true art of making a game would mean making great gameplay. a telltale game that has a good story and u just click one of 4 dialogues is barely considered a game imo, at that point one might as well just go watch a movie. ofc there are games that put everything together, like elden ring, with great story, visuals, music and gameplay which can be considered the peak of artistic expression in gaming but they wouldn't be that if the gameplay was lacking and wasn't at the forefront.

I am not opposed to this at all lol!

Yoshi-p stays winning. it cant be helped.

FF14 is the main money making game that SE have right now. And it is not a bad game also, one of the best in the main line series in terms of story. What SE needs us multi platform release like what Capcom is doing.

Enix is pretty stupid so I would he surprised. Yoshida has talked about them not getting more budget before despite doing so well

imo ff14 is doing too little way too late. they really should have gone all in on the ff mmo and released a brand new one without all the clunk of 14 and take ideas from other mmos to improve on their weak points instead of releasing the same old stuff with slightly improved graphics. many people quit already, some will obviously return for dawntrail and maybe initially u will also get some new players but imo ff14 doesn't have a bright future. i would say that this expac is kind of a make or break for them, with a good possibly of the game goin down the stinker if it's not at shadowbringer levels and if it doesn't have enough content throughout the patches. i might be wrong cuz ppl said that about wow all the time and wow bounced back but ff14 isn't wow and i'm not necessarily talking about quality but about the popularity wow had, the nostalgia effect, the fomo practices (which i don't really like) all of which and more make wow much harder to fail than ff14.

As a matter of fact, they started to see it during the N64 era. The GC era was when they saw their observations were actually true.

this is pure copium, endwalker had updates every 4 months but they were all a day to 1 week worth of gameplay. ff14 fumbled real bad. they had a big opportunity riding off shadowbringers which was great and also had a huge boost from wow refugees but with those gone and endwalker being as bad as it was i don't see a bright future for them. i might ofc be completely wrong and dawntrail goes and blows everyone's socks off but i will personally be very surprised

@@metalface_villain FF14 has been carrying SE LOOONG before Shadowbringers. A quick google search will show you their annual profits, that used to be in the negative (as in actual losses) during the FF13 age, and started to go up when ARR arrived. The only fumble was to make FF7 a trilogy and call part 1 a remake. Now THAT was a fumble. So, in summary, they either go the live service route (like their latest fumble, FF7 ever crisis), make games cheaper and faster having them run on ALL platforms, or close shop.

​@@metalface_villain sounds like you started in shadowbringers. endwalker during its (expected, and common) lull was more populated than every other expansion at its peak

I do hope when Nintendo's next console comes out they don't try to outdo themselves with making 'bigger games'. I think when making Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom, they were experimenting with the "Open world concept" and even though both games are sold A LOT (they're they best selling Zelda games for a reason), I worry with how much games cost now that if they keep trying to get 'bigger', they'll start losing their fanbase. Like I didn't get Tears of the Kingdom for 2 major reasons, the biggest was that price point. 2nd reason was because I wasn't a fan of BotW's gameplay and since gameplay will always be #1 in my book, I didn't want to spend a lot of money on a game I wasn't going to enjoy playing.

Yep this is the most important thing to happen next.

as a 20+ year long fan of both franchises, i get that on a personal level. the only thing that has me attached to star wars nowadays was tcw s7 and jfo/js. just like how the only thing that has me attached to ff nowadays is this trilogy in some ways. 16 was pretty good tho.

I really tried to get into the remake series, but unless you have a huge attachment to the og. It's just not very interesting 😅 I played the original last year for the first time, and I just don't care for the same game twice. FF7's time had passed, that's the reality of it

@@lpstweetytv5242 The Remake series is pretty damn different tho. It's not a 1:1 remake. And THAT is why its great

There’ll be more sales when they’re ported to pc, Xbox, and whatever Nintendo decides to call their next thing

@Davethawave1999 It's still the same game for the most part, the changes are a bit silly. It's not a draw for me

They should really be releasing more Final Fantasy games that are at a smaller scope and cheaper. It's wild how well they struck that balance in the PS1 days. Square Enix spent 7 years telling one story with FFXIII... that hurt them more than they'll ever realize.

@@deedoubsthey do release smaller FF games like stranger of paradise, Theatrhythm, World of Final Fantasy, etc. it’s just that nobody buys them

Most of the mainline final fantasy are at 5-10 million mark ironically.

