This article is based on this Twitter thread by Jacob Navok, a former Square Enix Exec. It identifies and analyses many of the issues plaguing the gaming industry today (e.g. bloated budgets,...
Exemplary
This article is based on this Twitter thread by Jacob Navok, a former Square Enix Exec.
It identifies and analyses many of the issues plaguing the gaming industry today (e.g. bloated budgets, live-service, Triple-A, sustainability of the industry, etc.). See below:
Avoiding Twitter? Click Here. Part I
A thread on the recent Square Enix news regarding FF sales numbers and expectations
• As a reminder I reported to two CEOs of Square Enix for the better part of a decade and ran a subsidiary. I also correctly predicted last year that Square Enix was going to break exclusivity. I'll note I have no confidential information that I'm basing my arguments on.
• To start, we need to look at decisions made on the titles under development within the lens of 2015-2022, not the lens of 2023. For example, FF16 would have started pre-production prior to the release of FF15, which was released in 2016.
• This is a pre-Fortnite era. Budgets for FF7 Remake and into Rebirth would have been around this period too. This is important to note and we will get back to it.
• There's a misunderstanding that has been repeated for nearly a decade and a half that Square Enix sets arbitrarily high sales requirements then gets upset when its arbitrarily high sales requirements fail to be met.
• This was not true when I was there and is unlikely to be true today.
• If a game costs $100m to make, and takes 5 years, then you have to beat, as an example, what the business could have returned investing $100m into the stock market over that period.
• For the 5 years prior to Feb 2024, the stock market averaged a rate of return of 14.5%. Investing that $100m in the stock market would net you a return of $201m, so this is our ROI baseline.
• Can the game net a return higher than this after marketing, platform fees, and discounts are factored in?
• This is actually a very hard equation though it seems simple; the $70 that the consumer pays only returns $49 after 30% platform fees, and the platforms will generally get a recoup on any funds spent on exclusivity meaning until they are paid back, they will keep that cash. Plus, discounts start almost immediately.
• Assume marketing expenses at $50m, and assume that you're not going to get $49 but rather an average closer to $40 given discounts, returns and other aspects. Now let's say in that first month you sold 3m copies with $40 net received (we will ignore the recoup). You need to surpass $254m to make expectations. (That's $100m + $101m in ROI baseline + $50m in marketing).
• From the statements made, it will take FF16 eighteen months to hit expected sales. (I used the stock market as an example but actual ROI should be higher than stock market averages).
• The sales figures required aren't wild expectations; the number of copies sold were too low. And my numbers are actually much lower than realities (game dev costs are probably 2x as high, and marketing is also likely 2x as high, and this makes ROI requirements higher too).
• But that's not even the core of the problem, this is just me proving that expectations aren't set immodestly.
• The core of the problem is that the budgets were set in a period where the expectation was that audiences would grow.
• Total audience growth was a reasonable expectation in the 2015-2022 era and still is today. Not only had the industry grown significantly each year, but each day that new generations were coming of age, they were coming of age as gamers. Meaning that your total addressable population should be increasing and you should be increasing your revenue.
• What's happened? Not just to Square Enix, but to the industry as a whole?Audience behavioral patterns are radically different than expected in 2015. Remember, I said 2015 was pre-Fortnite.
• The way it used to work was that you'd pick your release date similar to a Hollywood movie, stick to it, and consider the competition to be the titles releasing the weeks before and after.
• We would look at a Hitman or a Deus Ex release and consider whether there was a Call of Duty or Assassin's Creed coming out around that time, assuming that gamers had X amount of money to spend and Y amount of time, and that if we wanted to get the full sticker price (remember, discounts eat into cash received and also at that time, used disc sales were $0 cash received) we needed to get as many sales in the first two weeks as possible.
• At that time, as a gamer, once you finished the most recent game you were on, you moved onto the next. You were looking for your next title once you finished the prior one. We wanted one of our titles to be the next title you bought to fill your gamer needs.
• This world radically changed in the last 6 years.
(cont'd)
Part II
• Earlier this month Kotaku had an article called "9 Great Games We Can't Stop Thinking About." There's a surprise 10th slide, and that is Fortnite.
• @ZwiezenZ writes in the article: "And once again, another weekend arrives and I realize that I'll be spending most of it playing Fortnite. I'm very close to maxing out both my battle pass and Festival pass, so that's the plan.
• I hate how deep Fortnite has its hooks in me — to the point where I'm choosing to play it over brand-new, cool-looking video games — but I can't help it. I must finish these damn passes, get all the rewards, and earn the right to play other stuff. Well, until the next season starts up and I once again return to Fortnite to drop in and level up all over again. It's sick. I hate myself. I can't wait to play more this weekend." Kotaku's Weekend Guide: 9 incredible games we can’t stop thinking about
• This is indeed the point. Square Enix are not competing against just the latest new installments, they are competing against every F2P online game that is constantly adding content and getting more robust over time.
• The assumption was that people would jump between products when they finished one. But, as you know, F2P games like Fortnite or Warzone are evergreen, they never get old. They are always updating with new content and experiences. They can continue for decades. Candy Crush has had its best years ever the last few years. And companies like Epic can continue to invest back into the products to make them better, creating even higher barriers to entry for competitors. Reuters: Candy Crush Saga hits $20 billion revenue milestone, maker King says
• The game industry is still growing in revenue but that revenue is increasingly captured by fewer live services games that are generating a level of stickiness seen in social media companies. There are reasons there are very few competitors to Facebook. Once the network effect starts, it can keep going for a long time. Since Instagram (also FB), the only real competitor in an entire decade that showed up and could quickly reach 1bn+ people was TikTok. And this is in a trillion dollar valued industry.
• I expect Fortnite, Roblox, Warzone, and similar products to continue to grow revenue. Meanwhile, put yourself in an older gamer's shoes: if you're a gamer with disposable income but less free time, and you have the choice of paying $70 to play 100 hours in FF16 or to just continue playing Fortnite with your friends for free, you'll wait to see the FF16 reviews before you decide whether to switch off FN.
• In other words, your switching costs (how good a game is, how exciting it needs to be) are now substantially higher than when you'd finish the latest Assassin's Creed and look for the next title to fill your time, because you’re awash with content options. Fortnite doesn't end.
• This is the reason we see trends where games are either spectacular 10/10 successes, or disasters, with little in between; there is no "next hit" being searched for in many cases. And this polarization makes risks higher, and costs higher too (we will get to this in a moment.)
• Now if you're a younger gamer in your teens, you may not even be thinking about FF. If you are 13 years old now, you were 5 years old when the last mainline FF, FF15, came out.
• Your family may not own a PS5 and you may not care. You're satisfied with Fortnite or Roblox or Minecraft with your friends on your phone or laptop. I'm not say that this is the case for everyone. But it is certainly a trend.
• The old AAA franchises do not seem to be converting the younger generations that the industry was counting on for growth, and instead F2P social games on mobile are where they spend their time.
• This is the reason every publisher chased live service titles; audiences clearly gravitated toward them, and profits followed in success. (It is surprising that Square Enix, which had successful F2P live service mobile titles in Japan, left the AAA live-service attempts to Eidos rather than try to build those products in Japan, but dissecting this problem would likely require an entirely different thread.)
• Regardless, the Fortnite-ization of the industry was not entirely predictable in 2015 when budgets were being planned. Even after FN came out and well into the Covid period, it felt like industry growth was pulling all ships forward, not just a handful. But that isn't what happened.
(cont'd)
Part III
• Now we have to get to the cost of development. Asset generation, motion capture, textures, animation, engineering, infrastructure are incredibly expensive. Making games costs a lot of money. The recent layoff wave is generally a consolidation toward a new expected sales average in the [fewer] number of titles being produced, not the cost of an individual title, which is going to continue to increase. (Spider-Man 2 cost $380m! )
• Development costs have gone up, and switching costs of the consumer has gone up, and as a result companies have to invest even more because it has to be a 10/10 or gamers will stick to Fortnite. (I don't literally mean FN, but similar types of products.)
• There are three levers you can pull to make the equation work for return on investment at a game company. You can decrease costs, increase price, or increase audience size. As noted, any non-service game is having trouble increasing audience size. Meanwhile, on the cost side, inflation is up, salaries are up, and consumers require sophisticated, beautiful products to get them to fork over cash rather than keep playing F2P titles.
• It is true that there are many smaller games or less beautiful games that generate audiences and are profitable. But something like Balatro is not a good example to point to. It's made by one person. AAA games can take hundreds, thousands of people to make. A single person making $2-3m in sales is life changing, a hundred people trying to split that is not enough money. And products like Balatro are lightning in a bottle, you can't generally capture that twice, and there are hundreds of thousands of competing products on Steam or App Stores that fail for every Balatro.
• This leaves only price left as a lever to pull. Since the price of games hasn't substantially increased, relative to inflation, package disc games have gotten cheaper over the last two decades. The assumption was that this was okay because the audience size would grow instead of price. But the audience went to the platform titles.
• Prices for packaged disc games will go up. Game companies have no choice, it is the only lever left. Just look at Kotaku's article about GTA6’s price point from this week: Kotaku: GTA 6 could be the first game to push past $70
• You're also seeing this trend with Ubisoft's Star Wars game
• It's not because game companies are penny pinchers looking to fleece their users. It's because this is the only path left to make non-F2P service titles workable in the AAA space given cost and competition.
• Something has to give; if SQEX can’t get its cost of dev down (it will go further up) and is getting good reviews but isn’t increasing audience, they and the rest of the publishers are going to have to increase price point. Otherwise live service titles will be all we have left. reddit.com/r/pcgaming/.../star_wars_outlaws_$110_and_$130_editions_prompt_a/
• There's another path that I can think of, which is increasing the take rate. If publishers can capture more of the platform side revenue, they can moderate price point increases while capturing a better return on investment because they'll be capturing say $50 or $55 out of $70.
• @TimSweeneyEpic knows this which is why he's fighting the good fight on platform fees, both at EGS and with the app stores, to open up PC and mobile ecosystems.
• This is also why you'll see MS and others take advantage of his fight and start their own app stores. (You would think MS would chip in for Epic's legal fees given they're capturing the benefits with no risk!)
• But this path will take time, and is very hard on consoles, where the AAA publishers make a lot of their money, so expect price increases to still be the norm. ReadWrite: Microsoft readies launch of its own mobile app store — Microsoft announced that they will be launching a new mobile games and app store to compete with Apple and Google Play.
Ugh. Just, ugh. I have basically given up on modern AAA games. They spend an absolute fortune on experiences that are so polished that they cease to be interesting. As someone who has a long...
Ugh.
Just, ugh.
I have basically given up on modern AAA games. They spend an absolute fortune on experiences that are so polished that they cease to be interesting. As someone who has a long history enjoying Final Fantasy games, FFXVI and the VII remake games are painful for me to experience; they feel like they are trying to play the game for me. But the thing that really disappoints me from reading this is that the reason why AAA games are looking like this is is competition from the so-called live service games, which I hate. They are extremely repetitive, twitchy, and chaotic. And frankly I do not have time to be addicted to games like that; the reason why I let myself get addicted to other games is specifically because there is an implied promise of an ending where I can get on with my life.
The AAA games industry is dead. There is no way they will come back. Keep your eyes on the small guys, people; that’s where creativity will come from.
Yeah, Navok's stand that "Otherwise live service titles will be all we have left" suggests he's looking at the ultimate demise of AAA gaming simply because the traditional formula for making games...
