• Hey, guest user. Hope you're enjoying NeoGAF! Have you considered registering for an account? Come join us and add your take to the daily discourse.

Europe game sales 2024: dragon age TV, SW Outlaws, FF7 rebirth - all out of top 30

They simply chose the wrong path, or to be more precise, greed ruined them. There was absolutely no reason to split one 40-hour game into 3 parts and increase its duration by 3-4 times. All they had to do was what Capcom does and their recipe for Remakes - take an old game, create a neat remake of a classic, refresh it a little in places so that it looks normal from a gameplay point of view and make nice modern graphics, that's all. It would have been one game for 40-60 hours, on 2 disks and everything would have been great for them and there would have been no problems with sales.

In the end, they still have one more game left, they still need to finish the ending, and now they still have to push a filler for 20-30 hours into the ending to justify the price of $70, and all this will lead to a situation where, in the end, in the time that all the remakes are running, the original can be played 3-4 times from start to finish.
This is the worst part of the Remake Trilogy from a capitalist standpoint. Instead of making 1 game which would be much cheaper and faster to make and sell many copies, they decided to make 3 games, spend a lot more money, invest time and employee resources that could otherwise be used to make other games, and sell fewer copies making less money overall across 3 games. Square Enix was so blinded by their greed they quite literally chose the worst possible option when remaking FFVII
 
Last edited:

Mayar

Member
This is the worst part of the Remake Trilogy from a capitalist standpoint. Instead of making 1 game which would be much cheaper and faster to make and sell many copies, they decided to make 3 games, spend a lot more money, invest time and employee resources that could otherwise be used to make other games, and sell fewer copies making less money overall across 3 games. Square Enix was so blinded by their greed they quite literally chose the worst possible option when remaking FFVII
Well, they recently had a call, so to speak, which I hope woke them up. It's a remake of Dragon Quest 3 - which sold over 2,000,000 copies. The difference is that in the case of DQ3 it was a lovingly made remake of a classic, and players got what they were waiting for. And in the case of FF7 and its remakes it was a pure attempt to make money on a famous brand, they could have done exactly the same as with DQ3 and people would have just thanked them for it and they would have had sales, but no, inflating the game 4 times and selling 3 times for $70 turned out to be more important.
 

Boss Mog

Member
People sleeping on Rebirth is honestly disgusting.
I kind of expected it because so many people whined about the first one , that it wasn't faithful to the original. Of course it's not supposed to be since it's a new game but that didn't seem to matter to the whiners. Personally I thoroughly enjoyed both Remake and Rebirth for what they were.
 

Thebonehead

Gold Member
All I see is outrage that nobody bought Final Fantasy.

Where's your outrage for poor Dragon Age sales Gaf?

High School GIF
 

SkylineRKR

Member
Well, they recently had a call, so to speak, which I hope woke them up. It's a remake of Dragon Quest 3 - which sold over 2,000,000 copies. The difference is that in the case of DQ3 it was a lovingly made remake of a classic, and players got what they were waiting for. And in the case of FF7 and its remakes it was a pure attempt to make money on a famous brand, they could have done exactly the same as with DQ3 and people would have just thanked them for it and they would have had sales, but no, inflating the game 4 times and selling 3 times for $70 turned out to be more important.

They had Star Ocean 2 too. Which is the original game, but then with far better gameplay, much more options, lots of QoL features added.. for me it was a joy to play. And it was the complete game. It was one of last years GOTY contenders for me. FFVII like this would be stellar. It would play better than the original, with lots of features added making it likely the ultimate version of FFVII.

Now they're sitting on a modernized, disconnected trilogy that runs from 2020-2027? And doesn't really sell all that great. I also firmly believe Square kind of lost it anyway. If they attempt a new project, its mediocre. FFVII Remake is saved somewhat by its iconic characters, settings and music they already had access to. But parts of present day Square do shine through, which results in the laughable new story changes and bad characters such as Roche and Leslie. This is at good as it gets.
 

StreetsofBeige

Gold Member
I don’t play FF games but am surprised it seems some aren’t selling well.

I thought these games were pretty much guaranteed hot sellers.
 

ArtHands

Thinks buying more servers can fix a bad patch
Those were guaranteed hot sellers until the last couple of games which were Playstation timed exclusives.
 

wa600

Member
Haven't played Rebirth, but imo they screwed up turning the Midgar section into a full game. It's still more or less the same 4-6 hours section of the original without adding anything meaningful? Game felt extremely linear and drags way too often.
I did enjoy the expansion on the Avalanche trio, but pretty much all of the narrative changes were for the worse? Turning Sephiroth into a stalker was such a downgrade. At the end the game shifted into absolute nonsense and gave me the most unearned final boss fight in a jrpg I ever experienced (I finished around ~80 jrpgs).
 

pulicat

Member
Final Fantasy brand is no longer viewed as a big boy in gaming market. They've lost it when they decided to go for time exclusive route with the last three big Final Fantasy games.
 

demented waffle

Gold Member
Final Fantasy brand is no longer viewed as a big boy in gaming market. They've lost it when they decided to go for time exclusive route with the last three big Final Fantasy games.