I agree. Final Fantasy wants to be ambitious but it's borderline impossible to emulate those old experiences with high accuracy due to how expensive they would be to make. Final Fantasy prides itself on having stellar visuals and storytelling, but having both along with a solid gameplay system is in many cases financially unachievable. The structure of a JRPG is among the most expensive in game development because of the sheer amount of things that they have in them. It reminds me of the issue that 2D games had when they tried to transition to 3D back during the N64 era, where some of the stuff just didn't work in that transition due to ideas no longer being good ones or they became too difficult to replicate in 3D, and it seems that Final Fantasy is facing a similar crisis trying to figure out how to make a story-focused, globe-trotting adventure with AAA budget. Rebirth came the closest to this out of any game of its type, but at the cost of it being only one of 3 whole ass games. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that that isn't financially sustainable in the JRPG genre. Clearly, there are compromises that need to be made for Final Fantasy because the ambition of these games does not match the financial backing that SE is willing or able to put into them. Bringing back the older world map system instead of having a giant open world would do wonders to help with that, plus I quite liked seeing the characters moving from location to location over the span of a few minutes; there's something relaxing about it.

@@davidmuller6011 Stranger of Paradise, Theatrythm, and World of FF are all spinoffs with decidedly different gameplay from normal FF games. When I say they need to make smaller games, I mean they need to be making smaller actual FF games... sort of like how FF8 and FF9 were smaller games than FF7.

Game companies want to cut cost over making good games…in America that is

​@@ericwalker6477Nop. They want to cut costs because they spend too much money to make their games ultrarealistic.

@@ericwalker6477 Well, for one thing, if they want to cut costs in the US, they should move their operations out of California. It's obscenely expensive there compared to the rest of the US. Hell, you could move to north to the state of Washington, and you'll save a ton of money compared to California and that's not factoring in other states as well.

The exclusivity deal for FF16 and Rebirth were signed like well over a decade ago at this point by Matsuda who was squares previous CEO

now i'm not making this a pissing contest but i have 7 friends within our friend group who picked up a PS5 just to play FF16 and FF7Rebirth. I feel like this argument is no different than saying ''pirates hurt sales''. It cannot be a coincidence that its always SE crying about not meeting expectations while other exclusive games are getting massive profits despite being exclusives. When it works, it works. Surely multiplatfrom will earn them more but it will also cost them more to develop too which will also increase their development time overall since all versions have to be ready all at once. Most of the broken PC launches of today happen because the devs simply cannot work fast or good enough to make all the platform ready for launch so they target whatever platform sells the most which ends up hurting PC then gamers not only NOT buy the game but they also badmouth the devs(rightfully so ofc) so it even ends up as a lose-lose situation for devs. Hell FF7 remake had years to develop a PC port and it still launched terrible.

@@davidmuller6011i remember FF16 first trailer says that it was going to release to PC day one then Square said "nu uh we never said that" confusing.

They could sell more but it wouldn’t be that much difference financially in the short term as they will have an even longer time of development to optimize for every systems. FF16 wouldn’t have been released yet if they decided to release the game day one on all systems. The real issue for Square is that they have too many games that takes too long in development before release which eats up all the cost. Rebirth is 4 years after Remake and that is still considered quick. Another thing to note is that the FF franchise number was never really that big to begin with. The 3million sales number is actually quite in line with most games meaning majority of their fanbase, especially the early adopters are on the PS consoles.

@@EfecanYSL Years? FF7 Remake on PC dropped a year after launch.

Yep, CEOs and the corporate executives are getting paid obscene amounts of money that they really aren't worth.

Considering part 3 was probably in development before part 2’s release it’s basically guaranteed to happen, unless something major hits SE.

Ah yes. Get rid of the marketing team. That's a great way to get eyes on you newest game... $100 mil for marketing is chump change for AAA games. But that's the problem. AAA is too expensive to develop, then sell at $60 a pop. Case in point: compare the end credits runtime of God of War 3 vs the end credits run time of God of War (2018) GoW3: 8.5 mins. GoW('18): 33 minutes. If you think $60 is enough to cover the amount of money needed to A: pay all those people and B: be profitable at the same time as a sustainable business model, you are delusional. Edit: the key here is "sustainable business model". Look a studio like falcom. Their games cost $60 and general consensus amongst nonfans is "they need to update their graphics" or " why does it look like mobile game trash". And yet, I've yet to hear them saying their games haven't met sales expectations since 2008s Zwei 2. And they've been in game development longer than Square enix. And he'll, when Square Enix puts out a game that ISNT FF quality, they get the same comments regarding graphic quality.