Yeah, Navok's stand that "Otherwise live service titles will be all we have left" suggests he's looking at the ultimate demise of AAA gaming simply because the traditional formula for making games has gotten complex and only certain variables matter to the accountants and executives anymore, because those variables maximize ROI. That's a really distressing way to view creating entertainment and I think you're right to point to indie games as examples of quality, worthwhile entertainment and adhering to a development and marketing formula that is substantially different from what AAA studios want to work with.
It's kind of crazy to me that an indie Metroidvania called Hollow Knight might have 15 million copies sold (at $15 or less), while a main-line FF title might be "struggling" to meet corporate's expectations. Hollow Knight had marketing in the form of a lengthy Kickstarter and that was pretty much it. The rest has been word of mouth/internet culture/YouTubers at essentially no cost to the developers. Their work stands on its own merits and the game doesn't have any live services. All the DLC added real content and were Kickstarter stretch goals, but otherwise released the content as free updates.
I know that live services as the gold-standard for raking in money, but it sounds like Navok is making the case that if you don't do live services right, if you don't have that addictive gameplay loop and spending hook for your game, then you need to do something else to get those sales. Navok suggests raising prices to deal with falling sales numbers. But maybe that something else is called "quality?" And appealing to the people looking for entertainment and not a second job grinding season passes? There are multiple sectors to the gaming pie and SE could sell to the "single-player" or "non-live services" sector and still make a profit.
And people will never see the costs it took to get to that point, which was ultimately a huge gamble. Remember that the Cuphead devs took a second Mortgage on their house to fund the game. It...
Their work stands on its own merits and the game doesn't have any live services. All the DLC added real content and were Kickstarter stretch goals, but otherwise released the content as free updates.
And people will never see the costs it took to get to that point, which was ultimately a huge gamble. Remember that the Cuphead devs took a second Mortgage on their house to fund the game. It failed and they may have literally been on the streets. No amount of quality guarantees 1 millions sales at launch, not for a 3 person dev team with a grassroots marketing "budget". Let alone an evergreen title that continues to sell 8 years later. You need all the stars to align for that to happen.
The industry is rickety as all hell, but at least I'm being paid regardless of the success of the game. I eventually want to save up money just so I can afford to one day do a full time sprint to the finish line for my own work. But just living (and living without an income) is expensive these days.
There are multiple sectors to the gaming pie and SE could sell to the "single-player" or "non-live services" sector and still make a profit.
if you want a quick breakdown, I left a comment (it's at the bottom) measuring such a scenario. It still isn't cheap.
You make plenty of fair points, but I think you're conflating apples and oranges. The team size behind a product like Hollow Knight or Hades is miniscule compared to the hundreds employed by...
You make plenty of fair points, but I think you're conflating apples and oranges. The team size behind a product like Hollow Knight or Hades is miniscule compared to the hundreds employed by Square Enix. If Square wanted to release a cheaper indie style game, they would have significantly fewer devs involved. This would mean mass layoffs.
The assumption was big team ⟩ big product ⟩ big sales. Now that's borked, and the industry is in a pinch.
I fully understand that team sizes are different and so are expectations. But publishers and those with large in-house development teams don't need to scale-down in order to produce games with the...
I fully understand that team sizes are different and so are expectations. But publishers and those with large in-house development teams don't need to scale-down in order to produce games with the scope or reach of an indie title. They don't need to do that to produce good games either, so I'm not sure what disconnect you're pointing to with my understanding. I did write some of the above originally as part of my other post (a reply to the main OP), but saw that it fit better with the direction Akir was going (I actually waited to see if they posted first since we're sometimes on the same page).
The assumption was big team ⟩ big product ⟩ big sales.
I addressed this in my other post as well. Navok outlines that that's not actually how SE viewed it. They compared their sales performance to market investment performance on top of all that. Chasing "what if" profits pegged to what the stock market actually did is foolhardy when they're in entertainment and not the financial industry.
If SE execs were as hard on themselves as they are on their employees, they'd have fired themselves for having that absurd fixation a long time ago. Ultimately, SE has a management problem. They haven't been properly understanding their Total Addressable Market. They haven't been trying to communicate with their customers in effective (and modern) ways. They've allowed producers and executives to draw out development times on games which have run up the budgets on them, with less to show for it (I pre-ordered FF15 and Versus XIII on PS3). They've invested in technologies that haven't come to market in a timely manner and have the same financial issues (Luminous Engine?). It's not the fault of the developers, or the size of dev teams, or even the fault of community managers, that any of these things happened. There's a management culture that just isn't living up to their own expectations.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding you then. I just can't see how a large team of 50-100 working on an "indie" project that sells for indie prices could possibly be profitable. The numbers just don't work...
But publishers and those with large in-house development teams don't need to scale-down in order to produce games with the scope or reach of an indie title.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding you then. I just can't see how a large team of 50-100 working on an "indie" project that sells for indie prices could possibly be profitable. The numbers just don't work out. Square actually has tried doing the strategy of many smaller teams working on smaller projects. Thing is the vast majority of the small projects don't pan out. u/raze2012's comment here lays out the math better.
They compared their sales performance to market investment performance on top of all that. Chasing "what if" profits pegged to what the stock market actually did is foolhardy when they're in entertainment and not the financial industry.
Not necessarily. If I'm an investor, why would I bother with a company that always underperforms the market? I agree comparing to the market's actual performance is foolish, but it's reasonable to expect a company in a growing market to grow. Gaming is huge and still growing, Square isn't. Mobile gaming is an increasingly huge share of the market.
Well it seems like we're far apart on our views on this. But I'll tackle one of your concerns. There are a lot more indie studios out there than you might think. And I feel like there must be a...
Well it seems like we're far apart on our views on this. But I'll tackle one of your concerns.
I just can't see how a large team of 50-100 working on an "indie" project that sells for indie prices could possibly be profitable.
There are a lot more indie studios out there than you might think. And I feel like there must be a ton of examples in the size you've specified, though I can only come up with a few that are still indie and make for good comparison (i.e. having more than one game under their belt at the moment, or have attracted venture capital because of their success), but I don't have their financials in hand so I don't know if employees are making industry-standard (or comparable to SE). I don't know what their marketing spend is. I don't know what their turnover rate is (I expect it's a lot lower than SE).
The last time I did a head-count Petroglyph Games had around 50 employees total and real office space. Their games sell for around $20 at launch and get discounted from there. They've been chugging along for decades.
Stunlock Studios, makers of V Rising, have 40 employees. Add a few more people working for the publisher to get it published and you're in the 50-100 ball park. And the studio has been around since 2010, they're not a one-hit wonder.
Splitgate devs 1047 Games have ~50 devs, maybe more? Only one game though? But they have gotten to a point where venture capital is privately invested in them.
Shiro Games, makers of Dune: Spice Wars and Northgard among others, have 70+ devs.
I expect a lot of the devs partnered with THQ Nordic have team sizes of 40 or so, but also rely on contractors or actors. That is true of Ashborne Games (makers of the excellent Last Train Home that had actors for FVM scenes) and probably other studios like Black Sea Interactive. So there might be a sweet spot for these studios, but it does often take a few more people to actually get the game published, so I think it's fair to round these up to that 50-100 figure you were after.
But the key thing that successful studios do is they stick to a reasonable budget and ship a decent product. I'm sure you can think of a lot of indie studios that didn't do either of those things, and undoubtedly had a lot of project management headaches along the way (or were just a straight up cash-grab on Greenlight/Early Access), but there are a lot of studios out there that are successful and aren't one-hit wonders from 3 guys in a garage.
This is my take on the new ones as well. I've always described it as it's trying to be too cinematic. It's like it wants to be a movie and it's frustrating as hell. It has so many great aspects to...
As someone who has a long history enjoying Final Fantasy games, FFXVI and the VII remake games are painful for me to experience; they feel like they are trying to play the game for me.
This is my take on the new ones as well. I've always described it as it's trying to be too cinematic. It's like it wants to be a movie and it's frustrating as hell. It has so many great aspects to it, but one of my biggest pet peeves in video games is constantly taking control away from the player and constantly forcefully moving the camera.
Nice, I was going to post this, but I was beat. And honestly this format far exceeded how I was going to prepare an opening statement. Kudos! I think if nothing else, this should be the big TL;DR...
Nice, I was going to post this, but I was beat. And honestly this format far exceeded how I was going to prepare an opening statement. Kudos!
The core of the problem is that the budgets were set in a period where the expectation was that audiences would grow.
I think if nothing else, this should be the big TL;DR people take out of this. And the biggest consequence on why these long development times are truly unstable. Imagine needing to plan out from 2015 how your 2022 release needs to sell. A time where (with hindsight)
a whole new format of gaming took over,
we experience a global pandemic
the Japanese Yen, for the first time in 30 years, is subject to inflation
most economies are either in official recession or threading the needle
you make a game targeting a single platform that barely has specs to target... all while the true most popular platform is ignored (remember, 2015, is before the Switch is announced. In a time where the Wii U is flopping harder than any console before it)
you target an aging 20's-30's audience while also being welcoming to new teens/young adults.
and many other factors I can and can't think of. It the biggest shot in the dark, and only gets darker as you lengthen the process.
Western studios mitigate this by monetizing their games more with all the now familiar tricks; lootboxes, battle passes, multiplayer centric gameplay, multiplayer expansions on single player games, cosmetics, etc. I think one thing that isn't mentioned much in this discourse is that Japan doesn't do this for their console games (They do it on mobile, but that's another discussion). They have a few (or a lot, for fighting games) cosmetic DLCs, one or two expansions, and that's it. FF16's pricing strategy is no different from FF13's back in 2010. Perhaps even "less greedy", since there's no FF 16-2 and 16-3 in sight. Only one expansion. FF7R only had a DLC expansion as well.
But no good deed goes unpunished I suppose. They want to respect the player's time and finances, but people complain nonetheless about the cost of games. They try to keep presentation values up, but are criticized for "abandoning the formula" (as if FF ever had a formula...). They deliver stuff players begged for decades to do but are only criticized again because this seemingly 150+ hour adventure they deliver didn't come in one fell swoop. And meanwhile the silent majority move over to the very F2P experiences the old guard chastise.
As you'd expect, these costs only grow as people demand more (but not paying more), without necessarily bringing in more people. The console market is stagnating, pc market is growing but also plateauing, and the mobile market is now over half of gaming's revenue. It's not sustainable, but it also doesn't seem like people really want to try and keep it up.
It is true that there are many smaller games or less beautiful games that generate audiences and are profitable. But something like Balatro is not a good example to point to. It's made by one person.
Another poignant point. There is a nice allure of the indie market, but many of the examples consumers laud would either be unaccaptable for a AAA company (Square is a great example for all these scopes. Remember Dungeon Encounters? Or Voice of Card's three games from Yoko Taro? No? Exactly). But even if they did do this and focused on small teams making smaller games: let's break it down:
let's say, a core team of 10 talented people paid $100k/yr on average. Not even including benefits which can double compensation.
They make a game in 2 years, this is $2m in dev costs alone. And remember, if this seems high to you: 100k these days is a decent living but far from a competitive salary, especially compared to tech.
Now let's say they do marketing, localization, etc. and make it $500k. I'm probably low balling this a lot.
Gamers want cheaper games, so let's use Helldivers 2 and charge $30.
So, what's needed to break even?
83k copies of a game.
Take 30% platform cuts and we're up to 110k copies of a game.
