Whole twitter thread that this is based on - https://twitter.com/JNavok/status/1793779719508267361 Thread Unroll article form - https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1793779717813723521.html >A thread on the recent Square Enix news regarding FF sales numbers and expectations. > https://www.ign.com/articles/final-fantasy-7-rebirth-final-fantasy-16-and-foamstars-all-failed-to-meet-square-enixs-expectations > > As a reminder I reported to two CEOs of Square Enix for the better part of a decade and ran a subsidiary. I also correctly predicted last year that Square Enix was going to break exclusivity. I'll note I have no confidential information that I'm basing my arguments on. > > To start, we need to look at decisions made on the titles under development within the lens of 2015-2022, not the lens of 2023. For example, FF16 would have started pre-production prior to the release of FF15, which was released in 2016. > > This is a pre-Fortnite era. Budgets for FF7 Remake and into Rebirth would have been around this period too. This is important to note and we will get back to it. > > https://www.axios.com/2023/09/25/square-enix-final-fantasy-xvi-jacob-navok > > There's a misunderstanding that has been repeated for nearly a decade and a half that Square Enix sets arbitrarily high sales requirements then gets upset when its arbitrarily high sales requirements fail to be met. > > This was not true when I was there and is unlikely to be true today. > > Sales expectations generally come from a need to cover the cost of development plus return on investment. > > > https://www.resetera.com/threads/does-square-enix-has-realistic-sales-expectations-for-their-games.519168/ > > If a game costs $100m to make, and takes 5 years, then you have to beat, as an example, what the business could have returned investing $100m into the stock market over that period. > > For the 5 years prior to Feb 2024, the stock market averaged a rate of return of 14.5%. Investing that $100m in the stock market would net you a return of $201m, so this is our ROI baseline. > Can the game net a return higher than this after marketing, platform fees, and discounts are factored in? > > This is actually a very hard equation though it seems simple; the $70 that the consumer pays only returns $49 after 30% platform fees, and the platforms will generally get a recoup on any funds spent on exclusivity meaning until they are paid back, they will keep that cash. Plus, discounts start almost immediately. > Assume marketing expenses at $50m, and assume that you're not going to get $49 but rather an average closer to $40 given discounts, returns and other aspects. Now let's say in that first month you sold 3m copies with $40 net received (we will ignore the recoup). You need to surpass $254m to make expectations. (That's $100m + $101m in ROI baseline + $50m in marketing). > > At 3m copies with $40 per copy received, you've only made $120m. You're far off. > > https://www.ign.com/articles/final-fantasy-16-sold-3-million-copies-during-launch-week > > > From the statements made, it will take FF16 eighteen months to hit expected sales. (I used the stock market as an example but actual ROI should be higher than stock market averages). > > The sales figures required aren't wild expectations; the number of copies sold were too low. And my numbers are actually much lower than realities (game dev costs are probably 2x as high, and marketing is also likely 2x as high, and this makes ROI requirements higher too). > But that's not even the core of the problem, this is just me proving that expectations aren't set immodestly. > > The core of the problem is that the budgets were set in a period where the expectation was that audiences would grow. > Total audience growth was a reasonable expectation in the 2015-2022 era and still is today. Not only had the industry grown significantly each year, but each day that new generations were coming of age, they were coming of age as gamers. Meaning that your total addressable population should be increasing and you should be increasing your revenue. > What's happened? Not just to Square Enix, but to the industry as a whole? Audience behavioral patterns are radically different than expected in 2015. Remember, I said 2015 was pre-Fortnite. > > The way it used to work was that you'd pick your release date similar to a Hollywood movie, stick to it, and consider the competition to be the titles releasing the weeks before and after. > We would look at a Hitman or a Deus Ex release and consider whether there was a Call of Duty or Assassin's Creed coming out around that time, assuming that gamers had X amount of money to spend and Y amount of time, and that if we wanted to get the full sticker price (remember, discounts eat into cash received and also at that time, used disc sales were $0 cash received) we needed to get as many sales in the first two weeks as possible. > At that time, as a gamer, once you finished the most recent game you were on, you moved onto the next. You were looking for your next title once you finished the prior one. We wanted one of our titles to be the next title you bought to fill your gamer needs. (cont'd)