@@RaifSeverence or we could be way less hyperbolic and recognize that if the marketing team can't do it at the price point that it's at that you could heavily downsize it and lean on a small group of professionals that utilize things like streamers to push your games as indie games are currently doing. But it's way less exciting when we're not making completely hyperbolic arguments isn't it? Let's ignore the fact that I'm throwing out a completely arbitrary number when I say a hundred mil because every game has a different budget for this sort of thing, It's not a fucking secret that these companies spend a large portion of the budget for the game on marketing. Now let's just ask a really basic question, when do I start getting diminishing returns when referencing the price I'm willing to pay for marketing? If you already have saturation because everybody knows your name, If the platforms are going to promote your product regardless of your investment into marketing, At what point are you just dumping money into content slop that's going to be back fed into ad blockers? But again we can't touch on any of this type of shit when you're trying to make entirely hyperbolic arguments...

To your point, Square IS mainly relying on established IP, so we already follow every development without watching legacy media or TV. I don't think Square needs to invest in a super bowl commercial or collaboration with Porsche to market 99% of their output. And I don't personally know anyone that watches legacy media so I don't have any firsthand experience with anyone swayed by the expensive marketing deals made by SE. They should just forward builds and do interviews with people like NSP and FFU.

30% fees are crazyyyyyy. EGS being 12% hopefully shifts the industry in the same direction. Reality is that games are expensive AF to make at a quality that pushes boundaries. AI is going to be the way to make these kinds of experiences cheaper, and let smaller teams make higher “quality” visuals… There is going to be a big shift over the next few years…

@@RaifSeverence you really can’t spend a large amount on a game and not spend a large amount in marketing. You would be doing your devs a disservice, sending their hard work and your money out to die without any fanfare.

If there truly is not much else they can't do, then they are screwed. Square Enix games, JRPGs as a whole, really, have never sold well in systems outside of Sony and Nintendo. Like... ever. No, really, do your research. At most, they scratch an extra million copies or so, which is way too low in the AAA bracket. Most likely Square Enix got the money they would have made out of a PC version from Sony as part of their exclusivity deal.

​@@XanderVJyeah unless they had a switch release the needle isn't really going to shift and it's clear why a switch release wasn't really an option for games like these. The pc release will obviously be coming later down the line like they usually do so they know the numbers on that

@@XanderVJ they did fine dude

Both games didn't met expectations they both bombed they spent too much on the game, they haven't broken even yet.

​@@playername9391 If I count on the conservative side FFVII Remake has made ~300 million dollars in profit considering the 7+ million sold copies... All estimates show that the game has cost about 150 million to make. So there's about a 2x profit. It's enough for a healthy private business to thrive, but not enough for venture capitalist that want to maximize their profits.

@@PixelShade and they use that profit to make other games including rebirth and 16, assuming both are around 300m and sold at 70, playstation takes 30%. Ff16 would make 147 million in total and FF7 r would be around 122.5m at total below 300m to recoup the budgets of both games, they haven't even broke even for the games, even if Sony paid for some of the dev cost, they still have an expected RoR to reach for each project. Stop boring talking points about capitalism or whatever. Square is a mess in terms of budget management and how they handled the final fantasy brand.

I understand having a deep attachment to something from your childhood, but it's probably not good to consume wantonly. Do you actually like every single game? I'm not trying to be mean, I'm genuinely curious.

@@lpstweetytv5242 like I said it’s not just my childhood lol I’ve been playing FF, star ocean, and Kingdom hearts games since forever, my earliest memory in life is when my cousin brought his Playstion over and had FF7, 8, and 9. It’s funny too cause he first put in FF9 and I legit just rebought FF9 a couple weeks ago and have been replaying it lol And I didn’t mean that I was going to buy every game lol I’m gona buy several that I wanna replay and I’m gona get a few that I haven’t played before like the first and second star ocean.