Using the metric above to beat out ROI, you need another 30% to beat out the stock market. So we're now up to 145k copies of this game.
I can keep adding other costs. If using UE5 they pay Epic, if they have 3rd party libraries they need to compensate those, etc. So let's ballpark this at 200k copies.
200k copies to start to be a success in their eyes over this fairly ambitious AA-ish scoped game. We could halve it back to 100k if you pay a AAA price, but in comes the argument of pricing vs. attracted audience (another topic I can spend another post elaborating on. But this is already too long). even 100k is quite a number to reach for a "AA" game, which still indirectly competes with the above Fortnites.
This is all to say that even "small games" quickly add up to millions for the smallest possible team if you want, as the meme goes, "shorter games with worse graphics made by people who are paid more to work less ". I'm already sort of breaking this by making a team as small as 10 people and giving them 2 years to ship, without counting QA, producers/managers, writing, voice acting, etc.
Thanks for sharing this in a non-Twitter format! Really illuminating and well-articulated. I hope that everyone gives Navok's writing at least a partial read because people have been complaining...
Thanks for sharing this in a non-Twitter format!
Really illuminating and well-articulated. I hope that everyone gives Navok's writing at least a partial read because people have been complaining about SE's press releases and general sales performance woes. I knew that they had some interesting expectations for ROI -- I've heard that typically it's development cost + marketing cost multiplied by a magic number (so $300M game + $100M marketing x 3 = $1.2B sales expectation) or something like that. I didn't know SE was pretending they were a hedge fund and basing their calculations against theoretical stock performance.
The part about being wary of releasing games too close to competing blockbusters is something I started tracking back in the old days of /r/JRPG's release date calendar because I wanted people to see how this dynamic played out in real-time. Smaller studios were frightened of releasing within weeks of a Halo or Call of Duty. But the thing about gaming is that, at least until live service games as Navok points out, some people would still pick up all the new releases on day one and while they had something specific they'd want to play that night, they'd get around to the others eventually. Or they'd at least get around to buying it the month of release while it was still very fresh. Those people are called fans. Companies should be cultivating all the good will with these fans as best as possible. But we never really see that from a lot of Japanese publishers (including Bamco until more recently), because it always seemed like corporate didn't value this customer relationship at all. It was always about brand loyalty for the executives. They sold a product and loyal customers had to buy it; who cared if they liked it or recommended it to their friends? So of course they were surprised when things changed in the early-/mid-2010s.
Navok laments the lack of sales to repeat customers for mainline Final Fantasy games, and for good reason, but the funny thing to me is that Square Enix has always had all the ingredients to the secret sauce. They have/had brand loyalty, they have name cachet and some inertia, they have developers who can do great things and they've invested a lot in those developers. They also have something that Navok didn't once mention: they have live services in the form of FFXI and FFXIV -- and there have been a lot of diehard fans there for basically a decade for corporate to learn from. So why hasn't SE capitalized on all of this in the last ~10 years? It's not because Fortnite stole their ice cream.
Thanks for putting this out in text format. It's a very interesting discussion. What I'm left wondering, though, if this isn't a net positive for the actual gamers. As he wrote most games now are...
Thanks for putting this out in text format.
It's a very interesting discussion. What I'm left wondering, though, if this isn't a net positive for the actual gamers. As he wrote most games now are either 10/10 blowouts or massive flops.
Depends on your style of play. I don't particularly like nor want to attach myself to multiple GaaS, so I see it as a tragedy to lose all these high production single player games. Indies are...
Depends on your style of play. I don't particularly like nor want to attach myself to multiple GaaS, so I see it as a tragedy to lose all these high production single player games. Indies are nice, but I do have some bias as a graphics programmer to seek out stuff trying to push the hardware.
But for those Fortnite players, gaming has never been cheaper. You can get thousands of hours of constantly updating entertainment without ever spending a dime. That's a small miracle for such audiences.
I'm very open to opinions. From where I stand, the Final Fantasy games just seem like they never took the next steps necessary. Other games are so much better at storytelling and having playable...
I'm very open to opinions.
From where I stand, the Final Fantasy games just seem like they never took the next steps necessary. Other games are so much better at storytelling and having playable stories.
I don't have a good reason for a "casual gamer", because RPGs from the get go (in both video games and its tabletop origins) weren't "casual" to begin with. It's flourishing now, but this genre 40...
Why would your casual gamer pick up an FF game?
I don't have a good reason for a "casual gamer", because RPGs from the get go (in both video games and its tabletop origins) weren't "casual" to begin with. It's flourishing now, but this genre 40 years ago was the very definition of the stereotypical "unpopular nerd activity". To be interested to begin with you needed to go off the beaten path of mainstream activities.
But as we know, DnD skyrocketed (potentially due to influencers showing a "cooler side"), Baldur's Gate 3 was a resouding success while being mainly developed outside of the US/Japan, and other activities like cosplay, LARPing, and animation are more popular than ever among western adults. So who knows what counts as "casual" these days?
Tangent aside, I'll at least explain why I still follow Final Fantasy:
Top notch presentation. You really can't get much better looking for a JRPG. Worse yet, few others even try to match Square Enix1. Tales of Arise was quite the looker itself, but it's been a real shame in retrospect considering that the most competitive JRPG to FF is Genshin Impact. AAA fidelity today for JRPGs mean choosing between Square Enix and a few Chinese mobile gacha that can cost hundreds to pull a single desired character. really speaks to the state of the genre.
Despite being a JRPG, Final Fantasy has traditionally done the best job taking in considerations from more than just typical anime tropes. They were never M rated games (until Type 0, and much later 16), but the games never felt like they talked down to the teens they marketed to. The early games weren't afraid to touch on concepts like War, Death, Betrayal and Redemption, Love, and Vengence. Later games would make take on more grandiose and "subtle" themes like environmentalism, identity, One's place in the world, Religion and tradition, and much more.
in a similar sentiment to #2, I appreciated seeing the story that would unfold. This is more for JRPGs in general but it is a primary difference that had JRPGs and WRPGs diverge as genres. WRPGs are more focused about inserting you into the world. The game merely providing an environmental setting to manipulate. JRPGs focused more on a tight, linear narrative and left the role playing to the gameplay (which was flashier than your average WRPG. Again, see #1). We can debate the pros/cons here for decades to come (and have for decades prior), but there's definitely an element of bonding over a shared experience with other fans compared to talking about how you decided to approach decision XYZ in a more open format.
This may be the cause of much discord among fans, but I do appreciate that FF is never satisfied with one way to play. Every numbered entry is a new world to explore (and as of 10 onward, usually headed by a new director's vision), and usually with a new battle system to figure out. You will never like every single FF equally, but I argue that it's hard to hate every single FF too. There's something for everyone if you have some slight interest in the franchise. How many other genres would have the gall to shift from a turned based game with a non-traditional leveling system to an online MMO in their next numbered title? The answer is Dragonquest 10 An Online MMO in 2001 on a console without built-in ethernet?
FF was always a great showcase of what the next gen was capable of, and in the different ways to interpret this "stale" genre stereotyped for being "stand around and take turns hitting each other". I don't think anyone else would have figured out a system like FF7R's that gives a turned based feel to an Action RPG. Especially because you realize they spent a decade in several other games experimenting with what worked and what didn't. Losing that would definitely feel like losing a part of gaming.
1. This isn't to say that you need good graphics to be a playable JRPG. But if you've been a fan for decades, you see a very drastic and sudden decline in JRPGs around the PS3 era. With many franchises hibernating, crashing and burning, or simply stagnating over this gen. in Gen 7 it was reduced down to Square Enix and the Tales of series, with a few one offs here and there. By Gen 8, things petered out for everyone else. Even Persona 5 was launched on the PS3 back then in Japan only. in Some ways, Square's lineups are the last line of defense for showing the genre hasn't faded into obscurity.
There were quite a number of pretty good JRPGS released for gen 7 consoles that were not Final Fantasy nor Tales. Tri-Ace alone made a number of them. There were also games like Eternal Sonata by...
There were quite a number of pretty good JRPGS released for gen 7 consoles that were not Final Fantasy nor Tales. Tri-Ace alone made a number of them. There were also games like Eternal Sonata by Tri-Crecendo (which is almost criminally overlooked for something so beautiful, IMHO), the quirky From Software game Enchanted Arms, and Game Republic’s Folktale. And those are just big examples on the expensive hardware with big budgets, completely ignoring the Wii (Xenoblade, anyone?) or DS/3DS, as well as the stuff that was simply never released outside of Asia.
The simple fact of the matter was that times were changing and that kind of game just wasn’t popular anymore. People were absolutely fed up with standard JRPG combat. So developers did everything they could do to change their gameplay loops and it had some very mixed reactions. Most of it was negative. Many companies tried instead to focus on the portable market but it was getting clear that the market was being crushed by mobile phones. Heck there isn’t really a portable market anymore; the Switch is hardly portable in the same way a gameboy or DS was.
I still question if this is really true. or if JRPGs are simply waiting for their Baldur's gate 3 or Breath of the Wild to suddenly reinvigorate the genre with new players. Who truly knows? If...
The simple fact of the matter was that times were changing and that kind of game just wasn’t popular anymore.
I still question if this is really true. or if JRPGs are simply waiting for their Baldur's gate 3 or Breath of the Wild to suddenly reinvigorate the genre with new players. Who truly knows?
If it's worst case, it may be a poetic death. Among many things, Sakaguchi took inspiration from western Theartre in the Squaresoft era of FF, and maybe it's simply the fate of Theater to blend into the background as the larger populace care less about performance and more about "My adventure". And the lion's share of modern JRPGs falls to its own version of market capture lootbox GaaS character collector funded by whales.
Many companies tried instead to focus on the portable market but it was getting clear that the market was being crushed by mobile phones.
Don't worry, pretty much every RPG studio you can think of (if they aren't already dead) has adapted to that. Even if ReBirth "flopped" (which I'm not entirely sure of), Ever Crisis made some billion dollars by now. On the other end of the stick, Tales has had 4 different smartphone games release and all have shut down by now (or are shutting down). They will 100% make a 5th one sometime in the next year or two. Even the legendary VN maker Key (known for Air, Clannad, Angel Beats, etc) were more or less saved by their own mobile game, Heaven Burns Red. And none of this is even mentioning how Cygames is the top of the Japanese food train with Uma Musume.
They aren't Genshin, but many are definitely profitable. The studios probably won't die/hibernate Gen 7 style, but they certainly will be moving away from the Old Guard if they choose to abandon the genre.
I remember being extremely impressed by Bravely Default. Unfortunately Bravely Default 2 was a disappointment to me. I never got around to Bravely Second either. Some changes definitely worked and...
People were absolutely fed up with standard JRPG combat. So developers did everything they could do to change their gameplay loops and it had some very mixed reactions.
I remember being extremely impressed by Bravely Default. Unfortunately Bravely Default 2 was a disappointment to me. I never got around to Bravely Second either. Some changes definitely worked and drew people in, but you're right that the market isn't the same.
Regarding people being fed up with traditional turn based combat, is that true? The last mainline normal FF game was FFX, which did fantastic. Then came the MMO, then 12's weird mix, then 13's...
Regarding people being fed up with traditional turn based combat, is that true? The last mainline normal FF game was FFX, which did fantastic. Then came the MMO, then 12's weird mix, then 13's weird mix, then another MMO, and now action combat.
I don't see a decline. The series went from 7 to 8 to 9, then culminated in 10. At what point did interest start to wane?
