AzrealMaximillion said:
Dora said:
Yeah, that's what we need. More remakes. Forget creativity, just throw money at older properties! People are magpies who like shiny, familiar things!
Well look what creativity did to Square Enix recently. They've lost 148 million dollars thanks to crappy original IPs. Hell, The upcoming FF14 is responsible for almost half of that loss. An FF7 remake would provide them with the money they need to not be a massive sinking ship right now. As I see it SqEnix is going to have another brush with bankruptcy soon, just like they did when the poured that massive amount of money into Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within. Sony had to bail them out of that colossal mess up.
Honestly I think that FF7 would be a lot more of a financial risk than you think. First off, you're talking about probably a years development time, minimum. Sure, that's faster than a lot of games these days, but it's still a colossal task to just make a game. There isn't a single line of code that you can just pull from the original. You have to make EVERYTHING from new. All you have is a the script and an outline of events, which while I grant you saves some time, that is not the big deal in terms of man hours. So its going to take a long ass time to do. FF7 is a big game, and you have to make everything all over again. Next up you have to deal with a full sequence of QA, not just to make sure that it works, but that its actually still worth playing. If you change anything you get bitched at, even if its retarded.
So, they can't start to recoup anything for a long time. Next up, all that development costs money. A lot of money. If you want high quality voice acting and such like, well you have to pay for it. FF7 has a LOT of dialog. This takes a lot of investment to see through, a LOT.
Finally, you have a finished product sitting on shelves for 50 bucks.
How many people are going to actually buy that ? Now yes, you can assume a decent level of sales from the nostalgia crowd, but SqNix don't need decent, they need a VAST seller. The vast majority of people who seriously give a damn already have the PSN version of FF7, and though you'll still get sales, not to the same degree you might want. Next up, you have the regular gamer crowd who haven't played FF7 since the new millennium. How many of them are going to buy a game that advertisers itself as being 'exactly the same' as one they played over ten years ago ? Add to that the lack of anything new (ie multilayer, extra ANYTHING to make it worthwhile) and you have what looks like a pretty anemic title in this day and age, even more so if you completed it first time.
Basically what I'm saying is that while a remake would guarantee a million or so sales, SqNix need ten times that for it to be genuinely worth it, and tbh I don't even know if there are enough PS3s to make that happen. For a PS3 only title, it would probably be on killzone 2 levels (2mil) and while that might make them a few bucks that doesn't help them.
All that assumes that they actually don't get crapped on by every reviewer on the internet (not just Yahtzee) for screwing it up and destroying everyone's dreams, which TBH I think is a near certainty no matter what they do. Looking back, everyone loves FF7 with nostalgia glasses on. In practice, even a perfect remake is going to remind them that even for its time ff7 was not a great innovator.
Basically, its a BIG risk to do it. Similar stuff has generally not succeeded, or at least not to a huge degree. There's a remake of HL in the HL2 source engine, and of Doom in the Doom 3 engine. Both of which are pretty damn awesome but not particularly popular or commercially viable.
If there was a time to do this it was 2007 on the anniversary. It would be a job for a small team to release in chapters via PSN over the course of a year or so, and charging say $15 bucks for the whole thing. Keep most everything the same (ie the same code), just update the battle sequences and higher res sprites for the rest. People would buy that. Hell I might buy that if I had a PS3. But a proper remake would be definitely a bigger gamble than SqNix are in a position to take atm.