​@avnn.1851 Oh, I see lol, sometimes I get worried about people who seem to overconsume. It can be so detrimental, but I get you. I'm actually playing FF9 right now, I'm not very far tho :)

@@lpstweetytv5242 oh wow what a coincidence lmao idk what kind of player you are but I love to max out stats and grind levels and do every single side quest and junk but on FF9 if maxing out stats is something you’re interested in then don’t get too high leveled too quick. Wait til you get really good equipment. I’m gona get a little further so I can get a bunch of equipment that raises speed and strength. If you level up with equipment on that raises stats then you get those stats boosted every level permanently 😬 idk if it’s your first time playing it or if you’ve played it way back then but that’s just a little tip in case

@avnn.1851 It is my first time, so thanks for the tip! :) I like to explore and do sidequest, too, though I'm not one to grind too much. It might sound weird, but I like playing under level sometimes, it forces me to use better strategies lol Sometimes I do get caught up in the story tho and start only doing mainline XD

Tired and overused argument. Your kind literally consists of no more than a 100k max. Thats chump change for SE. But as always any negative press for these games is used by people like you to drone on about the same issue you havent moved on from since 2020. Its kind of like that dude NSP qoutes in the video that thought SE’s solution would be to pauze on FF and remake Parasite Eve and Chrono Trigger. Two niche IP almost no one beyond the hardcore fanbase knows about. And he actually believed this or wanted to use it as a vehicle to get his agenda across. No in reality its very easy for non-super fans to just look at OG FF7 as the first draft thats now used in the remake series for the definitive version. So it not being a literal 1:1 doesnt matter anymore. That only matters when you’re hyped focused and nostalgic about an old game from the 90s you’ve been overidealizing for two decades. It has already reached a point where audiences look at Remake/Rebirth and then compare to OG and start to point out all the flaws and improvements made. Entirely forgoing the game as canon as a result. I’m sure this is painfull to hear but this was bound to happen. ‘it not being the exact same as the old thing’ stops being a compelling argument the moment multiple improvements start to root themselves in the new thing.

Lmao clown they did not turn of a large amount of fans. You guys are just a very loud minority. Which is a fact. The main reason why they don't sell is simple final fantasy just isn't that popular of a brand.

@@mikev8746 From someone more outside the FF community his argument is not overused, it's underused actually compared to your corporate programming take. Even you yourself contradict your claim by saying they're in the minority player base wise. 100k x 70 7 Million in profits from one game isn't chump change even for a studio like Square, and that doesn't include the good faith to old fans that goes a long ways in free advertising from those die hard fans. Also worth mentioning Square making the games a trilogy means they can reuse many assets and get an additional 14 million from that same group. I'm not a Final Fantasy guy but if FF 7 is the first draft the paper must have been 24 karat gold cause Remake's core story changes are garbage. FF7 is not Lord of the Rings, but it's told fine for what it is, while the DIRECTION and character moments are better in Remake the story writing is dreadful. The whispers in particular are horribly handled and honestly the most disrespectful plot device I've seen in ANY media. It's sad to see the new blood posers pretend to be fans while shitting on the OG game. Defending these greedy mega corps who just wanna wring money "reimagining" (Advent Childen sequel fanficing) a classic. Just consume product, eat the g0ysl0p. I'll be the first to say FF7 from a gameplay perspective was not groundbreaking, but it's a technical marvel and the blending of science fiction dystopia with fantasy elements is cool. The remake trilogy on the other hand is just piggyback on Marvel multiverse garbage, Crisis Core/Advent Children, and Sephiroth being everywhere "cuz he da bad guy" without good pacing or reason for his appearances anymore. I write a lot so seeing this shit is painful ,especially when someone else's art is tarnished for this "remake". Like the gameplay of the remake all you like, it's a different game, and an inferior story.