Final Fantasy is only a tiny percentage of the RPG genre. RPGs used to be ubiquitous. There were tons of them coming out all of the time in the 80s and 90s, and they have basically disappeared...
Final Fantasy is only a tiny percentage of the RPG genre. RPGs used to be ubiquitous. There were tons of them coming out all of the time in the 80s and 90s, and they have basically disappeared today.
Keep in mind that the PS2, with Final Fantasies 10-12, was the 6th console generation, and even then Square Enix was moving away from traditional turn-based combat. Most of the notable RPGs from this era that used turn-based combat were doing a number of things to freshen up the concept, like Shadow Hearts' Ring of Fate system. I'd go so far as to say that by the end of that console generation interest in turn-based RPGs had not only waned, but had become a liability as people were starting to actively dislike them.
RPGs didn't disappear entirely during the 7th generation, of course, but they did become incredibly niche. Xseed and Niponichi became practically the only publishers interested in bringing JRPGs over, and as time went on they quickly became very low-budget and had pretty poor quality.
See, I would argue that there's a difference between what SH Covenant and Persona do (add a spin to turn based JRPGs) and what Final Fantasy does (throw it out altogether). Or the Dragon Quest...
See, I would argue that there's a difference between what SH Covenant and Persona do (add a spin to turn based JRPGs) and what Final Fantasy does (throw it out altogether). Or the Dragon Quest strategy of not changing a single thing, and still being successful.
Neither Persona nor DQ feel the need to spend 100 million dollars on graphics, but both have excellent art direction, and I bet both series ultimately end up being more profitable (and less risky) than FF.
My overall point is that at no point did the formula fail for SE. Not ever. As interest waned, maybe it could have, but we will never know because SE abandoned the formula at the height of its popularity.
(PS I'm so happy you played Covenant, that game was excellent)
To be honest this seems like a complete non-sequitur. What about FF15 or FF16 lack “next steps”? If anything, the complaints were the opposite: those games tried too hard to be like a God of War...
To be honest this seems like a complete non-sequitur. What about FF15 or FF16 lack “next steps”? If anything, the complaints were the opposite: those games tried too hard to be like a God of War or other modern AAA third person action game that they lost their much beloved identity.
To me, the FF games haven't taken steps in storytelling for years. That's where they're supposed to excel and win their audience. FF16 compares unfavorably to The Witcher 3 in most respects (bar...
To me, the FF games haven't taken steps in storytelling for years. That's where they're supposed to excel and win their audience.
FF16 compares unfavorably to The Witcher 3 in most respects (bar the terrible Witcher combat system). The pace is off, the characters are less believable, the story isn't as compelling, the game feels more closed off, the side quests feel less impactful.
Comparing unfavorably to a game that came out eight years earlier just isn't cutting it.
That's only one game. You could list many other older games that thwack FF15 and FF16.
I completely agree that the later FF games tried too hard to be a modern third person action game. Instead of fixing the core issues: telling stories in the same old way although others have found incredibly creative new ways of telling more compelling stories.
Even the FF cutscenes in the latest games just feel outdated to me, the pacing's just off. They aren't telling a compelling story.
Again, I'd love to hear arguments the other way around, but FF just feels like Pokemon or Yakuza: the same game over and over and over and over and over, with slight variations and a new skin. It's not nearly as bad as the annual versions of sports games, but it isn't tooooo far off either.
Both FF7 Remake and FF16 were nominated for best narrative at the Game Awards. Games also have a very broad spectrum of ways to incorporate story. Both Journey and Baldur's Gate 3 have celebrated...
Both FF7 Remake and FF16 were nominated for best narrative at the Game Awards. Games also have a very broad spectrum of ways to incorporate story. Both Journey and Baldur's Gate 3 have celebrated stories that are on opposite ends of the spectrum in both length and word count. Storytelling is really not the root cause here.
I think there is merit to the idea that there is very little reason for someone to get invested in Final Fantasy. I'm not someone invested in the franchise, I've only played FF7R. The only thing I feel like I can expect to get out of any FF game is that I'll be getting some sort of fantasy adventure story. The old ones are turned based, the new ones are not. The aesthetics change pretty wildly between releases as well. A new FF game does not promise more of that good shit that you are already in to, because they come with a new story and possibly new gameplay. You're left with the assumption that you'll get a B+ experience that may come with chocobos.
I'd say they are games that probably do work fine through word of mouth, but the past couple are running through the obstacle of being locked to the PS5. For me that means I get to play the new ones after they are like a year old, but still full price. I think the comment in the Twitter thread about how single player experiences are fighting with with live service games rings true. I'm not married to online multiplayer, but any 60+ hour rpg is still gonna have to fight both my friends and my backlog to get my attention.
I've never gotten the (western?) internet hate for FF7 Remake or FF16. I enjoyed them a lot and they're exactly what I look for in modern single player games. Compelling story, gameplay that has a...
Both FF7 Remake and FF16 were nominated for best narrative at the Game Awards.
I've never gotten the (western?) internet hate for FF7 Remake or FF16. I enjoyed them a lot and they're exactly what I look for in modern single player games. Compelling story, gameplay that has a bit of action but doesn't get away in the story too much, and...well, a Square Enix or anime aesthetic.
The games I play the most are easily Final Fantasy XIV and Genshin Impact, with some occasional Splatoon. Most of what's popular now doesn't hold my interest anymore. (Except Baldur's Gate 3, which I anticipated for years and was blown away by how popular it actually became. That was anomalous.)
I don't want to be too derisive here, but I'll be blunt: the FF fandom by far has the most entitled fans-base in gaming. The series has continually pushed itself to meet the graphical demands of...
I've never gotten the (western?) internet hate for FF7 Remake or FF16.
I don't want to be too derisive here, but I'll be blunt: the FF fandom by far has the most entitled fans-base in gaming. The series has continually pushed itself to meet the graphical demands of fans, but it's never enough. And it's not like this is an old phenomenon. I still remember the early FF16 footage with people thinking that it was simply an upscaled PS4 game exclusive to PS5. What game at that point in 2021 is there even to compare?
But to give them a fair interpretation, I also get it. There isn't necessarily a "Final Fantsy Fan". you have FF7 fans who may or may not like the direction of the remake, FF14 fans in a different medium, FF15 fans that may or may not be betrayed by FF versus 13, FF12 fans who love the Ivalice games, etc. Every entry has its drama. And I'm sure there's now FF16 fans (some from FF14, some who are brand new). There will be a good amount of overlap, but very few who truly like every entry.
The fanbase isn't united because their tastes are as different as the game types. The only particular connection is the brand, a vauge western-ish anime aesthetic, and some small motifs.
Hate might be too strong a word, but I played FF for a turn based JRPG experience, and it seems FF doesn't want to be in that market anymore. So I played Dragon Quest and Persona instead. They...
Hate might be too strong a word, but I played FF for a turn based JRPG experience, and it seems FF doesn't want to be in that market anymore. So I played Dragon Quest and Persona instead.
They traded markets. Which is fine, but then it's not surprising some people are bitter.
As a new player, I really enjoyed FF7 Remake. I was very easily charmed by the cast, and I found the combat system very fun. The thing they are going for, where it is mostly the same, but is still...
As a new player, I really enjoyed FF7 Remake. I was very easily charmed by the cast, and I found the combat system very fun. The thing they are going for, where it is mostly the same, but is still very clearly its own thing, makes it interesting for me. I can still fully understand people being mad that it's getting broken up into a trilogy though. I don't I'll ever get over The Hobbit being made into three movies, so I feel like I have some empathy for people being miffed that their favorite game ever got "remade" into something dramatically different. I also feel like it may just be in vogue to be anti Square Enix right now. They have pretty clearly fumbled the bag on multiple fronts for the past few years. It's very easy to paint them as incompetent and out of touch, in a similar vein to the way people treated mid 2010's Nintendo and Capcom.
I think you're on to something. Despite adopting modern game design (open worlds, real time combat, etc.), the signature feature of Final Fantasy, the story, has not really improved at all since...
I think you're on to something. Despite adopting modern game design (open worlds, real time combat, etc.), the signature feature of Final Fantasy, the story, has not really improved at all since the '90s. I don't even feel like Final Fantasy games have ever had particularly great stories.
I missed out on them as a kid because I had an N64, then an Xbox as a teenager, so I visited "classics" like Final Fantasy 7 as an adult some 10 years after they released. I found Cloud Strife to be an insufferable whiny kid. I can see why this game was seen as revolutionary in 1997; having any kind of meaningful story in a big budget game was still a pretty novel concept, and Final Fantasy certainly told big expansive stories, but they weren't great stories on their own. FF7 was outclassed just a year later by Metal Gear Solid. Their rate of improvement in this department has been practically glacial. Final Fantasy X, a popular contender for "Best Final Fantasy game", has some of the most atrocious dialog I've ever heard in a video game.
Caveat: I haven't played a modern FF aside from a couple hours in FF7 Remake. I was pleasantly surprised at how much more engaging the initial couple hours of story was with the remake. My hang up...
Caveat: I haven't played a modern FF aside from a couple hours in FF7 Remake. I was pleasantly surprised at how much more engaging the initial couple hours of story was with the remake.
My hang up with many AAA games is runtime. I find most games really struggle to hold my attention beyond 30 hours. I feel like the expectation for JRPGs now is 50+ hours (at a glance FFXVI in the 40s). As counter point let's look at Star Trek TNG, a season is approximately 19 hours. My impression is that most games cover about as much story as a season of TNG. So that 19 hours of story is spread across 40+ hours of game play.
I feel like the criticism of story and characters has more to do how they are stretched than the actual content. Give me a 15 hour critical path and I'll pay $60-$70. That's inline with buying or renting movies for a similar amount of content. If you want to pad out the game with side quests and make a completionist run longer (for the folks who want to maximize hours per dollar) go for it. But I'm not (generally) going to buy a 50+ hours commitment.
(I'm current playing through FromSoftware's catalog and at about 30 hours in Elden Ring. I love the game but still feel the play time fatigue, I'm probably a couple hours from putting it on pause until the DLC.)
The simple reason I don't get excited about Final Fantasy games is that I already thought Final Fantasy graphics were mindblowing back when I played 10. Graphics technology has gotten too advanced...
The simple reason I don't get excited about Final Fantasy games is that I already thought Final Fantasy graphics were mindblowing back when I played 10. Graphics technology has gotten too advanced for me to really care about continued improvements.
But it feels like thats where so much if the effort on these huge budget AAA games goes is toward making the most of the next gen rendering capability, rather than advancing the JRPG genre.
A game like shadow of the colossus really benefitted from a remake to new technnology. The original low detail art style was great for making the forbidden lands feel like a desolate wasteland, while the remake allowed the forbidden lands to feel like a lush environment that was just separate from human civilization. I played the remake and thought "wow, this setting is beautiful, Im so glad I decided to buy this remake"
Meanwhile when I played the most recent Final Fantasy I distinctly remember stopping part way through a level in a desert and thinking "wow, this canyon feels really dull. Its really detailed but just feels hollow."
Basically I feel like Final Fantasy is underperforming conpared to what I think Square Enix ought to be capable of after doing this over a dozen times.
I enjoyed FF7 Remake. I enjoyed it differently from the original (which was a formative game), but I liked it regardless, quite a lot. I think there's a significant amount of people who loved the...
I enjoyed FF7 Remake. I enjoyed it differently from the original (which was a formative game), but I liked it regardless, quite a lot. I think there's a significant amount of people who loved the game and just don't bother to be part of these discussions (out there in the socials network). I'm looking forward to playing Rebirth... as soon as I can borrow a PS5.