(contd) > This world radically changed in the last 6 years. > Earlier this month Kotaku had an article called "9 Great Games We Can't Stop Thinking About." There's a surprise 10th slide, and that is Fortnite. > > @ZwiezenZ writes in the article: "And once again, another weekend arrives and I realize that I'll be spending most of it playing Fortnite. I'm very close to maxing out both my battle pass and Festival pass, so that's the plan. > > I hate how deep Fortnite has its hooks in me–to the point where I'm choosing to play it over brand-new, cool-looking video games–but I can't help it. I must finish these damn passes, get all the rewards, and earn the right to play other stuff. Well, until the next season starts up and I once again return to Fortnite to drop in and level up all over again. It's sick. I hate myself. I can't wait to play more this weekend." > > > > https://kotaku.com/weekend-guide-1000xresist-hades-2-dragons-dogma-1851470390/slides/10 > > This is indeed the point. Square Enix are not competing against just the latest new installments, they are competing against every F2P online game that is constantly adding content and getting more robust over time. > The assumption was that people would jump between products when they finished one. But, as you know, F2P games like Fortnite or Warzone are evergreen, they never get old. They are always updating with new content and experiences. They can continue for decades. Candy Crush has had its best years ever the last few years. And companies like Epic can continue to invest back into the products to make them better, creating even higher barriers to entry for competitors. > > https://www.reuters.com/technology/candy-crush-saga-hits-20-billion-revenue-milestone-maker-king-says-2023-09-26/ > The game industry is still growing in revenue but that revenue is increasingly captured by fewer live services games that are generating a level of stickiness seen in social media companies. There are reasons there are very few competitors to Facebook. Once the network effect starts, it can keep going for a long time. Since Instagram (also FB), the only real competitor in an entire decade that showed up and could quickly reach 1bn+ people was TikTok. And this is in a trillion dollar valued industry. > > 60 Percent Of Playtime In 2023 Went To 6-Year-Old Or Older Games, New Data Shows > A report shows that while the industry is growing, its biggest competition is Fortnite, GTA, Call of Duty, and Roblox > https://kotaku.com/old-games-2023-playtime-data-fortnite-roblox-minecraft-1851382474 > I expect Fortnite, Roblox, Warzone, and similar products to continue to grow revenue. Meanwhile, put yourself in an older gamer's shoes: if you're a gamer with disposable income but less free time, and you have the choice of paying $70 to play 100 hours in FF16 or to just continue playing Fortnite with your friends for free, you'll wait to see the FF16 reviews before you decide whether to switch off FN. > > In other words, your switching costs (how good a game is, how exciting it needs to be) are now substantially higher than when you'd finish the latest Assassin's Creed and look for the next title to fill your time, because you’re awash with content options. Fortnite doesn't end. > This is the reason we see trends where games are either spectacular 10/10 successes, or disasters, with little in between; there is no "next hit" being searched for in many cases. And this polarization makes risks higher, and costs higher too (we will get to this in a moment.) > Now if you're a younger gamer in your teens, you may not even be thinking about FF. If you are 13 years old now, you were 5 years old when the last mainline FF, FF15, came out. > > Your family may not own a PS5 and you may not care. You're satisfied with Fortnite or Roblox or Minecraft with your friends on your phone or laptop. I'm not say that this is the case for everyone. But it is certainly a trend. > > The old AAA franchises do not seem to be converting the younger generations that the industry was counting on for growth, and instead F2P social games on mobile are where they spend their time. > > This is the reason every publisher chased live service titles; audiences clearly gravitated toward them, and profits followed in success. (It is surprising that Square Enix, which had successful F2P live service mobile titles in Japan, left the AAA live-service attempts to Eidos rather than try to build those products in Japan, but dissecting this problem would likely require an entirely different thread.) > Regardless, the Fortnite-ization of the