The Woes of Square Enix: Final Fantasy

or, sayonara you greasy little otaku

the numbers and the liars

This past summer, Square Enix announced that Final Fantasy XVI and Final Fantasy VII Rebirth did not meet profit expectations (emphasis mine, as the kids say).

There are a lot of ways to read this. Most seem to just take Square Enix’s word for it. Which, fair enough. They’re the ones justifying their decisions to their board of besuited goblins.

But no one really seems to wonder what the profit expectation was, or if such a thing were even reasonable or feasible, especially when launching on a single platform that has struggled to gain the traction and install base of its predecessor. It has led SE to now launch both games on PC, which should increase the sales substantially, one hopes.

We don’t know what the sales figures actually are for either game, but we know FFXVI sold 3 million copies in its first week. We know FFVII Remake sold 3.5 million in three days and seven million by the end of 2023. We know FFXV sold five million in its first day and has since sold more than ten million copies, as of 2022. We know FFXIV had thirty million users by January of this year. This makes FFXV and FXIV two of the bestselling Final Fantasy games to date.

We know FFVII Rebirth has sold slower, but we don’t really know how much slower or how many millions it’s sold even all these months later. But I think it’s fair to say that it’s sold slower than FFXVI, FFVII Remake, and FFXV. But I think these numbers tell us something on their own.

Final Fantasy XV launched on PS4 and Xbox One. It sold five million in one day. The PS4 was the second bestselling console of all time, if you exclude handheld consoles (Nintendo Switch included, though that hadn’t even been released by 2016). As of right now, it’s sold nearly 120 million units. When you add the Xbox One numbers to that (almost 60 million), the install base for FFXV in 2016 was just quite large. True, it wasn’t the 180 million it would be right at this moment, but I would imagine that there were at least 100 million owners of the PS4 and Xbox One when FFXV was released.

When FFVII Remake was released in 2020, it was exclusively on the PS4, again, to an install base close to 100 million people.

FFXVI and FFVII Rebirth were, until last week, available only on the PS5, which currently has an install base of about 60 million. So about 5%-10% of PS5 owners bought FFXVI the first week.

This is similar to the percentage of XboxOne/PS4 owners who bought FFXV in 2016 and PS4 owners who bought FFVII Remake in 2020.

So how well were the goblins at SE expecting FFXVI and FFVII Rebirth to sell?

And I think that’s the real question here. Or at least one of them.

Is Final Fantasy in decline or are we running facefirst into an immovable wall called growth mindset.

If you’ve ever worked for a company or listened to a podcast with some apparent business savant, you’ve probably heard the phrase, If you’re not growing, you’re shrinking.

Every company in every industry expects growth. Typically at least 3% growth, though often executives demand more unreasonable numbers like 10% growth. Sometimes they’ll even demand 10% growth in new business, which means healthy growth of existing business is still considered a failure.

And so I think it’s safe to assume that the board at Square Enix wanted to see unrealistic growth, especially when you consider the supply chain catastrophe of the PS5, which led to a throttling of the potential install base for a few years, causing the PS5 to now trail behind Sony expectation.

alas, poor Yorick

And all of this is happening at a very strange time in the games industry, where consoles like the Playstation and Xbox may be little more than a memory in several years.

Each console generation has come with the expectations of better graphics, stronger hardware, etc. But I don’t think we’ll ever see a jump in graphics as drastic as that from the PS1 to the PS2. Especially if, like me, you moved from the N64 to the PS2.

And now graphics across the board are so good for AAA games that Red Dead Redemption 2, now six years old, still looks as good or better than just about anything that’s come since.

While we’re at it, compare the difference between FFIX’s cutscenes on the PS1 in 2000 to FFX on the PS2 in 2001.

Honestly, had graphics never progressed from how FFX looked, I would still be satisfied.

But the console war, as we’ve understood it for thirty years, is over.

It’s all over.

Will we someday see a PS6? Probably, but I doubt we’ll see a PS7 and I know we will never see a PS8. Microsoft is basically exiting the console market as it attempts to make gaming’s Netflix, though it’s also flailing somewhat spectacularly and hilariously. I do think Nintendo will stay in the console market, but they got out of the hardware arms race several generations ago. This has led to two of the bestselling consoles of all time sandwiching a pretty substantial failure of a console, but I suspect the Switch 2, or whatever they call the Switch’s successor, will be another enormous success.

Though competition in the handheld market from Valve makes a repeat of the Switch’s success quite a bit murkier.