I'm not going to spend hundreds of euros on a dedicated living room computer I don't need other than to play FF7 Rebirth and maybe a couple other games. If I could buy and play the game on the PC I would already have done so.
Now, in hindsight, we can all (including squeenix, apparently) see this exclusiveness as a major limiting factor for the sales on the series. But while I sympathize with the difficulty of making some of these choices many years in advance of the release date, no one is going to convince me that this specific result is somehow shocking or unpredictable. Come on. 2015 wasn't that long ago. We'd been playing Minecraft for six years. Roblox existed even longer. World of Warcraft even longer. And publishers and studios have been targeting cross-platform for many years now. What are they saying, the audience was expected to grow? Company executives are paid out the wazoo because they're supposed to be wise or experienced enough to make good decisions under real world circumstances. That's literally what they're supposed to bring to the table.
2015 was 9 years ago. And COVID sure as heck made is feel even longer. I am in an extremely different path of life now than before then. My barely middle school niece is now in college. I sure...
Come on. 2015 wasn't that long ago.
2015 was 9 years ago. And COVID sure as heck made is feel even longer. I am in an extremely different path of life now than before then. My barely middle school niece is now in college.
I sure wouldn't make any high stakes best based on nearly a decade ago.
We'd been playing Minecraft for six years. Roblox existed even longer. World of Warcraft even longer
Minecraft was a very succesful but ultimately indie niche in 2014. the 2.5b aquisition is what turned it from successful to the most played game in the world.
Roblox is a wonderful example. It has indeed existed for almost 20 years. I don't know the exact details, but the time in 2017/8 when it transformed into the "Gen Z Newgrounds" (but with microtransactions) was fairly drastic.
And the MMO wars is a story worthy of its own post. To sum it up: there's a good reason why only it and FF14 survived that long to begin with. and 14 infamously had to blow its own servers up to restart anew to get trust back. Also... FF14 exists; I don't think Square was in a rush to make the next MMO.
None of these were really bets to take back in 2015's time, especially not given Square's Portfolio. It networking infrastructure was far too slow and too late to think of competing in the Roblox arena.
And publishers and studios have been targeting cross-platform for many years now.
You know, I really don't understand this sentiment. By this time FF13 launched on Xbox and 15 was planned for Xbox as well. Square was touching its base into Steam around this time. Square's always kept a stream of games coming on Nintendo's systems.
They have temporary exclusives, but square in the 00's was infamous for making sure every FF was ported to every new console until the end of time. It wasn't an 'if' so much as 'when'.
I don't think they aren't losing out on some "hype" factor by staggering ports either (which helps with better QA). Just look at the marketing buzz for KH on Steam, despite the fact that it's been on the PC platform for 3 years already. Then can drum up their own marketing if they really want to.
Company executives are paid out the wazoo because they're supposed to be wise or experienced enough to make good decisions under real world circumstances. That's literally what they're supposed to bring to the table
People may already have forgotten about it, but: COVID had, has, and will have huge effects on the industry and I don't think anyone called how drastic it would be at the time. The games industry is still seeing weekly layoffs happening, assumedly burned through all its pre-COVID production in 2022-2023, and is still a bit cold on investing or pitching for funding for the next big project. It may be over in the public conscious, but businesses will at the very least be feeling the effects through 2024 at the bare minimum.
The timing here is wrong. Minecraft was already the all time best selling PC game, and the console and mobile ports were also established prior to Microsoft's purchase.
Minecraft was a very succesful but ultimately indie niche in 2014. the 2.5b aquisition is what turned it from successful to the most played game in the world.
The timing here is wrong. Minecraft was already the all time best selling PC game, and the console and mobile ports were also established prior to Microsoft's purchase.
This article is based on this Twitter thread by Jacob Navok, a former Square Enix Exec.
It identifies and analyses many of the issues plaguing the gaming industry today (e.g. bloated budgets, live-service, Triple-A, sustainability of the industry, etc.). See below:
Avoiding Twitter? Click Here. Part I
A thread on the recent Square Enix news regarding FF sales numbers and expectations
IGN: Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth, Final Fantasy 16, and Foamstars all failed to meet Square Enix’s expectations
• As a reminder I reported to two CEOs of Square Enix for the better part of a decade and ran a subsidiary. I also correctly predicted last year that Square Enix was going to break exclusivity. I'll note I have no confidential information that I'm basing my arguments on.
• To start, we need to look at decisions made on the titles under development within the lens of 2015-2022, not the lens of 2023. For example, FF16 would have started pre-production prior to the release of FF15, which was released in 2016.
• This is a pre-Fortnite era. Budgets for FF7 Remake and into Rebirth would have been around this period too. This is important to note and we will get back to it.
• There's a misunderstanding that has been repeated for nearly a decade and a half that Square Enix sets arbitrarily high sales requirements then gets upset when its arbitrarily high sales requirements fail to be met.
• This was not true when I was there and is unlikely to be true today.
• Sales expectations generally come from a need to cover the cost of development plus return on investment.
ResetEra Forums: Does Square Enix has realistic sales expectations for their games?
• If a game costs $100m to make, and takes 5 years, then you have to beat, as an example, what the business could have returned investing $100m into the stock market over that period.
• For the 5 years prior to Feb 2024, the stock market averaged a rate of return of 14.5%. Investing that $100m in the stock market would net you a return of $201m, so this is our ROI baseline.
• Can the game net a return higher than this after marketing, platform fees, and discounts are factored in?
• This is actually a very hard equation though it seems simple; the $70 that the consumer pays only returns $49 after 30% platform fees, and the platforms will generally get a recoup on any funds spent on exclusivity meaning until they are paid back, they will keep that cash. Plus, discounts start almost immediately.
• Assume marketing expenses at $50m, and assume that you're not going to get $49 but rather an average closer to $40 given discounts, returns and other aspects. Now let's say in that first month you sold 3m copies with $40 net received (we will ignore the recoup). You need to surpass $254m to make expectations. (That's $100m + $101m in ROI baseline + $50m in marketing).
• At 3m copies with $40 per copy received, you've only made $120m. You're far off.
IGN: Final Fantasy 16 sold 3 Million copies during launch week
• From the statements made, it will take FF16 eighteen months to hit expected sales. (I used the stock market as an example but actual ROI should be higher than stock market averages).
• The sales figures required aren't wild expectations; the number of copies sold were too low. And my numbers are actually much lower than realities (game dev costs are probably 2x as high, and marketing is also likely 2x as high, and this makes ROI requirements higher too).
• But that's not even the core of the problem, this is just me proving that expectations aren't set immodestly.
• The core of the problem is that the budgets were set in a period where the expectation was that audiences would grow.
• Total audience growth was a reasonable expectation in the 2015-2022 era and still is today. Not only had the industry grown significantly each year, but each day that new generations were coming of age, they were coming of age as gamers. Meaning that your total addressable population should be increasing and you should be increasing your revenue.
• What's happened? Not just to Square Enix, but to the industry as a whole? Audience behavioral patterns are radically different than expected in 2015. Remember, I said 2015 was pre-Fortnite.
• The way it used to work was that you'd pick your release date similar to a Hollywood movie, stick to it, and consider the competition to be the titles releasing the weeks before and after.
• We would look at a Hitman or a Deus Ex release and consider whether there was a Call of Duty or Assassin's Creed coming out around that time, assuming that gamers had X amount of money to spend and Y amount of time, and that if we wanted to get the full sticker price (remember, discounts eat into cash received and also at that time, used disc sales were $0 cash received) we needed to get as many sales in the first two weeks as possible.
• At that time, as a gamer, once you finished the most recent game you were on, you moved onto the next. You were looking for your next title once you finished the prior one. We wanted one of our titles to be the next title you bought to fill your gamer needs.
• This world radically changed in the last 6 years.
(cont'd)
Part II
• Earlier this month Kotaku had an article called "9 Great Games We Can't Stop Thinking About." There's a surprise 10th slide, and that is Fortnite.
• @ZwiezenZ writes in the article: "And once again, another weekend arrives and I realize that I'll be spending most of it playing Fortnite. I'm very close to maxing out both my battle pass and Festival pass, so that's the plan.
• I hate how deep Fortnite has its hooks in me — to the point where I'm choosing to play it over brand-new, cool-looking video games — but I can't help it. I must finish these damn passes, get all the rewards, and earn the right to play other stuff. Well, until the next season starts up and I once again return to Fortnite to drop in and level up all over again. It's sick. I hate myself. I can't wait to play more this weekend."
Kotaku's Weekend Guide: 9 incredible games we can’t stop thinking about
• This is indeed the point. Square Enix are not competing against just the latest new installments, they are competing against every F2P online game that is constantly adding content and getting more robust over time.
• The assumption was that people would jump between products when they finished one. But, as you know, F2P games like Fortnite or Warzone are evergreen, they never get old. They are always updating with new content and experiences. They can continue for decades. Candy Crush has had its best years ever the last few years. And companies like Epic can continue to invest back into the products to make them better, creating even higher barriers to entry for competitors.
Reuters: Candy Crush Saga hits $20 billion revenue milestone, maker King says
• The game industry is still growing in revenue but that revenue is increasingly captured by fewer live services games that are generating a level of stickiness seen in social media companies. There are reasons there are very few competitors to Facebook. Once the network effect starts, it can keep going for a long time. Since Instagram (also FB), the only real competitor in an entire decade that showed up and could quickly reach 1bn+ people was TikTok. And this is in a trillion dollar valued industry.
Kotaku: 60 percent of playtime in 2023 went to 6-year-old or older games, new data shows — A report shows that while the industry is growing, its biggest competition is Fortnite, GTA, Call of Duty, and Roblox
• I expect Fortnite, Roblox, Warzone, and similar products to continue to grow revenue. Meanwhile, put yourself in an older gamer's shoes: if you're a gamer with disposable income but less free time, and you have the choice of paying $70 to play 100 hours in FF16 or to just continue playing Fortnite with your friends for free, you'll wait to see the FF16 reviews before you decide whether to switch off FN.
• In other words, your switching costs (how good a game is, how exciting it needs to be) are now substantially higher than when you'd finish the latest Assassin's Creed and look for the next title to fill your time, because you’re awash with content options. Fortnite doesn't end.
• This is the reason we see trends where games are either spectacular 10/10 successes, or disasters, with little in between; there is no "next hit" being searched for in many cases. And this polarization makes risks higher, and costs higher too (we will get to this in a moment.)
• Now if you're a younger gamer in your teens, you may not even be thinking about FF. If you are 13 years old now, you were 5 years old when the last mainline FF, FF15, came out.
• Your family may not own a PS5 and you may not care. You're satisfied with Fortnite or Roblox or Minecraft with your friends on your phone or laptop. I'm not say that this is the case for everyone. But it is certainly a trend.
• The old AAA franchises do not seem to be converting the younger generations that the industry was counting on for growth, and instead F2P social games on mobile are where they spend their time.
• This is the reason every publisher chased live service titles; audiences clearly gravitated toward them, and profits followed in success. (It is surprising that Square Enix, which had successful F2P live service mobile titles in Japan, left the AAA live-service attempts to Eidos rather than try to build those products in Japan, but dissecting this problem would likely require an entirely different thread.)
• Regardless, the Fortnite-ization of the industry was not entirely predictable in 2015 when budgets were being planned. Even after FN came out and well into the Covid period, it felt like industry growth was pulling all ships forward, not just a handful. But that isn't what happened.