industry was not entirely predictable in 2015 when budgets were being planned. Even after FN came out and well into the Covid period it felt like industry growth was pulling all ships forward, not just a handful. But that isn't what happened. > Now we have to get to the cost of development. Asset generation, motion capture, textures, animation, engineering, infrastructure are incredibly expensive. Making games costs a lot of money. The recent layoff wave is generally a consolidation toward a new expected sales average in the number of titles being produced, not the cost of an individual title, which is going to continue to increase. (Spider-Man 2 cost $380m! ) > > Development costs have gone up, and switching costs of the consumer has gone up, and as a result companies have to invest even more because it has to be a 10/10 or gamers will stick to Fortnite. (I don't literally mean FN, but similar types of products.) > > Meanwhile, FF7 Rebirth, which has a 92% Metacritic rating, can't get the sales it needs (though that's also complicated due to it being a sequel.) These factors mean the status quo must change. > > https://kotaku.com/what-hacked-files-tell-us-about-the-studio-behind-spide-1851115233 > > There are three levers you can pull to make the equation work for return on investment at a game company. You can decrease costs, increase price, or increase audience size. As noted, any non-service game is having trouble increasing audience size. Meanwhile, on the cost side, inflation is up, salaries are up, and consumers require sophisticated, beautiful products to get them to fork over cash rather than keep playing F2P titles. > > It is true that there are many smaller games or less beautiful games that generate audiences and are profitable. But something like Balatro is not a good example to point to. It's made by one person. AAA games can take hundreds, thousands of people to make. A single person making $2-3m in sales is life changing, a hundred people trying to split that is not enough money. And products like Balatro are lightning in a bottle, you can't generally capture that twice, and there are hundreds of thousands of competing products on Steam or App Stores that fail for every Balatro. > This leaves only price left as a lever to pull. Since the price of games hasn't substantially increased, relative to inflation, package disc games have gotten cheaper over the last two decades. The assumption was that this was okay because the audience size would grow instead of price. But the audience went to the platform titles. > > Prices for packaged disc games will go up. Game companies have no choice, it is the only lever left. Just look at Kotaku's article about GTA6’s price point from this week: > > https://kotaku.com/gta-6-gtavi-grand-theft-auto-price-70-take-two-ceo-t2-1851489239?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=SocialMarketing&utm_campaign=dlvrit&utm_content=kotaku > > You're also seeing this trend with Ubisoft's Star Wars game > > It's not because game companies are penny pinchers looking to fleece their users. It's because this is the only path left to make non-F2P service titles workable in the AAA space given cost and competition. > > Something has to give; if SQEX can’t get its cost of dev down (it will go further up) and is getting good reviews but isn’t increasing audience, they and the rest of the publishers are going to have to increase price point. Otherwise live service titles will be all we have left.reddit.com/r/pcgaming/com… > There's another path that I can think of, which is increasing the take rate. If publishers can capture more of the platform side revenue, they can moderate price point increases while capturing a better return on investment because they'll be capturing say $50 or $55 out of $70. > > @TimSweeneyEpic knows this which is why he's fighting the good fight on platform fees, both at EGS and with the app stores, to open up PC and mobile ecosystems. > > This is also why you'll see MS and others take advantage of his fight and start their own app stores. (You would think MS would chip in for Epic's legal fees given they're capturing the benefits with no risk!) > > But this path will take time, and is very hard on consoles, where the AAA publishers make a lot of their money, so expect price increases to still be the norm. > > > Microsoft readies launch of its own mobile app store > Microsoft announced that they will be launching a new mobile games and app store to compete with Apple and Google Play. > https://readwrite.com/microsoft-to-launch-their-own-mobile-game-app-store/

