Final Fantasy's sales crisis is also an identity crisis | Opinion

The news that Square Enix considers its two major Final Fantasy titles in the past year – Final Fantasy 16 and Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth – to have missed their sales targets won't be a surprise to many people in the industry. On the contrary, this outcome was so predictable that it's provoked all manner of exaggerated eye-rolling.

Square Enix has form in this department, after all. Its most famous public lament for the under-performance of a key title (despite selling many millions of copies) was for Tomb Raider.

But since then, this tactic has become a fairly standard part of its financial communications, leading many to believe that the company's internal sales estimates are insanely out of touch with reality.

There's some validity to that claim – Square Enix doesn't generally seem to be very good at setting realistic targets for its games, and it's tempting to suggest that the problem is one of motivated reasoning.

This is a company that's struggled, perhaps more than most, to keep development budgets and timescales under control. It's not unfair to wonder if part of the reason for major titles so often missing their sales targets is because those target figures were calculated, somewhat wishfully, on the basis of how many sales would be needed to cover an over-inflated budget, rather than a realistic assessment of the market conditions for that title.

Although this kind of reasoning is not usually overt, it's not uncommon across the industry – large projects often become juggernauts that nobody wants to stand in front of and risk being rolled over, so numbers and projections get fudged when they suggest inconvenient truths about commercial viability.

In this specific case, however, I don't think Square Enix's tendency to over-inflate its projections is really to blame. These games have underperformed quite badly by a much more simple metric, one that no publisher on earth would be happy about – they have failed to match or exceed the sales of their direct predecessors.

By restricting the addressable market for the games, Square Enix made it almost an inevitability that their sales would disappoint

FF7 Rebirth's sales are lagging the sales of FF7 Remake, the previous instalment in this remake-cum-sequel saga, while FF16's sales are tracking quite a long way behind those of FF15, the previous mainline entry in the series.

Other internal projections or development cost concerns notwithstanding, this is disappointing performance for the franchise – these games are still multi-million sellers, but the trend line is not healthy.Lots of people have been quick to point the finger of blame at Square Enix's decision to make these games into PS5 exclusives at launch, with the PC version of 16 only arriving very belatedly (well over a year after the PS5 launch) this week.

The argument is simple; by restricting the addressable market for the games, Square Enix made it almost an inevitability that their sales would disappoint.

Granted, FF7 Remake was also PlayStation-exclusive, but it launched on the PS4 at a point when it had a much larger installed base. FF15, on the other hand, was cross-platform on PS4 and Xbox One at launch (neither game launched on PC until over a year later, though).

There's some logic to the argument that platform exclusivity is a significant restriction on sales potential, of course – I'm especially sympathetic to the argument that the current economic climate has made the notion of people buying an entire console to play a game into a very a tough sell, making it more important than ever to meet your consumers where they are. I don't think, however, that the numbers add up particularly neatly for the platform exclusivity argument – and while it's not possible to make a robust defence of Square Enix's platform strategy without knowing what kind of benefits it negotiated with Sony (which could well have made it into absolutely the right choice commercially), it's at least fair to say that it's not obvious that this was a strategic error.

Square Enix would benefit at least somewhat from speeding up its PC release schedule

For Rebirth, certainly, the PS5 installed base has been a limiting factor – Remake launched late in the lifespan of PS4 and could address an immense installed base, as well as enjoying another sales boost when the PS5 version came out down the line.

Rebirth faces a tough comparison as a consequence – but it's far from clear that launching on other platforms would have helped very much. Xbox Series sales are tracking a long way behind PS5 sales, and software attach rates for the console don't seem to be very healthy (perhaps unsurprisingly given the focus on Game Pass).

PC is probably a more promising platform, and I do think Square Enix would benefit at least somewhat from speeding up its PC release schedule – making PC gamers wait for more than a year post-launch is undoubtedly hurting sales – but it's very unlikely that the difference would have made up millions of sales.

FF16 is a different case, since the installed base of PS5 at its launch was actually very comparable with the position of PS4 when FF15 launched in 2016. Square Enix's willingness to accept an exclusivity deal for FF16 was probably informed in no small part by the fairly miserable underperformance of the Xbox One version of that game. The argument that an Xbox Series version of FF16 would have made a big difference to its sales isn't supported at all by looking at how things panned out for FF15.

Again, an earlier or even simultaneous launch for a PC version could have made a more impressive dent, but it's not clear how significant it would have been. The available data, then, doesn't provide easy or simple support for the hypothesis that platform exclusivity is the villain of this piece. That could be part of the answer, but more broadly, I'd argue that for a real understanding of what's happening here you have to look to the management of the Final Fantasy brand overall in recent decades.

At one time, this was the premier JRPG brand; for much of the world, it was about the only JRPG brand many consumers knew. There was a very clear sense of what you'd be getting if you bought one of these games – each iteration brought significant reinvention, but these were always identifiably similar in key ways, ranging from story themes and structures to overarching concepts in the gameplay.

Now, though, I'm honestly not sure what Final Fantasy means as a brand – I don't know what it's supposed to mean to me, as someone who's played these games for nearly 30 years, and I certainly don't know what Square Enix thinks the Final Fantasy brand represents to consumers more broadly.

The available data doesn't provide easy support that platform exclusivity is the villain... For a real understanding you have to look to the management of the Final Fantasy brand overall in recent decades

The appetite for reinvention which was a staple of the series from the outset has been twisted into an excuse to make entirely different types of game, not as experimental side-projects (which has always been a part of the brand, and has resulted in both some classic titles and some absolute dross over the years), but as mainline entries in the series.