But the numbers for the 9th Console Generation are just bleak. PS5 is around 60 million sold and the new Xbox Series X/S have sold about 20 million units. Typically, four years into a console generation would be considered the midpoint of that generation, heading towards the backhalf, and you frontload those sales since far more will happen early in a console life than later.

But the PS4 chugs along, 11 years later. The Switch is 7 years old and while there’s likely a new generation coming I don’t really think the new hardware is necessary for any but the hardcore gearheads who want to play Elden Ring on a Gameboy.

In short, I think the console arms race has ended. We’ve achieved Peak Graphics and we achieved it at least 4-7 years ago. The biggest gaming successes of the last decade are from indie studios with teams of 50 or fewer who have made games outselling their AAA competition.

Games that look like they’re thirty years old but play like the future. Meanwhile, AAA games are always eating their own tail because of how long development cycles have ballooned.

If a console generation lasts roughly 5-8 years and the development cycle for a AAA game is 4-8 years, games are, by the cruel fact of time, old before they’re even new. And that’s not even to mention the difficulty of maintaining a creative vision when you’re overseeing a team of literal thousands spread across at least one continent. But I think I’ve said that elsewhere already a dozen times so no need to repeat myself here.

a story of fandom

Final Fantasy is a series in decline. And I say this as a noted Final Fantasy lover¹.

But if we look back on the series over the last twenty years, it’s the story of a franchise failing to satisfy players and often even critics.

Final Fantasy XI was an MMORPG, which, by its nature, excluded a lot of Final Fantasy fans. Myself included. And not because I had no interest in playing an FF MMORPG but because I had no way to play a game like that and definitely had no way to convince my parents to pay a subscription for a game in 2002. Final Fantasy XII, despite being genuinely amazing, was much hated when it came out in 2006 (it has been rehabilitated, as is always the case in fandoms). Final Fantasy XIII was infamously hated by critics and fans. While it has its defenders and its sequels especially have their fans, none of these boosted Final Fantasy as a franchise and brand. If anything, it was the moment many people gave up on the series. Final Fantasy XIV then had such a disastrous launch in 2010 that it was shutdown and redone from the ground up, eventually relaunching in 2013 to become the juggernaut it now is. But, again, it’s an MMORPG and so people like me will likely never touch it.

I just don’t have the time to play a 500 hour game and I play too inconsistently to want to pay a monthly subscription.

But people waited six years for another singleplayer mainline Final Fantasy game only to be met with Final Fantasy XV. I’m a big defender of this game and have many fond memories of it, since it brought me back into gaming (I even restarted playing it yesterday), but the game has many, many problems and weaknesses. And while it’s one of the bestselling games in the franchise, it was not a critical success.

Fans were growing increasingly unhappy with the series. And while this is the story of every fandom in the social media age, it is worth acknowledging that Final Fantasy’s goodwill built through the 90s was fading fast as we marched towards the pandemic. And by then, Final Fantasy had more years of fan disappointment (2002-2019) than it ever had of success and acclaim (1986-2001).

Final Fantasy VII Remake was a critical success and a truly great game. Final Fantasy XVI was a critical success but extremely divisive among fans and those strong sales from the first week dropped off by 90% come week two.

While FFVII Rebirth is a critical success, it’s also been controversial and has not sold as well as the other recent games in the franchise. It is a serious contender for Game of the Year, though, which will likely spike sales.

This comes after a few years of Square Enix dabbling with NFTs and after the SE president said:

We intend to be aggressive in applying AI and other cutting-edge technologies to both our content development and publishing functions.²

NFTs and using AI in game development are not popular among gamers, to say the least.

And so fans have slowly been turning on Final Fantasy. More than that, Square Enix seem to be failing to appeal to new gamers.

While Final Fantasy VII is a game much beloved, with people wanting a remake almost as soon as it was out, that remake mostly appeals to people who were between the ages of ten and twenty in 1997.

Do people born in 2002 care that much about the remake for a game that came out before they were born?

Hard to say!

It sure did appeal to me, and I didn’t even like Final Fantasy VII when I played it as a preteen. Even so, I didn’t play it until it was available for free with my PS+ subscription that I forgot to cancel. But the hard truth of Final Fantasy is that it’s been a long time since they released something that is much beloved by fans and a critical success.

But this has always been the case with Final Fantasy. And I can tell you that because I was alive almost the whole time it’s been around.

I was there when Final Fantasy X came out. It was much loved by FF fans but there were also a lot of people (myself included) who thought it was very bad. My view has softened considerably since I stopped being 15, but that was the state of the fandom even in 2001.

What was new was often deemed as bad.