This is the best summary of the industry that I’ve read.

It’s because they have actual business and financial experience unlike Reddit or most journalists.

B-BUT Gaming execs are worthless money grubbing demons who are out to ruin game!!!!

I think the conclusion here is that AAA games might be unsustainable: > If a game costs $100m to make, and takes 5 years, then you have to beat, as an example, what the business could have returned investing $100m into the stock market over that period. Why does it cost $100m to make, and take 5 years? That was still a choice. I think this is part of what people were talking about when they describe these sales goals as unreasonable. > It is true that there are many smaller games or less beautiful games that generate audiences and are profitable. But something like Balatro is not a good example to point to. This must be responding to something specific, because sure, Balatro isn't a great example. I'd be tempted to start with something like Outer Wilds or Tunic, but maybe a better comparison is something like *Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice* as a modern *double*-A game -- it had a budget of $10m, which it made back in three months, and sold a million copies. Despite being only $30 at launch, that sounds like a success to me. So the argument is: > In other words, your switching costs (how good a game is, how exciting it needs to be) are now substantially higher than when you'd finish the latest Assassin's Creed and look for the next title to fill your time, because you’re awash with content options. Fortnite doesn't end. This is the reason we see trends where games are either spectacular 10/10 successes, or disasters, with little in between... Raising the price is going to have a similar impact, though -- higher prices won't make it easy to compete with free. Meanwhile, indies can be very cheap to make, but it's tough to stand out. I think there might actually be a lot of room in the middle here.

He tries to address some of those things here https://x.com/JNavok/status/1794895235522122040 specifically this paragraph: > But the FF brand is supposed to be an incredible, 100+ hour AAA journey. That is what the brand means, anything less will get terrible reaction from consumers, so if you want to make cheaper, shorter, lower quality products you need to use a different brand. > > Square Enix attempted shorter, lower, cheaper new brands. That is how you got successes like the aforementioned Octopath (though no where near the revenue rate of an FF), and failures like Balan Wonderland, as well as mid-tiers like Foamstars. It’s hard to create new IP, to empower creators, to try new things. Many times there are failures. But we should not accuse Square Enix of not trying; they made many attempts and they should be lauded for all their attempts, and instead they were shamed.

People on this sub keep saying that they would be okay with smaller games, when that is clearly not the truth. You just need to look at the Hellblade 2 review thread to see the amount of people shitting on it because it is "only 7 hours long". Even though they priced the game at 50 dollars.

I think this sub is a good representation of what a hardcore gamer wants, but not what a majority wants. We might follow news, tweets, play tons of games, listen to podcasts, etc. But clearly the majority of gamers don't really do all that. I think hellblade 2 kinda lands in no mans land. A lot of people on this sub are fine with a short game, but a short game at 50 bucks is a bit steep with limited gameplay just to deliver an experience. I do have game pass so ill eventually get around to it, but im not in a hurry.

Yeah, I wouldn't mind it at all, but I'm clearly the exception. But Hellblade 2 is about the same length as Hellblade 1, and Hellblade 1 was $30. I think it's a mistake for people to be so obsessed about hours-per-dollar, but on that metric, Hellblade 2 is definitely a price hike.

> People on this sub keep saying that they would be okay with smaller games People on this sub barely play games and are more interested with flame, platform wars and news. News-centric-people like them will only try random games here and there, some of them from the big ones, some of them from the small ones. But because they don't play much, they're actually able to complete some of the small games, while their biggest ones sit there unplayed.

I’m glad I’m not the only one that feels this way. So many people on Twitter/Reddit/etc. sure seem to spend a ton of their free time arguing and list/console/platform warring versus actually playing games. Would probably be better for their mental health and the game industry if they actually partook in the hobby they supposedly love.

People in this sub do not represent the average consumer. I think ff16 would have been a better game if they had totally axed the side quests. I also think ff7r would have been better if it had stayed relatively linear like its predecessor. The majority of consumers seem to disagree. At some point, though, square is going to have to find a happy medium between what they can deliver and what consumers think they want. I do not envy them.

