Crono1973 said:
I think it will be ok. I think they can take more risks if they don't have to gamble everything on ONE big game per generation.
It's pretty sad that the NES saw three titles in 3 years. SNES saw three titles in 3 years. PS1 saw three titles in 3 years but with the PS2 began the slowdown with only 3 titles (not counting MMO's) in 5 years and this generation we have seen only ONE title in 5 years. If XIII-2 doesn't get delayed that's 2 titles in the longest console generation yet.
That I can agree with, certainly. I don't see anything wrong with them scaling back on things a bit, and more stringent deadlines will hopefully teach them to focus and not over-scope. I just worry about who's going to be behind the wheel.
Aeonknight said:
Games they've released within the last 5 years:
Crisis Core from 2007, sold a good 350,000 copies. Nothing huge, but was definately not a bad game (alot of people like it more than FF7 now)
Not me. Way too much of Nomura's self-indulgence. I'll acknowledge it was a decent game, though, even if the existentialist junk isn't really to my taste.
Still, 350,000 copies isn't really what you'd call "good." Generally speaking under 500,000 is considered "commercial failure and/or flop." As a handheld Crisis Core gets some leeway, but... they spent on it like it was a full-blown console game. Probably why there's a tinge of panic in Wada's press releases of late, and why there's supposedly a ton of friction between him and Nomura.
Dissidia, the first one sold 1 million copies back in '09. Enough to warrant a sequel:
Dissidia Duodecim, released a little over a year ago, didn't sell AS well, but still outsold the 3DS in terms of first week sales.
In point of fact I bought my PSP for them.
For those games, I will grant you that those are fine sales. The production scope was controlled enough that it could probably get away with under half that and still turn a tidy profit.
Then there's Kingdom hearts. Specifically Birth by Sleep. Released a little over a year ago, 800,000+ in japan alone.
Again, they spent on it like a full-blown console game. It probably came off more profitably for them than Crisis Core, but I have a difficult time believing they made enough to pay Leonard Nimoy.
If I'm being more serious, though, egh, the Kingdom Hearts franchise is in big trouble with regards to its sustainability. For one, look what worlds they had to force action into in Birth by Sleep. They ran out of ideas a long time ago.
More importantly to their future sales, though, think what happened with Chain of Memories and KH2 (most people didn't play Chain of Memories and had
no idea what was going on), then think about that three times over with KH3. To put this in perspective? Most people who
aren't hardcore KH fans don't
know about Birth by Sleep. They still think the trailer at the end of KH2 was for KH3.
Truth is, Square's narrowcasted the ever-loving shit out of this thing by spreading it across every system imaginable, and it's going to bite them in the hump like nothing else when they finally do get the balls to do a mainstream release and spend a big wad on it, mark my words.
Then there's that game that everyone seems to think is a failure, FF13. Released a year ago... again. 6.2 million copies worldwide.
Short-term it's the fastest-selling Final Fantasy game in history. Fastest-selling, but not best-selling. Pretty well in keeping with their usual numbers for an "average" title in the series, which is still better than most major productions. Trouble is, I don't think they made their money back even with 6.2 million copies--at least, not enough of it. The game still took about four years to make--four years of stagnation on a team of
three hundred people, which is bloody fucking enormous. This ranks it among the biggest productions of game development history, and whether you like the game or not it's difficult to justify based on the product turned out.
Before I go long-term, I want to address some other comments.
Yes, they absolutely BOMBED on FF14. Quite possibly a bigger flop than the Spirits Within movie.
Hard to say without a concrete idea of what the budget was like for that game, but I'm willing to bet you're right. At this point they've probably lost a mint on maintaining it for the few people who do play it.
But they still have a relatively decent track record I'd say. Those are not CoD or Skyrim sales numbers by any means, but they're holding their own for the time being. All it takes is a good game into the main series to put them back on top again. I still have some faith in em.
Getting back to FF13...
Thing is, they
used to pretty consistently make Call of Duty or Skyrim sales numbers. In fact, they epicly outsold any Western RPG franchise. FF7 and 10 are among "best-selling of all time" titles at about 10,million units apiece. That's up there with Call of Duty, Super Mario World, and Guitar Hero. The fact that a game that cost them many times the respective budgets of FF7 and 10 to build cracked in at around half that doesn't bode very well for them. Probably why they really ought to do what they're talking about here and try to be a bit more disciplined with their productions.
Long-term, it's a bit too soon to judge how the fanbase is going to deal with it... but I'm honestly much more concerned with how Square themselves are going to deal with it. Yoichi Wada reacted maybe the most sensibly, saying "this business model isn't sustainable and we've got to do something about this right now," but he may push into over-compensating by trying to "westernize" too much.
Plus, as many have pointed out, Square's production teams have already been spread way too thin; among the games you pointed out, four of them were simultaneous projects under Tetsuya Nomura's oversight,
along with several others, including Versus 13, The World Ends With You, and other Kingdom Hearts spinoffs. It's a situation that, from what I understand, he's very fed up with--and at this point for Square losing Nomura, who is essentially the company's face, would be an incredible loss.
And then there's Motomu Toriyama, the guy who's likely to end up directing future Final Fantasy titles. The genius who brought us FFX-2 and FF13; who has reacted
very stubbornly to criticism against his baby. I'll be perfectly clear on this right now: I really hate this ************. I feel like he can't rub two sticks together and have no confidence in his ability to direct a game. He sees storytelling as being mutually exclusive from interaction and exploration, is prone to making excuses for his mistakes, and as FF13 has shown he makes for a very weak project manager; case in point, the game spent three years stagnating in development hell with the team unable to cooperate on either the story
or design direction; both points that were meant to be his final say; before he finally threw up his hands and said, "screw it! We'll just make it up as we go along." As long as THIS GUY is in charge of the series? I don't see any good coming of it.