(cont'd)
Part III
• Now we have to get to the cost of development. Asset generation, motion capture, textures, animation, engineering, infrastructure are incredibly expensive. Making games costs a lot of money. The recent layoff wave is generally a consolidation toward a new expected sales average in the [fewer] number of titles being produced, not the cost of an individual title, which is going to continue to increase. (Spider-Man 2 cost $380m! )
• Development costs have gone up, and switching costs of the consumer has gone up, and as a result companies have to invest even more because it has to be a 10/10 or gamers will stick to Fortnite. (I don't literally mean FN, but similar types of products.)
• Meanwhile, FF7 Rebirth, which has a 92% Metacritic rating, can't get the sales it needs (though that's also complicated due to it being a sequel.) These factors mean the status quo must change.
Kotaku: What hacked files tell us about the studio behind Spider-Man 2
• There are three levers you can pull to make the equation work for return on investment at a game company. You can decrease costs, increase price, or increase audience size. As noted, any non-service game is having trouble increasing audience size. Meanwhile, on the cost side, inflation is up, salaries are up, and consumers require sophisticated, beautiful products to get them to fork over cash rather than keep playing F2P titles.
• It is true that there are many smaller games or less beautiful games that generate audiences and are profitable. But something like Balatro is not a good example to point to. It's made by one person. AAA games can take hundreds, thousands of people to make. A single person making $2-3m in sales is life changing, a hundred people trying to split that is not enough money. And products like Balatro are lightning in a bottle, you can't generally capture that twice, and there are hundreds of thousands of competing products on Steam or App Stores that fail for every Balatro.
• This leaves only price left as a lever to pull. Since the price of games hasn't substantially increased, relative to inflation, package disc games have gotten cheaper over the last two decades. The assumption was that this was okay because the audience size would grow instead of price. But the audience went to the platform titles.
• Prices for packaged disc games will go up. Game companies have no choice, it is the only lever left. Just look at Kotaku's article about GTA6’s price point from this week:
Kotaku: GTA 6 could be the first game to push past $70
• You're also seeing this trend with Ubisoft's Star Wars game
• It's not because game companies are penny pinchers looking to fleece their users. It's because this is the only path left to make non-F2P service titles workable in the AAA space given cost and competition.
• Something has to give; if SQEX can’t get its cost of dev down (it will go further up) and is getting good reviews but isn’t increasing audience, they and the rest of the publishers are going to have to increase price point. Otherwise live service titles will be all we have left.
reddit.com/r/pcgaming/.../star_wars_outlaws_$110_and_$130_editions_prompt_a/
• There's another path that I can think of, which is increasing the take rate. If publishers can capture more of the platform side revenue, they can moderate price point increases while capturing a better return on investment because they'll be capturing say $50 or $55 out of $70.
• @TimSweeneyEpic knows this which is why he's fighting the good fight on platform fees, both at EGS and with the app stores, to open up PC and mobile ecosystems.
• This is also why you'll see MS and others take advantage of his fight and start their own app stores. (You would think MS would chip in for Epic's legal fees given they're capturing the benefits with no risk!)
• But this path will take time, and is very hard on consoles, where the AAA publishers make a lot of their money, so expect price increases to still be the norm.
ReadWrite: Microsoft readies launch of its own mobile app store — Microsoft announced that they will be launching a new mobile games and app store to compete with Apple and Google Play.
Note: emphases mine
Source — ThreadReaderApp Twitter proxy: threadreaderapp.com/thread/1793779717813723521.html
Ugh.
Just, ugh.
I have basically given up on modern AAA games. They spend an absolute fortune on experiences that are so polished that they cease to be interesting. As someone who has a long history enjoying Final Fantasy games, FFXVI and the VII remake games are painful for me to experience; they feel like they are trying to play the game for me. But the thing that really disappoints me from reading this is that the reason why AAA games are looking like this is is competition from the so-called live service games, which I hate. They are extremely repetitive, twitchy, and chaotic. And frankly I do not have time to be addicted to games like that; the reason why I let myself get addicted to other games is specifically because there is an implied promise of an ending where I can get on with my life.
The AAA games industry is dead. There is no way they will come back. Keep your eyes on the small guys, people; that’s where creativity will come from.
Yeah, Navok's stand that "Otherwise live service titles will be all we have left" suggests he's looking at the ultimate demise of AAA gaming simply because the traditional formula for making games has gotten complex and only certain variables matter to the accountants and executives anymore, because those variables maximize ROI. That's a really distressing way to view creating entertainment and I think you're right to point to indie games as examples of quality, worthwhile entertainment and adhering to a development and marketing formula that is substantially different from what AAA studios want to work with.
It's kind of crazy to me that an indie Metroidvania called Hollow Knight might have 15 million copies sold (at $15 or less), while a main-line FF title might be "struggling" to meet corporate's expectations. Hollow Knight had marketing in the form of a lengthy Kickstarter and that was pretty much it. The rest has been word of mouth/internet culture/YouTubers at essentially no cost to the developers. Their work stands on its own merits and the game doesn't have any live services. All the DLC added real content and were Kickstarter stretch goals, but otherwise released the content as free updates.
I know that live services as the gold-standard for raking in money, but it sounds like Navok is making the case that if you don't do live services right, if you don't have that addictive gameplay loop and spending hook for your game, then you need to do something else to get those sales. Navok suggests raising prices to deal with falling sales numbers. But maybe that something else is called "quality?" And appealing to the people looking for entertainment and not a second job grinding season passes? There are multiple sectors to the gaming pie and SE could sell to the "single-player" or "non-live services" sector and still make a profit.
And people will never see the costs it took to get to that point, which was ultimately a huge gamble. Remember that the Cuphead devs took a second Mortgage on their house to fund the game. It failed and they may have literally been on the streets. No amount of quality guarantees 1 millions sales at launch, not for a 3 person dev team with a grassroots marketing "budget". Let alone an evergreen title that continues to sell 8 years later. You need all the stars to align for that to happen.
The industry is rickety as all hell, but at least I'm being paid regardless of the success of the game. I eventually want to save up money just so I can afford to one day do a full time sprint to the finish line for my own work. But just living (and living without an income) is expensive these days.
if you want a quick breakdown, I left a comment (it's at the bottom) measuring such a scenario. It still isn't cheap.
You make plenty of fair points, but I think you're conflating apples and oranges. The team size behind a product like Hollow Knight or Hades is miniscule compared to the hundreds employed by Square Enix. If Square wanted to release a cheaper indie style game, they would have significantly fewer devs involved. This would mean mass layoffs.
The assumption was big team ⟩ big product ⟩ big sales. Now that's borked, and the industry is in a pinch.
I fully understand that team sizes are different and so are expectations. But publishers and those with large in-house development teams don't need to scale-down in order to produce games with the scope or reach of an indie title. They don't need to do that to produce good games either, so I'm not sure what disconnect you're pointing to with my understanding. I did write some of the above originally as part of my other post (a reply to the main OP), but saw that it fit better with the direction Akir was going (I actually waited to see if they posted first since we're sometimes on the same page).
I addressed this in my other post as well. Navok outlines that that's not actually how SE viewed it. They compared their sales performance to market investment performance on top of all that. Chasing "what if" profits pegged to what the stock market actually did is foolhardy when they're in entertainment and not the financial industry.
If SE execs were as hard on themselves as they are on their employees, they'd have fired themselves for having that absurd fixation a long time ago. Ultimately, SE has a management problem. They haven't been properly understanding their Total Addressable Market. They haven't been trying to communicate with their customers in effective (and modern) ways. They've allowed producers and executives to draw out development times on games which have run up the budgets on them, with less to show for it (I pre-ordered FF15 and Versus XIII on PS3). They've invested in technologies that haven't come to market in a timely manner and have the same financial issues (Luminous Engine?). It's not the fault of the developers, or the size of dev teams, or even the fault of community managers, that any of these things happened. There's a management culture that just isn't living up to their own expectations.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding you then. I just can't see how a large team of 50-100 working on an "indie" project that sells for indie prices could possibly be profitable. The numbers just don't work out. Square actually has tried doing the strategy of many smaller teams working on smaller projects. Thing is the vast majority of the small projects don't pan out. u/raze2012's comment here lays out the math better.
Not necessarily. If I'm an investor, why would I bother with a company that always underperforms the market? I agree comparing to the market's actual performance is foolish, but it's reasonable to expect a company in a growing market to grow. Gaming is huge and still growing, Square isn't. Mobile gaming is an increasingly huge share of the market.
Well it seems like we're far apart on our views on this. But I'll tackle one of your concerns.
There are a lot more indie studios out there than you might think. And I feel like there must be a ton of examples in the size you've specified, though I can only come up with a few that are still indie and make for good comparison (i.e. having more than one game under their belt at the moment, or have attracted venture capital because of their success), but I don't have their financials in hand so I don't know if employees are making industry-standard (or comparable to SE). I don't know what their marketing spend is. I don't know what their turnover rate is (I expect it's a lot lower than SE).
The last time I did a head-count Petroglyph Games had around 50 employees total and real office space. Their games sell for around $20 at launch and get discounted from there. They've been chugging along for decades.
Stunlock Studios, makers of V Rising, have 40 employees. Add a few more people working for the publisher to get it published and you're in the 50-100 ball park. And the studio has been around since 2010, they're not a one-hit wonder.
Splitgate devs 1047 Games have ~50 devs, maybe more? Only one game though? But they have gotten to a point where venture capital is privately invested in them.
Shiro Games, makers of Dune: Spice Wars and Northgard among others, have 70+ devs.
I expect a lot of the devs partnered with THQ Nordic have team sizes of 40 or so, but also rely on contractors or actors. That is true of Ashborne Games (makers of the excellent Last Train Home that had actors for FVM scenes) and probably other studios like Black Sea Interactive. So there might be a sweet spot for these studios, but it does often take a few more people to actually get the game published, so I think it's fair to round these up to that 50-100 figure you were after.
But the key thing that successful studios do is they stick to a reasonable budget and ship a decent product. I'm sure you can think of a lot of indie studios that didn't do either of those things, and undoubtedly had a lot of project management headaches along the way (or were just a straight up cash-grab on Greenlight/Early Access), but there are a lot of studios out there that are successful and aren't one-hit wonders from 3 guys in a garage.
Can't you make 10 Hollow Knights, then? If costs are ballooning out of control, make cheaper games, sell to less people, right?
This is my take on the new ones as well. I've always described it as it's trying to be too cinematic. It's like it wants to be a movie and it's frustrating as hell. It has so many great aspects to it, but one of my biggest pet peeves in video games is constantly taking control away from the player and constantly forcefully moving the camera.
Nice, I was going to post this, but I was beat. And honestly this format far exceeded how I was going to prepare an opening statement. Kudos!
I think if nothing else, this should be the big TL;DR people take out of this. And the biggest consequence on why these long development times are truly unstable. Imagine needing to plan out from 2015 how your 2022 release needs to sell. A time where (with hindsight)
and many other factors I can and can't think of. It the biggest shot in the dark, and only gets darker as you lengthen the process.
Western studios mitigate this by monetizing their games more with all the now familiar tricks; lootboxes, battle passes, multiplayer centric gameplay, multiplayer expansions on single player games, cosmetics, etc. I think one thing that isn't mentioned much in this discourse is that Japan doesn't do this for their console games (They do it on mobile, but that's another discussion). They have a few (or a lot, for fighting games) cosmetic DLCs, one or two expansions, and that's it. FF16's pricing strategy is no different from FF13's back in 2010. Perhaps even "less greedy", since there's no FF 16-2 and 16-3 in sight. Only one expansion. FF7R only had a DLC expansion as well.