Games like FF15 and FF16 are almost entirely divorced from the legacy of the series and the expectations of existing fans, tied to the franchise only by a shallow application of window dressing in the form of a few visual and naming elements. This is not just a 'they don't make them how they used to' complaint from a long-suffering fan; it's an approach that has genuinely left Final Fantasy in a very uncomfortable place as a brand. Despite its long and storied legacy, in the eyes of most consumers it's now only as good as its last outing, because the chasing of new genres and the peculiar sense that the company is actually somewhat ashamed of its prize IP being a JRPG has left the series without a firm footing in its own past.

FF7 Remake, of course, had the beloved classic status of the original FF7 to build upon, and much of its sales success can be attributed to that – but the second game in that mini-series was always going to have to live or die by consumers' estimations of Remake, not of the original game.

Remake was fondly received, but acclaim for it was far from universal. It was probably inevitable that there would be sales attrition for the sequel, platform issues notwithstanding, since some not-insignificant percentage of people were put off by decisions in the first game – things like introducing fast-paced action-game combat, or making the game, despite its "Remake" title, into a quasi-sequel to the not-entirely-beloved FF7 expanded universe media.

I certainly don't know what Square Enix thinks the Final Fantasy brand represents to consumers more broadly

Rebirth has been similarly divisive with some fraction of its audience; the company should steel itself for the likelihood of further diminishing returns as it hits the third instalment of the 7 Remake series. Things are tougher for the mainline series. The last outing there was FF15 – which sold very well, with ten million unit sales making it into one of the best-selling FF games of all time, but is generally remembered quite poorly.

In hindsight, many players were nonplussed by the consequences of Square Enix's ambition to make the game into the heart of a cross-media experience – slicing out large parts of the story and background to use for movies, anime shows, and DLC chapters left much of the actual experience of the game feeling hollow, incomplete, and unfinished.

FF16 thus faced twin challenges: convincing FF's long standing fans that things were back on track after the commercially successful but not well regarded FF15, while also trying to expand the appeal of the franchise by convincing Final Fantasy refuseniks and newcomers that this was a new kind of game, something they'd be interested in. It doesn't seem that either of those goals was accomplished in a satisfactory way.

Many series fans seem unhappy that FF16 was essentially a pure action game, with all pretense of actually being an RPG of any description stripped away. For outsiders to the series, however, even embracing this Devil May Cry style gameplay didn't do much to convince them that this is anything more than a lot of melodramatic highly-coiffed twinks yelling at each other about crystals. The real bright spot for the franchise in recent years, the success of FF7 Remake aside, has been the MMORPG FF14, which has generally been incredibly well received and is often described by fans as the best mainline FF game in decades.

Putting FF14 director Naoki Yoshida in charge of FF16 was clearly meant to harness some of that success. It didn't work – though the MMORPG background of the designers certainly shone through in the interminable boss battles which all had a litany of health bar after health bar to chip away at – but it should, in theory, have driven sales among the FF14 fans who have been hanging off every word from 'Yoshi-P' about game updates for years.

This brings us back to the platform issue though, and is part of the reason why I think Square Enix's slow PC releases, not its ignoring of the largely irrelevant (for this franchise) Xbox, is a genuine part of the problem.

Ironically, even as FF seems to struggle with both an identity crisis and a sales slump, JRPGs more generally are actually in pretty good health

FF14 is a success on PlayStation, of course, but like most MMOs, it's primarily a PC title and its most hardcore fans – the ones most likely to run out and preorder a new game from the same director – are playing on PC. Instead of being able to pre-order, that audience had a year-long wait coloured by largely negative word of mouth – nobody should be surprised that the PC launch is a damp squib. The problem, then, is nothing quite so simple as a mistake in platform targeting – which might easily be rectified by moving future releases to a multi-platform strategy. Square Enix certainly needs to improve its approach on PC, but even that will only be fiddling in the margins of the problems Final Fantasy has as a brand right now.

Those problems all arguably trace back to Square Enix's own deeply held belief that this game is its mainstream pillar franchise – which means that a major Final Fantasy game has to be everything to everyone, a gigantic mainstream hit on the level of a Call of Duty or even a GTA.

But that ignores the reality of what Final Fantasy has been throughout its history. It was at the vanguard of JRPGs, yes, but the moments when that genre (and Final Fantasy itself) brushed up against mainstream success and acceptance were the exception, not the rule. It's a niche genre, one which benefits from having an insanely devoted fanbase (and thus lots of merchandise sales and opportunities for ancillary revenue) – but overtly chasing mainstream success requires taking major steps away from what makes that genre appealing to its core fans in the first place.

Ironically, even as Final Fantasy seems to struggle with both an identity crisis and a sales slump, JRPGs more generally are actually in pretty good health. Flagship genre titles like Persona and Like A Dragon are very different to what Final Fantasy has become – likely having only a fraction of the development budget, for a start, but embracing their genre roots in ways that have delighted fans while also helping to control development costs to some degree.

I don't know if that's a model Final Fantasy could ever return to – perhaps after years of pushing in the opposite direction, expectations are simply set too differently for that to ever work – but at the very least, those are the types of games Square Enix should be looking at carefully as it makes strategic decisions about what kind of development scale and budget is actually justifiable for Final Fantasy given the audience and market it has