@@seliph-qq8ew Why am I corporate programmed just because I like a game lol? What kind of argument is that. It's a good game dude. Look up the metacritic. And I'm not saying that number is chump change. But if the millions of sales these current games are getting don't move the needle. A 100k more won't do the trick. What is your argument even? > Also worth mentioning Square making the games a trilogy means they can reuse many assets and get an additional 14 million from that same group. Exactly, that's why companies alongside risk aversion like doing sequels. I don't get your point since you were trying to disagree with me and yet this is exactly what I've been saying. > I'm not a Final Fantasy guy but if FF 7 is the first draft the paper must have been 24 karat gold cause Remake's core story changes are garbage. You're not a FF fan and yet you think you're in a position to judge if the story changes are garbage? Also there are no core story changes. It's the same events playing out. They added meta narrative shit and expanded on everything. Completely different kind of story changes than it being the core that got changed. Shows how little you understand on the subject. Why even comment? > character moments are better in Remake the story writing is dreadful. The whispers in particular are horribly handled and honestly the most disrespectful plot device I've seen in ANY media Dreadfull is a big word. The actual dialogue writing is much better. The plot writing in certain moments is not as good as it could have been but it's also not bad. Calling it garbage just betrays you have some form of emotion tied to this even though you are supposedly 'not an FF fan' lmao. The whispers are not great but I do think that they were needed or their solution to achieve some goals for the remake project. I can live with them but most certainly without. However every game will have elements you don't like. I also don't like elements of FF7 OGs plot. It's just that remakes give mindless critics the excuse to just say something is bad because of it's absence in the original. > It's sad to see the new blood posers pretend to be fans while shitting on the OG game. Dude I played the OG when I was a kid back in FF7 multiple times in a 2 year span when I was obsessed with it. I followed the story and replayed it here and there throughout my life several times. I watched the movie. Played the PsP game. Piss off with your cheap suggestion that everyone that loves these games is a newbie and a corporate shill. > Defending these greedy mega corps who just wanna wring money "reimagining" (Advent Childen sequel fanficing) a classic. Just consume product, eat the g0ysl0p. Just running hard with any mantra and not having an actual filter in place where you're able to select things on a case by case basis is probably the most mid-IQ thing one could do. Everything is a mega corp money printing scheme to you is it now? There's no middle ground or grey area? Corporations can't be greedy while the creators are genuine? There's no nuance in your takes. Probably because you lack the cognitive ability to uphold personal values on a moment to moment, case by case basis. Being a footsoldier on either side is just sad. You never win out. > I'll be the first to say FF7 from a gameplay perspective was not groundbreaking, but it's a technical marvel and the blending of science fiction dystopia with fantasy elements is cool. Ah look so you are an FF7 fan. See there you go. Don't pretend otherwise buddy. You're the same as any of them. > The remake trilogy on the other hand is just piggyback on Marvel multiverse garbage Woah so you can see multiverse elements in Marvel movies and then distill some supposed 'multiverse' elements in FF7R and equate those things together and then just figure out both things are on the same level of quality. Even down to being the same in tone and style. Damn impressive man. I bet you rock at the google image captcha test 😂 > and Sephiroth being everywhere "cuz he da bad guy" He's also everywhere in the original but you're in the mid IQ mindset most npcs are where a good thing is good in all it's elements and a bad thing is bad in all it's elements so there's no point in discussing this shit with you. > I write a lot so seeing this shit is painful Clearly not at a high level of quality though else you wouldn't be arguing with random people on a youtube channel and instead you would be working on your own LotR fantasy book or FF7 OG masterpiece. > especially when someone else's art is tarnished for this "remake". What do you mean someone else's art lol. The original devs all have leading roles on this project. What are you spacing out on? And tarnished is a big word. The reality is the original FF7 is a nice polygon game for the 90s PSX times. It was made in 1 year and has lots of flaws in execution, writing and presentation. The remakes improve on allot of these things while in turn coming up short with some other things. That's how things go you know? > Like the gameplay of the remake all you like, it's a different game, and an inferior story. It's literally a different game yeah. Or what did you mean? That it's not FF7? Truth is I think it solidifies FF7 OG as a rough draft. It's failings in certain story elements and gameplay sections are just a side effect of trying to remake something. You wont convince me that a game that was made three decades ago by more inexperienced devs with 6 months system development time and 6 months of production time did such an immaculate job of it that the thing could not be improved upon. Nah man, you're coping hard here. The remakes have bad elements and great elements. It's still FF7 and actually fleshes a ton of things out. The classic will always be there if you want to see how things began. If you can't deal with that please try and work through it by yourself or with a shrink. But stop trying to attack people online for what they like and calling them corporate shills. It's pathetic. Only because you can't mentally disassociate.