Of course, I don’t really fall into that camp since my favorite game of all time is Final Fantasy IX, released a year before FFX. And we could spend a dozen hours with me explaining why IX and not X, but we all have to get on with our lives.

Final Fantasy VIII was also seen as a failure to many FF fans when it came out for the simple reason that it wasn’t FFVII. I mean, even FFIX was, for a long time, sort of the forgotten stepchild of the franchise, released months before the PS2 came out.

Each Final Fantasy game is looked at with distrust by huge swaths of the fandom. And this is not a problem specific to FF fans but to fandom more broadly, and it’s a tendency that has gotten far worse in the social media age.

I share these because I find them interesting reactions to the FF discourse happening. And I think many people around my age fell into a similar kind of trajectory.

For many, the series did begin with FFVII and it may as well have ended with FFX. And, like I said, FFVIII, FFIX, and FFX were not kindly received by many people when they were new. All of them are much loved now, though.

Again, that’s fandom.

The biggest barrier for Final Fantasy, as I see it, is one of innovation.

Innovation always leads to risk. Risk of alienating the core fans. Risk of something new being rather undesirable, as it turns out.

Contrast this with Dragon Quest, the other juggernaut of the JRPG, and you see it quite clearly. Though it is myopic to say that DQ doesn’t innovate (we wouldn’t have Harvest Moon, Pokemon, or dozens of other genres without the DQ series), it’s also true that DQ sticks to its core quite tightly. Characters and situations from one game could be transplanted to another numbered game and fit just fine. The battle system is very similar even between DQI and DQXI.

But Final Fantasy has striven to make each game new. New even to itself. Often, this meant building an engine from the ground up for the game (the story behind FFXV has much to do with this), with new combat systems, new minigames, new perspectives, new visual aesthetics, but most importantly was increasing the cinematic nature of the series.

You see this even with the opening of Final Fantasy I, which stood as a gauntlet thrown down to Dragon Quest I and II. But we especially saw this with the opening of FFIV, the airship ripping over the landscape. FFVI was a graphical marvel upon release and FFVII was famously a graphical monument and then FFX, as demonstrated by the cutscene above, reached for full on cinematic production.

Dragon Quest, on the other hand, has continued to make game that are visually quite similar, that don’t require new cutting edge hardware to play. I mean, DQXI looks like it could have been released in 2007 rather than 2017.

And it’s true that each new FF game looks beautiful. For all that I may say about FFXIII, it remains a gorgeous looking game, attempting to erode the visual differences between cutscene and gameplay.

An admirable goal, but I also think it’s led to this downfall.

the future

The future of Final Fantasy will, foolishly, continue to hinge on making the biggest, most beautiful games on hardware that can barely support it, but I think something that many fans want and something that would bring the series to many new fans is if they released a 2D Final Fantasy again.

Even give us that 2DHD look from Octopath Traveler and the upcoming DQIII remake.

It won’t be FFXVII, because I’m sure they’re already planning on that being the most beautiful game to ever exist, but make FFXVIII be the best looking pixelart to ever come around. Give us a story that coheres (a struggle since FFX) from beginning to end. Give us a beautiful cast of people we can love and hate but ultimately root for.

And I do think that graphical innovation does get in the way of story. I don’t think it should but that’s the nature of the beast, I’m afraid. And so I’d prefer—and I think many, many others would also prefer—a return to the basics, to the 90s.

I mean, Square Enix put out Octopath Traveler II, which was on some Best of the Year list in 2023. It sold a million copies in just a few months, but it did that with a fraction of the development time and development cost when compared to, say, FFXVI which came out later that same year.

But I fear that the video game’s industry’s obsession with chasing Hollywood visual storytelling is also causing it to fail the same way Hollywood is currently failing. Studios put all their hopes in a big tentpole release like FFXVI or Avengers 7 (or whatever number we’re on), which needs to make half a billion dollars just to break even.

And it’s worth remembering that Squaresoft, the company behind Final Fantasy, already died in the late 90s. It had to merge with Enix, its rival, in order to stay afloat. So it is possible that if Square Enix swings big with FFXVII and misses, we may not get a chance to see Final Fantasy XVIII.

And that would be a shame, yes.

But I think the future of videogames are the smaller indie games picking up the FF torch. I don’t think we’ve yet seen one as good as FFVI or IX or even IV, honestly, but I am hopeful.

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Free books:

• Late Summer Genre Fusion

• Beastly Books

• Dystopian Fantasy Books

1. Here are my reviews of several FF games:

• Final Fantasy IV

• Final Fantasy V

• Final Fantasy VI

• Final Fantasy VII Remake

• Final Fantasy XV

2. A New Year's Letter from the President