But no good deed goes unpunished I suppose. They want to respect the player's time and finances, but people complain nonetheless about the cost of games. They try to keep presentation values up, but are criticized for "abandoning the formula" (as if FF ever had a formula...). They deliver stuff players begged for decades to do but are only criticized again because this seemingly 150+ hour adventure they deliver didn't come in one fell swoop. And meanwhile the silent majority move over to the very F2P experiences the old guard chastise.
As you'd expect, these costs only grow as people demand more (but not paying more), without necessarily bringing in more people. The console market is stagnating, pc market is growing but also plateauing, and the mobile market is now over half of gaming's revenue. It's not sustainable, but it also doesn't seem like people really want to try and keep it up.
Another poignant point. There is a nice allure of the indie market, but many of the examples consumers laud would either be unaccaptable for a AAA company (Square is a great example for all these scopes. Remember Dungeon Encounters? Or Voice of Card's three games from Yoko Taro? No? Exactly). But even if they did do this and focused on small teams making smaller games: let's break it down:
So, what's needed to break even?
200k copies to start to be a success in their eyes over this fairly ambitious AA-ish scoped game. We could halve it back to 100k if you pay a AAA price, but in comes the argument of pricing vs. attracted audience (another topic I can spend another post elaborating on. But this is already too long). even 100k is quite a number to reach for a "AA" game, which still indirectly competes with the above Fortnites.
This is all to say that even "small games" quickly add up to millions for the smallest possible team if you want, as the meme goes, "shorter games with worse graphics made by people who are paid more to work less ". I'm already sort of breaking this by making a team as small as 10 people and giving them 2 years to ship, without counting QA, producers/managers, writing, voice acting, etc.
Thanks for sharing this in a non-Twitter format!
Really illuminating and well-articulated. I hope that everyone gives Navok's writing at least a partial read because people have been complaining about SE's press releases and general sales performance woes. I knew that they had some interesting expectations for ROI -- I've heard that typically it's development cost + marketing cost multiplied by a magic number (so $300M game + $100M marketing x 3 = $1.2B sales expectation) or something like that. I didn't know SE was pretending they were a hedge fund and basing their calculations against theoretical stock performance.
The part about being wary of releasing games too close to competing blockbusters is something I started tracking back in the old days of /r/JRPG's release date calendar because I wanted people to see how this dynamic played out in real-time. Smaller studios were frightened of releasing within weeks of a Halo or Call of Duty. But the thing about gaming is that, at least until live service games as Navok points out, some people would still pick up all the new releases on day one and while they had something specific they'd want to play that night, they'd get around to the others eventually. Or they'd at least get around to buying it the month of release while it was still very fresh. Those people are called fans. Companies should be cultivating all the good will with these fans as best as possible. But we never really see that from a lot of Japanese publishers (including Bamco until more recently), because it always seemed like corporate didn't value this customer relationship at all. It was always about brand loyalty for the executives. They sold a product and loyal customers had to buy it; who cared if they liked it or recommended it to their friends? So of course they were surprised when things changed in the early-/mid-2010s.
Navok laments the lack of sales to repeat customers for mainline Final Fantasy games, and for good reason, but the funny thing to me is that Square Enix has always had all the ingredients to the secret sauce. They have/had brand loyalty, they have name cachet and some inertia, they have developers who can do great things and they've invested a lot in those developers. They also have something that Navok didn't once mention: they have live services in the form of FFXI and FFXIV -- and there have been a lot of diehard fans there for basically a decade for corporate to learn from. So why hasn't SE capitalized on all of this in the last ~10 years? It's not because Fortnite stole their ice cream.
Thanks for putting this out in text format.
It's a very interesting discussion. What I'm left wondering, though, if this isn't a net positive for the actual gamers. As he wrote most games now are either 10/10 blowouts or massive flops.
Depends on your style of play. I don't particularly like nor want to attach myself to multiple GaaS, so I see it as a tragedy to lose all these high production single player games. Indies are nice, but I do have some bias as a graphics programmer to seek out stuff trying to push the hardware.
But for those Fortnite players, gaming has never been cheaper. You can get thousands of hours of constantly updating entertainment without ever spending a dime. That's a small miracle for such audiences.
I'm very open to opinions.
From where I stand, the Final Fantasy games just seem like they never took the next steps necessary. Other games are so much better at storytelling and having playable stories.
Why would your casual gamer pick up an FF game?
I don't get it.
I don't have a good reason for a "casual gamer", because RPGs from the get go (in both video games and its tabletop origins) weren't "casual" to begin with. It's flourishing now, but this genre 40 years ago was the very definition of the stereotypical "unpopular nerd activity". To be interested to begin with you needed to go off the beaten path of mainstream activities.
But as we know, DnD skyrocketed (potentially due to influencers showing a "cooler side"), Baldur's Gate 3 was a resouding success while being mainly developed outside of the US/Japan, and other activities like cosplay, LARPing, and animation are more popular than ever among western adults. So who knows what counts as "casual" these days?
Tangent aside, I'll at least explain why I still follow Final Fantasy:
Top notch presentation. You really can't get much better looking for a JRPG. Worse yet, few others even try to match Square Enix1. Tales of Arise was quite the looker itself, but it's been a real shame in retrospect considering that the most competitive JRPG to FF is Genshin Impact. AAA fidelity today for JRPGs mean choosing between Square Enix and a few Chinese mobile gacha that can cost hundreds to pull a single desired character. really speaks to the state of the genre.
Despite being a JRPG, Final Fantasy has traditionally done the best job taking in considerations from more than just typical anime tropes. They were never M rated games (until Type 0, and much later 16), but the games never felt like they talked down to the teens they marketed to. The early games weren't afraid to touch on concepts like War, Death, Betrayal and Redemption, Love, and Vengence. Later games would make take on more grandiose and "subtle" themes like environmentalism, identity, One's place in the world, Religion and tradition, and much more.
in a similar sentiment to #2, I appreciated seeing the story that would unfold. This is more for JRPGs in general but it is a primary difference that had JRPGs and WRPGs diverge as genres. WRPGs are more focused about inserting you into the world. The game merely providing an environmental setting to manipulate. JRPGs focused more on a tight, linear narrative and left the role playing to the gameplay (which was flashier than your average WRPG. Again, see #1). We can debate the pros/cons here for decades to come (and have for decades prior), but there's definitely an element of bonding over a shared experience with other fans compared to talking about how you decided to approach decision XYZ in a more open format.
This may be the cause of much discord among fans, but I do appreciate that FF is never satisfied with one way to play. Every numbered entry is a new world to explore (and as of 10 onward, usually headed by a new director's vision), and usually with a new battle system to figure out. You will never like every single FF equally, but I argue that it's hard to hate every single FF too. There's something for everyone if you have some slight interest in the franchise. How many other genres would have the gall to shift from a turned based game with a non-traditional leveling system to an online MMO in their next numbered title?
The answer is Dragonquest 10An Online MMO in 2001 on a console without built-in ethernet?FF was always a great showcase of what the next gen was capable of, and in the different ways to interpret this "stale" genre stereotyped for being "stand around and take turns hitting each other". I don't think anyone else would have figured out a system like FF7R's that gives a turned based feel to an Action RPG. Especially because you realize they spent a decade in several other games experimenting with what worked and what didn't. Losing that would definitely feel like losing a part of gaming.
1. This isn't to say that you need good graphics to be a playable JRPG. But if you've been a fan for decades, you see a very drastic and sudden decline in JRPGs around the PS3 era. With many franchises hibernating, crashing and burning, or simply stagnating over this gen. in Gen 7 it was reduced down to Square Enix and the Tales of series, with a few one offs here and there. By Gen 8, things petered out for everyone else. Even Persona 5 was launched on the PS3 back then in Japan only. in Some ways, Square's lineups are the last line of defense for showing the genre hasn't faded into obscurity.
There were quite a number of pretty good JRPGS released for gen 7 consoles that were not Final Fantasy nor Tales. Tri-Ace alone made a number of them. There were also games like Eternal Sonata by Tri-Crecendo (which is almost criminally overlooked for something so beautiful, IMHO), the quirky From Software game Enchanted Arms, and Game Republic’s Folktale. And those are just big examples on the expensive hardware with big budgets, completely ignoring the Wii (Xenoblade, anyone?) or DS/3DS, as well as the stuff that was simply never released outside of Asia.
The simple fact of the matter was that times were changing and that kind of game just wasn’t popular anymore. People were absolutely fed up with standard JRPG combat. So developers did everything they could do to change their gameplay loops and it had some very mixed reactions. Most of it was negative. Many companies tried instead to focus on the portable market but it was getting clear that the market was being crushed by mobile phones. Heck there isn’t really a portable market anymore; the Switch is hardly portable in the same way a gameboy or DS was.
I still question if this is really true. or if JRPGs are simply waiting for their Baldur's gate 3 or Breath of the Wild to suddenly reinvigorate the genre with new players. Who truly knows?
If it's worst case, it may be a poetic death. Among many things, Sakaguchi took inspiration from western Theartre in the Squaresoft era of FF, and maybe it's simply the fate of Theater to blend into the background as the larger populace care less about performance and more about "My adventure". And the lion's share of modern JRPGs falls to its own version of market capture lootbox GaaS character collector funded by whales.
Don't worry, pretty much every RPG studio you can think of (if they aren't already dead) has adapted to that. Even if ReBirth "flopped" (which I'm not entirely sure of), Ever Crisis made some billion dollars by now. On the other end of the stick, Tales has had 4 different smartphone games release and all have shut down by now (or are shutting down). They will 100% make a 5th one sometime in the next year or two. Even the legendary VN maker Key (known for Air, Clannad, Angel Beats, etc) were more or less saved by their own mobile game, Heaven Burns Red. And none of this is even mentioning how Cygames is the top of the Japanese food train with Uma Musume.
They aren't Genshin, but many are definitely profitable. The studios probably won't die/hibernate Gen 7 style, but they certainly will be moving away from the Old Guard if they choose to abandon the genre.
I remember being extremely impressed by Bravely Default. Unfortunately Bravely Default 2 was a disappointment to me. I never got around to Bravely Second either. Some changes definitely worked and drew people in, but you're right that the market isn't the same.
Regarding people being fed up with traditional turn based combat, is that true? The last mainline normal FF game was FFX, which did fantastic. Then came the MMO, then 12's weird mix, then 13's weird mix, then another MMO, and now action combat.
I don't see a decline. The series went from 7 to 8 to 9, then culminated in 10. At what point did interest start to wane?
Final Fantasy is only a tiny percentage of the RPG genre. RPGs used to be ubiquitous. There were tons of them coming out all of the time in the 80s and 90s, and they have basically disappeared today.
Keep in mind that the PS2, with Final Fantasies 10-12, was the 6th console generation, and even then Square Enix was moving away from traditional turn-based combat. Most of the notable RPGs from this era that used turn-based combat were doing a number of things to freshen up the concept, like Shadow Hearts' Ring of Fate system. I'd go so far as to say that by the end of that console generation interest in turn-based RPGs had not only waned, but had become a liability as people were starting to actively dislike them.
