this post was submitted on 18 Sep 2024
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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.
Bad expectations and probably a lack of understanding of how launching expensive games as platform exclusives can hurt sales numbers. They were likely expecting the kind of numbers a game can only get from launching on the big 3.
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).
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.
That should be true for any company's projects though. That's just saying that the net present value needs to be positive. There's no way most of their projects have been negative NPV.