A small post regarding transcribing source, especially twitter. Please make sure to read the thread here.
Install Base introduces its brand-new Badge system. Check out the details here!
Check out the first release of Sales Design Gazette: A Video Game Sales Magazine at the thread here!
Honestly, that might be part of the problem here.... just going by the view numbers of State Of Play compared to the Nintendo Direct of the same month. Simply put, not a ton of attention with SOP.
Square's marketing honestly seems to be more of the same, and I don't think that you can do that now. I have been saying for years that if you are confident about your product, you have to put it in front of folks to see it. My example of that is Tekken 7, Bandai took that arcade game on the road in the US to preview the console product. They ended up in comic book conventions among other spots. It worked out every, every well for the franchise.
On this side note, I don't think that it has anything to say about you but it does point out something that gamers hate. The Blue Ocean Strategy. Nintendo's theory at the time over this was that new customers were not just going to come to a Nintendo product, they had to be introduced. You had to had to go out into the world and show what a Nintendo product is capable of, otherwise people will just go about their lives blissfully unaware that Nintendo exists for their gaming wants. Which would kill the company.
I do seem to remember FF fans seeming to be fairly excited about 16 when it was revealed. It seemed more "western" as I remember the conversation around it? Honestly though this is the only gaming forum I visit anymore, and I certainly never visited game specific forums or whatever so I'm probably not qualified to answer your question. Just remember lots on here getting hyped about the demo of 16.
Survival Horror isn't in some sort of giant renaissance, it's pretty much only RE holding the fort, so I don't think you can ask even the mighty RE4 to just crush all the other numbers by a mile from the get go. Cross Gen in 2023 isn't going to be a big % of sales. RE4R was/is ahead of every modern RE game in launch aligned, that's all you can ask for really.
For FFXVI's marketing, you should take into account the director's comment.
I don't think that the last SOP had a particularly high viewership. The one with Hogwards Legacy was high and I think Playstation Showcase had impressive numbers. Not to mention - who decided to start with Baby Steps???
The rule of thumb is that online discourse is rarely reflects the real world - a lot of online talks are still about JRPGs being system sellers so...No matter what forum, it always have that japan skewed discourse (probably due to people growing up with PS1 and PS2). It is always hilarious to see people hyping up some niche JRPG and then claim that nobody plays COD or Roblox.
Well it did not help that FF16 was not available on PC...And PC has a quite healthy FF14 community (don't know if it was bigger than PS or not though). By and large, I think that people who were planning to buy FF games, did buy it. But that's it. This specific FF game just did not translate to a bigger market.
I find it funny how people are constantly trying to disparage Xbox in regards of JRPGs. If you don't release games on of that specific genre on Xbox, you can't grow the community who play those games. Square Enix's result of selling PS consoles more (does FF even sell consoles at this point?) than to sell their games has finally caught up with them. There is a reason why other publishers are stopped doing time exclusive deals like Square Enix. Even if we exclude Xbox, not a single publisher locks their ips from PC because it is obvious for everybody that PC is an enormous platform.
I think FF7R will do better than FF16, but less than FF7R P1. The main problem with FF IP is - due to Square Enix releases - it basically being sold to people, who would have bought the game anyway.
FF16 had a lot going against it - no PC, no open world, no FF7 nostalgic factor, no JRPG (not sure if it is a plus or minus though).
This feels like a really disingenuous comment in so many ways.
FFXVI didnt meet the low end expectations for Square Enix but in the mid end of expectations.
Forums and youtubers aren't the best place to gouge interest, imo.
You are right. The sales drop in Japan covers almost the entirety of the discrepancy - since it opened at 336k in Japan vs FF7R's 702k.
They didn't say anything about mid end of expectations. That's your own insertion. They said it did not meet the high end of their expectations. If it was significant enough to comment on in the call, it'd likely be at the lower end of expectations. Not "mid-end". And low end of expectations would not be 2M or 2.5M. That'd be a ridiculous disaster. You're talking a 50% drop from FFXV on PS4 at that point. No way would SE have such a boneheaded expectation in the first place where they have a range of 2 million or whatever. That'd basically mean they were expecting the game to be a near flop by FF standards and none of the producer commentary for FFXVI indicates anything of the sort. They went into this looking to grow their base. You might as well just say their expectations were nothing if you're going to make that kind of speculative commentary.
i dont see FFXVI having worse legs that FFVIIR, that game disappeared from the NPD charts and PSN Digital Charts after the second month, FFXVI its still there on the third month.