It's been a timed exclusive, from Nintendo to PlayStation. Hell, some of those games didn't come to PC for decades. Their main problem is chasing the younger gamers while ignoring the series' longtime fans.
 

SweetTooth

Gold Member
His November report for UK has hardware information:

https://www.gamesindustry.biz/black-friday-video-game-sales-dip-in-the-uk-uk-monthly-charts

As does both his October reports:



So that proofs he have access to HW data, he just chose not to show it for November?
 
I'd say Space Marine 2 sold pretty good for such a low budget game (half of Doom Eternal's budget) and was a great commercial success.

The same could be said about Dragon Ball. As usual Drings want to create some kind of narrative.
 

SweetTooth

Gold Member
Final Fantasy brand is no longer viewed as a big boy in gaming market. They've lost it when they decided to go for time exclusive route with the last three big Final Fantasy games.

Final Fantasy sales declines has nothing to do with being timed exclusive or not, franchise has been running for over 35 years. Its natural you will face changing audiences, preferences, outdated gameplay.

FF used to sell +2m a week in Japan only, now it can barely manage a 10% of that. Newer generations tend to gravitate towards Fortnight, GTA, Shooters like CoD and Overwatch. Majority of core FF fanbase are mid 30s adults who either outgrew the franchise or is simply satisfied with replaying the older classics.

Having said all that, this decline is simply a natural course of action for a 35 years old franchise with +25 games between mainline and spinoffs. SE should have realized that sooner but they kept milking this cow too much.
 

Woopah

Member
So that proofs he have access to HW data, he just chose not to show it for November?
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think what is happening here is that you believe Chris' article on European November sales has come out without mentioning hardware.

But that article hasn't been published yet. What is in the OP is a single tweet about the year-to-date performance of software. So obviously it doesn't make sense to mention hardware there.
 

SweetTooth

Gold Member
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think what is happening here is that you believe Chris' article on European November sales has come out without mentioning hardware.

But that article hasn't been published yet. What is in the OP is a single tweet about the year-to-date performance of software. So obviously it doesn't make sense to mention hardware there.

Im just pointing out that he is a little selective on what to share. Best thing is waiting for the full article to get the full picture.
 

Woopah

Member
Im just pointing out that he is a little selective on what to share. Best thing is waiting for the full article to get the full picture.
Which is logical.

If you're writing a tweet about the performance of new games so far in 2024, you wouldn't include overall software, hardware or accessory data from November.

It doesn't make sense to create some conspiracy theory linking Chris' reporting to Switch sales, just because he doesn't talk about hardware in a single tweet.
 

ArtHands

Thinks buying more servers can fix a bad patch
They're releasing on PC. Releasing on Xbox wouldn't make any sense and you know it. Maybe the switch 2 will be able to run these games.

We’ll never know until they release on Switch and Xbox, and they are only in the midst of releasing on PC.

The one true fact we can confidently say is the series is currently flopping only on Playstation 5.
 
We’ll never know until they release on Switch and Xbox, and they are only in the midst of releasing on PC.

The one true fact we can confidently say is the series is currently flopping only on Playstation 5.

Remake sold badly on PC so I wouldn't expect that to change. 16 sold bad too. That they ported to PC probably shows that Square doesn't understand what's going on.
 

OmegaSupreme

advanced basic bitch
Remake sold badly on PC so I wouldn't expect that to change. 16 sold bad too. That they ported to PC probably shows that Square doesn't understand what's going on.
Understand what? What are they missing? There is no other viable platform outside of Switch which can't run these games natively.
 
Last edited:
Ff7 is the outlier here. I thought the game full of mini games was absolutely retarded and the characters all talked like little kids. The combat was good but the open world design was worse than Ubisoft. Good to see people didn’t make it a success but they will learn and tone it down for the sequel.
I got suckered into it and played it for a bit , the exploration was honestly horrendously boring. It’s the same 5 activities in every area. Get the tower, do the mog house, excavate the artifact, find the crystal, find the summon. Each EXACTLY the same every time.

Genshin Impact has better exploration.
 

KungFucius

King Snowflake
People sleeping on Rebirth is honestly disgusting.
Why? I would have slept on it if Remake was not on PS+x which I had at the time. I basically played the 2 back to back and was originally thinking I'd do that for all 3 when the last one releases to avoid having to wait several years.
 