RPGs didn't disappear entirely during the 7th generation, of course, but they did become incredibly niche. Xseed and Niponichi became practically the only publishers interested in bringing JRPGs over, and as time went on they quickly became very low-budget and had pretty poor quality.
See, I would argue that there's a difference between what SH Covenant and Persona do (add a spin to turn based JRPGs) and what Final Fantasy does (throw it out altogether). Or the Dragon Quest strategy of not changing a single thing, and still being successful.
Neither Persona nor DQ feel the need to spend 100 million dollars on graphics, but both have excellent art direction, and I bet both series ultimately end up being more profitable (and less risky) than FF.
My overall point is that at no point did the formula fail for SE. Not ever. As interest waned, maybe it could have, but we will never know because SE abandoned the formula at the height of its popularity.
(PS I'm so happy you played Covenant, that game was excellent)
To be honest this seems like a complete non-sequitur. What about FF15 or FF16 lack “next steps”? If anything, the complaints were the opposite: those games tried too hard to be like a God of War or other modern AAA third person action game that they lost their much beloved identity.
To me, the FF games haven't taken steps in storytelling for years. That's where they're supposed to excel and win their audience.
FF16 compares unfavorably to The Witcher 3 in most respects (bar the terrible Witcher combat system). The pace is off, the characters are less believable, the story isn't as compelling, the game feels more closed off, the side quests feel less impactful.
Comparing unfavorably to a game that came out eight years earlier just isn't cutting it.
That's only one game. You could list many other older games that thwack FF15 and FF16.
I completely agree that the later FF games tried too hard to be a modern third person action game. Instead of fixing the core issues: telling stories in the same old way although others have found incredibly creative new ways of telling more compelling stories.
Even the FF cutscenes in the latest games just feel outdated to me, the pacing's just off. They aren't telling a compelling story.
Again, I'd love to hear arguments the other way around, but FF just feels like Pokemon or Yakuza: the same game over and over and over and over and over, with slight variations and a new skin. It's not nearly as bad as the annual versions of sports games, but it isn't tooooo far off either.
Both FF7 Remake and FF16 were nominated for best narrative at the Game Awards. Games also have a very broad spectrum of ways to incorporate story. Both Journey and Baldur's Gate 3 have celebrated stories that are on opposite ends of the spectrum in both length and word count. Storytelling is really not the root cause here.
I think there is merit to the idea that there is very little reason for someone to get invested in Final Fantasy. I'm not someone invested in the franchise, I've only played FF7R. The only thing I feel like I can expect to get out of any FF game is that I'll be getting some sort of fantasy adventure story. The old ones are turned based, the new ones are not. The aesthetics change pretty wildly between releases as well. A new FF game does not promise more of that good shit that you are already in to, because they come with a new story and possibly new gameplay. You're left with the assumption that you'll get a B+ experience that may come with chocobos.
I'd say they are games that probably do work fine through word of mouth, but the past couple are running through the obstacle of being locked to the PS5. For me that means I get to play the new ones after they are like a year old, but still full price. I think the comment in the Twitter thread about how single player experiences are fighting with with live service games rings true. I'm not married to online multiplayer, but any 60+ hour rpg is still gonna have to fight both my friends and my backlog to get my attention.
I've never gotten the (western?) internet hate for FF7 Remake or FF16. I enjoyed them a lot and they're exactly what I look for in modern single player games. Compelling story, gameplay that has a bit of action but doesn't get away in the story too much, and...well, a Square Enix or anime aesthetic.
The games I play the most are easily Final Fantasy XIV and Genshin Impact, with some occasional Splatoon. Most of what's popular now doesn't hold my interest anymore. (Except Baldur's Gate 3, which I anticipated for years and was blown away by how popular it actually became. That was anomalous.)
I don't want to be too derisive here, but I'll be blunt: the FF fandom by far has the most entitled fans-base in gaming. The series has continually pushed itself to meet the graphical demands of fans, but it's never enough. And it's not like this is an old phenomenon. I still remember the early FF16 footage with people thinking that it was simply an upscaled PS4 game exclusive to PS5. What game at that point in 2021 is there even to compare?
But to give them a fair interpretation, I also get it. There isn't necessarily a "Final Fantsy Fan". you have FF7 fans who may or may not like the direction of the remake, FF14 fans in a different medium, FF15 fans that may or may not be betrayed by FF versus 13, FF12 fans who love the Ivalice games, etc. Every entry has its drama. And I'm sure there's now FF16 fans (some from FF14, some who are brand new). There will be a good amount of overlap, but very few who truly like every entry.
The fanbase isn't united because their tastes are as different as the game types. The only particular connection is the brand, a vauge western-ish anime aesthetic, and some small motifs.
Hate might be too strong a word, but I played FF for a turn based JRPG experience, and it seems FF doesn't want to be in that market anymore. So I played Dragon Quest and Persona instead.
They traded markets. Which is fine, but then it's not surprising some people are bitter.
As a new player, I really enjoyed FF7 Remake. I was very easily charmed by the cast, and I found the combat system very fun. The thing they are going for, where it is mostly the same, but is still very clearly its own thing, makes it interesting for me. I can still fully understand people being mad that it's getting broken up into a trilogy though. I don't I'll ever get over The Hobbit being made into three movies, so I feel like I have some empathy for people being miffed that their favorite game ever got "remade" into something dramatically different. I also feel like it may just be in vogue to be anti Square Enix right now. They have pretty clearly fumbled the bag on multiple fronts for the past few years. It's very easy to paint them as incompetent and out of touch, in a similar vein to the way people treated mid 2010's Nintendo and Capcom.
I think you're on to something. Despite adopting modern game design (open worlds, real time combat, etc.), the signature feature of Final Fantasy, the story, has not really improved at all since the '90s. I don't even feel like Final Fantasy games have ever had particularly great stories.
I missed out on them as a kid because I had an N64, then an Xbox as a teenager, so I visited "classics" like Final Fantasy 7 as an adult some 10 years after they released. I found Cloud Strife to be an insufferable whiny kid. I can see why this game was seen as revolutionary in 1997; having any kind of meaningful story in a big budget game was still a pretty novel concept, and Final Fantasy certainly told big expansive stories, but they weren't great stories on their own. FF7 was outclassed just a year later by Metal Gear Solid. Their rate of improvement in this department has been practically glacial. Final Fantasy X, a popular contender for "Best Final Fantasy game", has some of the most atrocious dialog I've ever heard in a video game.
Caveat: I haven't played a modern FF aside from a couple hours in FF7 Remake. I was pleasantly surprised at how much more engaging the initial couple hours of story was with the remake.
My hang up with many AAA games is runtime. I find most games really struggle to hold my attention beyond 30 hours. I feel like the expectation for JRPGs now is 50+ hours (at a glance FFXVI in the 40s). As counter point let's look at Star Trek TNG, a season is approximately 19 hours. My impression is that most games cover about as much story as a season of TNG. So that 19 hours of story is spread across 40+ hours of game play.
I feel like the criticism of story and characters has more to do how they are stretched than the actual content. Give me a 15 hour critical path and I'll pay $60-$70. That's inline with buying or renting movies for a similar amount of content. If you want to pad out the game with side quests and make a completionist run longer (for the folks who want to maximize hours per dollar) go for it. But I'm not (generally) going to buy a 50+ hours commitment.
(I'm current playing through FromSoftware's catalog and at about 30 hours in Elden Ring. I love the game but still feel the play time fatigue, I'm probably a couple hours from putting it on pause until the DLC.)
The simple reason I don't get excited about Final Fantasy games is that I already thought Final Fantasy graphics were mindblowing back when I played 10. Graphics technology has gotten too advanced for me to really care about continued improvements.
But it feels like thats where so much if the effort on these huge budget AAA games goes is toward making the most of the next gen rendering capability, rather than advancing the JRPG genre.
A game like shadow of the colossus really benefitted from a remake to new technnology. The original low detail art style was great for making the forbidden lands feel like a desolate wasteland, while the remake allowed the forbidden lands to feel like a lush environment that was just separate from human civilization. I played the remake and thought "wow, this setting is beautiful, Im so glad I decided to buy this remake"
Meanwhile when I played the most recent Final Fantasy I distinctly remember stopping part way through a level in a desert and thinking "wow, this canyon feels really dull. Its really detailed but just feels hollow."
Basically I feel like Final Fantasy is underperforming conpared to what I think Square Enix ought to be capable of after doing this over a dozen times.
I enjoyed FF7 Remake. I enjoyed it differently from the original (which was a formative game), but I liked it regardless, quite a lot. I think there's a significant amount of people who loved the game and just don't bother to be part of these discussions (out there in the socials network). I'm looking forward to playing Rebirth... as soon as I can borrow a PS5.
I'm not going to spend hundreds of euros on a dedicated living room computer I don't need other than to play FF7 Rebirth and maybe a couple other games. If I could buy and play the game on the PC I would already have done so.
Now, in hindsight, we can all (including squeenix, apparently) see this exclusiveness as a major limiting factor for the sales on the series. But while I sympathize with the difficulty of making some of these choices many years in advance of the release date, no one is going to convince me that this specific result is somehow shocking or unpredictable. Come on. 2015 wasn't that long ago. We'd been playing Minecraft for six years. Roblox existed even longer. World of Warcraft even longer. And publishers and studios have been targeting cross-platform for many years now. What are they saying, the audience was expected to grow? Company executives are paid out the wazoo because they're supposed to be wise or experienced enough to make good decisions under real world circumstances. That's literally what they're supposed to bring to the table.
2015 was 9 years ago. And COVID sure as heck made is feel even longer. I am in an extremely different path of life now than before then. My barely middle school niece is now in college.
I sure wouldn't make any high stakes best based on nearly a decade ago.
Minecraft was a very succesful but ultimately indie niche in 2014. the 2.5b aquisition is what turned it from successful to the most played game in the world.
Roblox is a wonderful example. It has indeed existed for almost 20 years. I don't know the exact details, but the time in 2017/8 when it transformed into the "Gen Z Newgrounds" (but with microtransactions) was fairly drastic.
And the MMO wars is a story worthy of its own post. To sum it up: there's a good reason why only it and FF14 survived that long to begin with. and 14 infamously had to blow its own servers up to restart anew to get trust back. Also... FF14 exists; I don't think Square was in a rush to make the next MMO.
None of these were really bets to take back in 2015's time, especially not given Square's Portfolio. It networking infrastructure was far too slow and too late to think of competing in the Roblox arena.
You know, I really don't understand this sentiment. By this time FF13 launched on Xbox and 15 was planned for Xbox as well. Square was touching its base into Steam around this time. Square's always kept a stream of games coming on Nintendo's systems.
They have temporary exclusives, but square in the 00's was infamous for making sure every FF was ported to every new console until the end of time. It wasn't an 'if' so much as 'when'.
I don't think they aren't losing out on some "hype" factor by staggering ports either (which helps with better QA). Just look at the marketing buzz for KH on Steam, despite the fact that it's been on the PC platform for 3 years already. Then can drum up their own marketing if they really want to.
People may already have forgotten about it, but: COVID had, has, and will have huge effects on the industry and I don't think anyone called how drastic it would be at the time. The games industry is still seeing weekly layoffs happening, assumedly burned through all its pre-COVID production in 2022-2023, and is still a bit cold on investing or pitching for funding for the next big project. It may be over in the public conscious, but businesses will at the very least be feeling the effects through 2024 at the bare minimum.
The timing here is wrong. Minecraft was already the all time best selling PC game, and the console and mobile ports were also established prior to Microsoft's purchase.