@@mikev8746 "It's literally a different game yeah. Or what did you mean? That it's not FF7?" Yes, This is the core problem I have with this game. You yourself admitted to me that it's straight up a different game. If you wanna like it as it's own thing then alright, but you claim the OG is a rough draft, its not they are separate stories and games. FF7 Remake is borderline a sequel to the Original and AC. Completely different gameplay, and the story is more of a new timeline/sequel than a direct retelling. Improvements to character writing do not make up for the horrible plot changes. Whispers are a new edition that are inconsistently utilized and unnecessary. Here's why Zack Fair didn't need to be brought back the way he was, he undermines/cheapens our actual main characters. characters returning from and avoiding death is already cheap and being from a different universe is a case of "Who gives a shit about it?" Zack's point in a writing sense is to flesh out Cloud's backstory and provide a glimpse of a mentor figure. He wasn't utilized well enough to really justify spending more time with the characters especially when we have Cloud and the rest of the cast already. The gameplay being different is not bad, but when the gameplay is different and the story is heavily changed, yes, they are different games entirely utilizing the same world/concept. Compare FF7 remake to something like Resident Evil 1 Remake, which is a prime example of a game that is a straight remake. Plot is unchanged though there is some story expansion and MUCH better execution, gameplay is faithful while mechanically improved and has room layout changes for the returning players. That's the problem with something like FF7 Remake, it changes so much it's just a new game. There's a difference between iterating on a rough draft, and making a new story with returning characters/concepts.

That game was supported by a loyal fanbase and carried by its name. There was no quality to support it's succes. And on any onther platform or as a 3rd party game it would have failed. Hard.

Yea, Lisense fees were 9 digits. They got a % of total sales.

absolute shite game

@@Tuningforks85 a game for everyone is a game for noone. You just weren't the target audience

I mean Spiderman 2 is still a bug riddled mess I tried it again 2 days ago, fell through the floor again

Except that game cost $45 dollars in the United States. Most people weren’t paying that.

It was not uncommon to see "killer app" SNES games like Super Mario RPG selling for 70 to 80 bucks, and at N64's launch you could not get SM64 or Pilotwings 64 for less than that. But when it became obvious that the PS1 wasn't going away, that forced the prices down to this day.

@@nansi113 It was selling for $80 in mid-sized U.S. cities on release. And Sega Genesis RPGs going back to Phantasy Star II were similarly priced. Shining Force II was $80. Phantasy Star IV was $100 in the same fiscal year as Chrono Trigger.

Sounds like a skill issue. This game is made for elite players and it is selling amazingly well because of it. Nobody cares if casuals like you don't buy it. Square doesn't need your money. Bye.

You're ignoring the real reason sales are low. The lack of a PC release.

@@drexasaurus3788 Oh, I'll give you that, it would sell decently on Steam, but that is because the PC format removes a lot of the frustrating content, because PC players just cheat at the parts of games that they don't like. That doesn't mean there isn't a content issue, and the missed opportunities in the game and missing basic features like enemy spawning being random and a missing night and day cycle still hurt the game.

The most braindead comment I ever read no wonder no one is taking criticism seriously lmao clown.

Literally cope lmao 95% who played it loved it literally get good.

Oh there are, we got Shift up with Stellar Blade and despite the recent Problems we got Arrowhead, and you can't forget about Hello Games.

These companies are doing price gouging really to keep the stock investors happy. A lot of them are at the stage where they won't be making good profits on a regular basis so they either cut their budgets drastically and/or raise their prices.

But it ended up being what people loved FF7 was not the problem

Ff7 and 16 is not the problem. It's the past titles that failed. Babylons fall, avangers, forspoken. All made by their western division. Stop this false narrative that FF7 killed SE. The truth is, FF7 and 16 is not enough.

Im having a hard time to understand how anyone could rate rebirth Higher than 7/10. Sure the grafics are insane but gameplay wise? Its frustrating. Ive never played a jrpg that has had worse design than rebirth. But you do you.

​@@Pyck3the gameplay was a lot of fun.

@@kevinthunder3375 dont get me wrong when i say this. I did enjoy rebirth but i had to play on easy mode the entire time. However when it came to beating the more difficult challenges it just fell apart.

​@@kevinthunder3375not for some of us (excessive minigames, some of them bad, cheap bosses in some cases, delta between hard and easy modes is huge, etc). Loved Remake as hell, in comparison.

What can they do to change this

Elden Ring: on multiple platforms FF7R2 ( &FF16 for good measure): PS5 exclusive.

That god awful timeline and multiple realities bs from rebirth is not their best. I'd take generic ff16 over that any day

​@@RaifSeverenceunless they were also going to release it on the switch I don't think the sales would dramatically shift. In all the other recent multiplatform FF releases over 80% of the sales have been on playstation. With pc being the 2nd biggest, which they always release later down the line anyway.

