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Square Enix share price drops amid claims Final Fantasy 16 didn’t meet ‘high end’ expectations
(www.videogameschronicle.com)
this post was submitted on 07 Aug 2023
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According to Squeenix, what was the last game that actually managed to "meet expectations" according to them?
Nothing. I remember Tomb Raider sold like 7 mil and they were crying about it
And of course made the genius decision the next year to make the sequel Xbox exclusive for a year
That Tomb Raider thing was completely asinine. It was a quality reboot of a series that had gone horribly off the rails with a lot of promise and Square tanked it with completely unreasonable expectations, apparently expecting sales in the dozens of millions. And here we are with FF apparently not meeting expectations as well--it's easy to see where the issue is, and it's not with the games.
Off the top of my head, NieR: Automata was the last big one. Before that was the first Life is Strange.
There's also Octopath Traveler, which is perhaps relevant here because that was a game that filled a need on a hot platform. Taking relative install bases into account, FF16 probably had a better attach rate than FF15 did at this point in its lifecycle. I'm sure SQEX was hoping for a much higher rate than that given the slow pace of exclusives developed solely for PS5.
I'm also going to speculate that, internally, there's alarm over the Japan sales. SQEX is part of a group of Japanese publishers that have historically been very--if not unduly--sensitive to poor home performance.