Elios83

Member
Understand what? What are they missing? There is no other viable platform outside of Switch which can't run these games natively.

Their main problem is that they ruined the IP releasing mediocre games for a decade, the disgraceful Lightning trilogy, the unfinished FFXV shipped as a collage of the only pieces they had ready glued together, now a DMC clone forced to be played in easy mode with brain dead fillers.
The Remake project has been the only real bright spot quality wise in a decade and Rebirth is what a AAA FF should be. Too bad it took a decade to get there and in the form of a splitted game where it's hard to retain fans, many move on and others find difficult to step in because they haven't played the previous games (and about this...watch Nomura trying to release Kingdom Hearts 4 still based on a shitty story fractured among 10 games from 20 years ago :messenger_tears_of_joy: :messenger_tears_of_joy: ).
In the meantime they haven't cultivated a fanbase, too many identity changes, too low quality, their fans are still those that love them for the Squaresoft golden era of FF7-8-9-10 that has never been replicated.
But this is an aging fanbase that becomes smaller as years pass and they haven't given new generations any reason to get invested in the series.

Releasing games on other platforms is just a band aid for these huge problems and indeed we have seen that releasing Remake and XVI on PC and XIV on Xbox hasn't made any practical difference.
 

SkylineRKR

Member
XIII already sold mediocre. And it was multiplatform. You could pick it up like 2 months later for a bargain. Square would end up simply combining the sales of the XIII trilogy. Final Fantasy decline has been going on for about 15 years.

Before that, those games were of top quality. Even if some like VIII were divisive, this one really pushed the hardware and it was a big, feature complete game. XII pushed the PS2, and it had a deep gambit system. Despite its shortcomings in overall story I would say its an epic adventure with enough to find in its world.

FFXIII is basically what commenced the downfall of FF. It was a linear game without any soul whatsoever. It was stripped of everything that made the series good. There wasn't any depth, no exploration, no traversal, no hidden summons, no real superbosses, basically no economy and all ultimate weapons had to be made with money, which was extremely hard to come by. The biggest grind of this game, simply was for Gil. They further damaged the brand with 2 sequels, each one feeling more low budget than the other. And then XIV 1.0 happened. I think the series was absolutely rock bottom here. Square apparently didn't have a concept for XV, instead they rebranded their frankenstein project Versus XIII which had been in development hell for nearly a decade. And you see the end result is of a project that was in shambles and just thrown together in order to make a coherent product out of it. We've also seen this with Duke Nukem Forever, I am Alive and other games that should've been axed but were completed anyway. These games are almost never good.

Their main problem is that they ruined the IP releasing mediocre games for a decade, the disgraceful Lightning trilogy, the unfinished FFXV shipped as a collage of the only pieces they had ready glued together, now a DMC clone forced to be played in easy mode with brain dead fillers.
The Remake project has been the only real bright spot quality wise in a decade and Rebirth is what a AAA FF should be. Too bad it took a decade to get there and in the form of a splitted game where it's hard to retain fans, many move on and others find difficult to step in because they haven't played the previous games (and about this...watch Nomura trying to release Kingdom Hearts 4 still based on a shitty story fractured among 10 games from 20 years ago :messenger_tears_of_joy: :messenger_tears_of_joy: ).
In the meantime they haven't cultivated a fanbase, too many identity changes, too low quality, their fans are still those that love them for the Squaresoft golden era of FF7-8-9-10 that has never been replicated.
But this is an aging fanbase that becomes smaller as years pass and they haven't given new generations any reason to get invested in the series.

Releasing games on other platforms is just a band aid for these huge problems and indeed we have seen that releasing Remake and XVI on PC and XIV on Xbox hasn't made any practical difference.

Pretty much this is how.
 

ArtHands

Thinks buying more servers can fix a bad patch
Remake sold badly on PC so I wouldn't expect that to change. 16 sold bad too. That they ported to PC probably shows that Square doesn't understand what's going on.

If they are bad by SE's expectation, they wouldn't have proceed to port over FF7 Rebirth over, or would have make statement saying that they are bad.

On the contrary, we have them saying several times, that the sales for the games didn't meet expectation when they are on Playstation 5.
 
Last edited:

Three

Member
If they are bad by SE's expectation... or would have make statement saying that they are bad.
Which company comes out with a statement that their sales were bad? Like wtf are you talking about. They only why people know is through quarterly reports where they are obligated to not hide data and answer questions. The quarterly reports aren't out.
 
Last edited:

missiles

Member
My guess is that price is a contributor. If you buy games on PS-store even at 35% off they are more expensive than the PS4 days here in Scandinavia.

Price and the usual day one bugginess. Apart from FOMO and online activity, there's not much point in paying full price for a new release when you know it will be heavily discounted and patched in the future. The best version of a game is usually 6+ months after the release date. I view all games releases as being soft launches now and always wait for a discount/GOTY edition with DLC and patches.
 