​@@samoth5161 I agree that the fact that FF7 ReTrilogy has the multiverse in its story doesn't help. If remember they said that FF7 Remake would be newcommer friendly, this isn't the case. Plus, it's hard to keep up with a trilogy of remakes. I liked FF16, so if CS3 improves on all the mediocre aspects of FF16 with a new IP, I'll gladly take it. I'd like them to make another mainline FF but I think FF fans like the game design of FF7 ReTrilogy more and tbh i understand why, I mean Yoshi-P has said he'd like to direct a solo mainline FF, so there's always a chance.

Source: Trust me bro

for point one, I'm with this one. a friend bought me part one as a birthday gift, but I refuse to buy part two because I am morally opposed to spending $210+ to get a complete story. I get dividing the game up was probably the best thing they could do for development to break up the workload and get some money flowing back into the team... but the first game was padded to hell, and I honestly just don't really trust the second game to not have the same problem. for point three, this is why we need to insist on physical media. they might not get discounted buying them digitally, but also the developer has little incentive to do so whereas with physical copies not only can you sell the used copy to put toward your next game purchase, but someone else can also buy a discounted copy of that game. point four, you have to remember when you bring up mobile, every time they rerelease the games like that, it also involves new development costs. sure it's probably not as extreme as when they games were initially developed, but its not as though porting games to new platforms or to mobile comes without development costs. for point five.... this shows you don't understand how marketing works, and I say this as someone who works in marketing. you can say you don't like how square does its marketing, and that's fair, but look at some of their AA games. You cut the marketing budget and almost every time, you also cut profits and sales. marketing teams are not immune to cuts and layoffs and the like to save companies money, but if doing the marketing wasn't effective, they wouldn't be doing it at all.

@anthonydelfino6171 for your second point, companies consider reselling of games as theft, the same as pirating a game. This is because they receive 0$ for a game that is re sold. As such eventually physical copies will no longer exist, and this is already happening. Most pcs don't come with a cd drive, consoles are being sold without a disc drive, and eventually they wont even give you an option, forcing you to only be able to buy games digitally. This is also why theres been a push towards giving out games for free on day 1, as long as you buy a subscription to x service. As for your final point, just because you work in marketing, doesn't mean you actually know what u r talking about. For 1, this game required 0 marketing at all. It literally will sell by word of mouth alone. Have you heard of Dark Souls, it had no marketing for it, and it sold only on word of mouth, and look what has happened because of it. FF7 has been the most anticipated remake for over 2 decades. All the copies part 1 sold was already predetermined sales the day it was announced. All this marketing they did isn't pulling new sales from new players who never played the original. Streamers is whats did that, which is free marketing. You think elden ring needs to do any marketing for its dlc. No. Literally everyone who played elden ring and liked it is buying the dlc day 1. Its a waste of money to over market it, which they have not. FF7 however has so many announcements, so many trailers, and spoils so much of the games for no reason. Theres not a single game in history that sold more copies because of over spending on marketing. You know what sells games more than marketing, blanket lies during the 1st announcement, and interviews. We saw this with Fallout 76, with Overwatch 2, with No Mans Sky, and countless other games. If you want to sell a game, all you need to do is lie.

Nahh, i hope they do.

@@Rithysak101 Honestly yeah I agree. I wouldn't be mad if Remake trilogy was the last time that FF had blockbuster visuals. A return to form where the games had less emphasis on the visual detail in order to put more focus on the story and gameplay would make the series much better in my eyes. FF games were widely regarded as amazing back on the PS1, but it certainly wasn't due to the visuals. They left the visual wow factor to the occasional pre-rendered cinematics during pivotal story moments, but now every single cutscene in these modern FF games is basically on par with those and that is *very* expensive to do.

Why?

@@tbnwontpop8857 FF7 was literally the first AAA game, ever... One of the the most defining characteristic that defines the ps1 FF games was being a huge blockbuster production. The only difference is that back in the day they didnt have much competition, but today there are many AAA games, some are far bigger then FF that didnt see much growth Since the 90's when squaresoft was arguably the best developer in the world.

​​​@@Adamantaimaiwell it can't be that anymore, that's the point. It has to do something else. The 90's were 30 whole years ago. And that makes me sad. This day was many years coming, I can't believe it's actually here now.