For NPD charts, FFXVI looks like it will end up lower than FF7R. FFXVI is currently 10 on the Circana Year to Date, which is where FF7R ended up. And we have yet to get Starfield, EA FC, NBA, Spider-Man, Mario Wonder and Call of Duty. Assassin's Creed and Street Fighter legs have the potential to push it down further. While a part would be that the top part of the chart in 2023 is more robust than 2020, dropping 7+ positions isn't going to be explained by that
The thing is we have some facts we can go from; The reason why many Japanese studios and those making JRPGs stopped putting games on Xbox is because the terrible sales of their games on Xbox made it economically more feasible to sign exclusive deals with Sony anyway. As long as the Xbox ecosystem have so unfavourable views of JRPGs it doesn't really make much sense to focus on that ecosystem. Xbox being so heavily US focused and inspired makes it a terrible place for the JRPG genre which is unlikely to change in the future. Sure maybe they put it out on Xbox and take the few thousands sales there as a win anyway, but the audience isn't there at all. Xbox have their own RPGs that make more sense on that ecosystem like the games Bethesda are making, putting Dragon quest and Final Fantasy there will not make any numbers to speak of. If even JRPG games on the PS5 is struggling to gain the same traction as before with that ecosystem being much more favorable of JRPG games imagine the terrible sales on an Xbox, much less than they get from Sony previously, though Sony is unlikely to sign the deals they used to do with Square Enix due to their gradual declining sales makes it less profitable to sign exslusives with them anymore, leading Square Enix to want all the breadcrumb sales they can get from Xbox owners.
Mario Kart 8 was significantly bigger in 2020 than in 2023. It had 8.64 sell in for April through December in 2020. In 2022, it had only 6.3M. If we compare Q1 results, while 2023 is higher than 2022 at 1.67 (1.48 in 2022), they are far below 2020 which was 1.97. Super Mario 3D All-Stars also shipped 8.32 million that year. Physical alone would have them above FF7 Remake that year globally. Marvel's Avengers is also the second best selling superhero game at launch, only behind PS4 Spider-Man. It's not like we're talking about games that are below Dead Island 2/FFXVI tier. It's not that much worse than 2023.
I believe the sales for FFXVI would have been demonstrably worse without the demo. Although somewhat anecdotal, the hype for the game was practically nonexistent before the demo was released.
Yeah the demo probably saved that game from being a Forspoken bomb, the game had like no hype at all before the demo, everyone compared the hype of FF16 compared to FF7 rebirth and asked why the hype was so much bigger for FF7 rebirth, so if anything as you said the demo helped narrow the huge gape that existed before the demo with FF16 compared to FF7 rebirth. For real evidence we can see that preorders were cathastropically low for FF16 before the release of the demo, which collaborates the notion that FF16 was lacking in hype.
Again, this means nothing. This is just anecdotal and people parroting each other in a circular way to build this narrative. SE isn't setting expectations for FFXVI two weeks before its release. They will have a game plan, like any company, long before the game's release and they'll be tracking metrics over a long period of time leading to release. They had their expectations, and FFXVI came in at the lower end of them.
If you look at the preorders of FF16 they were really catastrophically low before the release of the demo, really far behind other FF preorder figures. The demo led to the preorders hitting up a fair bit. So its fair to assume that the modest release of FF16 would have been even worse without the demo. The game would likely have been an outright bomb due to complete lack of interest even close to release like FF16 was at the time.
I believe there were tweets by an industry analyst before the demo released that stated that preorders were very low. I just can't remember who it was. As you stated earlier, all SE said was that the sales weren't at the high end of their expectations. I honestly think the game would have struggled to meet the low end of their expectations without the demo. Once the demo released, the game shot up the charts on Amazon. It's clear why that happened. The demo was viewed much more positively than any other marketing materials SE had released to that point.
Catastrophically low? So you know what the pre-order numbers were? Can you share those with us? As well as the pre-order numbers for FFXV and FFVIIR so we can make a comparison?
There was no industry analyst. It was a tweet or post from a journalist (ex-journalist?) who said SE were slightly concerned about pre-orders for FFXVI. That's it.
Thanks for the correction. However, that doesn't dispute the fact that the game did much better on Amazon charts once the demo released.
It also doesn't change the demo did not have any impact worth mentioning. Doing better on Amazon charts doesn't mean a whole lot unless you actually have numbers. What we do know from SE themselves however is that game fell within their range of expectations, and that is set long before the demo was ever a thing.
We'll just have to agree to disagree. There's no way to have specific quantitative data to back my argument up, but I think the improvement on Amazon is a pretty solid indicator.
Not sure what you mean because all demos are designed to increase engagement. You don't make a demo, especially a pre-release demo and not expect it to drive sales. The expectations are going to include increase from the demo though you can't be sure of the exact effects of it. The debatable part is the scale of the effect of the demo, not that the demo didn't have any impact.
This is all just conjecture though. There is no way to quantify exactly how much VIIR going PS+ impacted sales but we know objectively that there was an impact of some level. If I was only casually interested in VIIR or was waiting for a discount and caught wind of it being absolutely free I would just play it that way without a second thought. That's probably the mindset for a lot of people when it comes to Sea of Stars.