ArtHands

Thinks buying more servers can fix a bad patch
Which company comes out with a statement that their sales were bad? Like wtf are you talking about. They only why people know is through quarterly reports where they are obligated to not hide data and answer questions. The quarterly reports aren't out.

They already admitted both Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth and Final Fantasy 16 did not meet expectation on Playstation 5.
 
Last edited:

Larivel

Member

leo-j

Member
Remake sold over 7 million copies, and rebirth probably did somewhere around 3-4 million. That’s still 10 million + copies. Sure it’s not doing Elden ring numbers ( no rpg is) , but it’s not doing horrible numbers either.

Also it’s crazy to me how people complain about bloat and repetitiveness in FF, and yet have 250 hours in a persona game with 100 of those hours being cut scene bloat.

I’d rather they stretch out a beautiful epic than just do a 1:1 remake that they themselves said had major limitations to what they could achieve due to the tech around at the time. Rebirth despite what the minority here are saying, is a GOTY nominee voted by both fans and critics.
 

leo-j

Member
No one should be surprised that fans of the single 40-80 hours game Final Fantasy VII aren't interested in a 3 game excessively drawn out filler stuffed trilogy that takes a 40 hour story and tries to make it 400 hours

The Remake Trilogy is like The Hobbit film trilogy of games. Everyone likes The Hobbit but nobody wanted a time wasting 3 movies about a really short book
The first game sold about what remake did (before they re released VII on everything that plays video games.) so nah idk if it has to do with fans not wanting xyz. You have free major mmos that are eating into rpg sales. Rarely do games that are that big sell to that crowd who only knew of FF as a big major rpg. I know people who were big fans of FF XIII, X, etc and didn’t touch rebirth because they are on honkai , and zzz. They just don’t care for FF like that anymore.
 

Three

Member
They already admitted both Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth and Final Fantasy 16 did not meet expectation on Playstation 5.
From the article you linked:
"The comment comes from its financial results briefing held in May"

Why would they come out and say it sold badly when they haven't held a financial results briefing yet? You're making zero sense in your platform warring.
 
Last edited:
I bought Rebirth(i fear the mini games :( ) together with SH2 full price to support them… still sealed due to backlog. But i just don't understand Square with their expectations.
 

LordOcidax

Member
Final Fantasy sales declines has nothing to do with being timed exclusive or not, franchise has been running for over 35 years. Its natural you will face changing audiences, preferences, outdated gameplay.

FF used to sell +2m a week in Japan only, now it can barely manage a 10% of that. Newer generations tend to gravitate towards Fortnight, GTA, Shooters like CoD and Overwatch. Majority of core FF fanbase are mid 30s adults who either outgrew the franchise or is simply satisfied with replaying the older classics.

Having said all that, this decline is simply a natural course of action for a 35 years old franchise with +25 games between mainline and spinoffs. SE should have realized that sooner but they kept milking this cow too much.
Zelda, Pokemon, Dragon Quest, Mario etc etc says hi… Square just took the wrong direction with the franchise, it’s not franchise fatigue at all.
 

ArtHands

Thinks buying more servers can fix a bad patch
If 3 million copies in 4 days for FF16 were not enough for SE, then their expectations are the problem.
Not meeting expectations is not equal to bad sales, if those expectations were unrealistic.

Sure sure, if you say so.

At the end of the day, they are disappointed with the sales of Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth and Final Fantasy 16 on Playstation 5.
 
Last edited:

LordOcidax

Member
I bought Rebirth(i fear the mini games :( ) together with SH2 full price to support them… still sealed due to backlog. But i just don't understand Square with their expectations.
With a lot bigger market, almost every people had really high expectations for the remake of the most iconic JRPG franchise of all times. I really thought that it was going to dog really big in terms of sales, then all the mess that square had planned for the “remake” happened.
 
If 3 million copies in 4 days for FF16 were not enough for SE, then their expectations are the problem.

Square said that the expectations for launch sales were OK for FF16. It's the post launch sales were not to what they expected.

Big blunder in SE part. They hurt Final Fantasy brand for tiny upfront money from Sony

Remake only got made because of Sony's money.
 
Last edited:

Fake

Gold Member
If 3 million copies in 4 days for FF16 were not enough for SE, then their expectations are the problem.

Are we know the cost production of this game or are you joining to the silly takes here?

They must know what they need to have profit. I remember the same buzz around Rise of Tomb Raider.
 
Are we know the cost production of this game or are you joining to the silly takes here?

They must know what they need to have profit. I remember the same buzz around Rise of Tomb Raider.

I guess Square's expectations are their expectations. I don't think it directly correlates to profitability.
 
Top Bottom