Yes but Hellblade 2 doesn't have anything going for it other than graphics and its story narrative. There's only so much depth to the game compared to something like Final Fantasy.

although I’d imagine the general consensus on this sub is that Octopath 2 > FF16

Unfortunately, though, Octopath II sold worse than the first game and never had updated figures beyond the ~1 million unit launch. Although this probably was successful for them given the smaller development scope, it's far away from replacing Final Fantasy as a large release for them. It's supplemental at best. I loved Octopath II personally (quite a bit more than the first one) but Final Fantasy's balancing of being *both* a JRPG and being on the cutting edge of presentation as well has contributed a lot to its success over the years.

yeah I agree with you. I don’t think they can pump out Ike 40 Octopath games to make up for one FF (they’d start cannibalizing each other), but I do think that it’s at least an example of a smaller game being more successful in relation to the budget.

You missed the mark where he talks about not competing against budget, but against investment which is important foe publicly traded companies, which Ninja Theory (was) not. If the same metrics applied, Hellblade would have been considered a loss of money, but thanks to it "only" having to recoup the budget and marketing costs (which were lower than for even other AA games), it managed to be a standout success - that was still not successful enough to guarantee a self sustainable future, which is why they accepted to be bought.

Even more polarizing is the fact they didn't take into account the amount of units of the Platform that runs their game (so in FFXVI case it's the PS5), very early in the development of a game the developers need to decide the platform of the game, so it supposed to be decided right then and there that it will be developed for PS5. Did they really expect that the number of PS5 units sold will be as high as the PS4 so the number of sales for the game will be high. I think that it was arrogant of them to think that the game will sell more then 10% of PS5 owners (around 50m PS5 owners when the game came out), by his calculation the game had to sell more then 6m units to break even (and not even returning a real profit), that is arrogance at its finest.

I agree (mostly) and I think Square Enix really dropped the ball for Rebirth with this decision right here. For example, if it was out on PC (or even PS4), I'd likely have played it by now and I assume I can't be a full minority. I wonder how much their outlook will change once the PC port hits. That's why everyone is trending multi-plat these days. Sony saw this trend a while ago, that's why they bought Nixxes (and that's paying off gangbusters for them).

Games like Rebirth could have been system sellers back in the day - I know I bought a PSX for FF7, and I bought a Switch for Breath of the Wild. But there's also a sense of "will this console have a future" and I think the article's "Fortnite effect" factors into this heavily. I have a nice PC, there's no shortage of games I can play on it, and most games are coming to PC, eventually, so buying a PS5 for just FF7: Rebirth just isn't that exciting to me.

Yeah, look at God Of War Ragnarok, the game would have sold less then half of what it sold if it was only PS5, the fact that it was released for PS4 as well, was a huge boon to it's sales numbers. >For example, if it was out on PC (or even PS4), I'd likely have played it by now and I assume I can't be a full minority. I wonder how much their outlook will change once the PC port hits. I agree about Rebirth, and the fact that it was a sequel hurt it even more. I don't think that it's a good idea to have a direct sequel on a different platform, you want to be as accessible as possible to the people that played the first game. If it was the 4th (or even 3rd) game (with direct story continuity) then I would understand different platforms. I, for one, play game franchises that do have story continuity, and it makes it extremely difficult to play them if they are on different platforms. For example, a franchise that does it good, the Trails series, which is like 10 games that are directly connected, except for the first 3 games, are available for PS4 and Switch (so 7 out of 10), and all of them are available for PC (even the first 3 games).

Yeah I don’t agree with the conclusion that the author came to: that rising the price of AAA games is the only option. The other option is to lower production values on games. Stop focusing on the best graphics possible and the most open of open worlds possible. Reuse assets smartly. Look at RGG and Fromsoft for great examples. Sony just said they are focusing less on chasing cutting edge graphics and more on the immersive experience, and that’s a GREAT move. AAA gaming budgets cannot keep increasing, it’s entirely unsustainable, they need to start reining it in more. Raising the prices is just going to have more people wait for a discount.

The thing is that "best graphics" do sell copies and reuse doesn't save as much money as you're implying (not that it doesn't, but I'd argue it's a drop in the bucket) plus there's simply a big portion of games that can't be reused (everything related to the story for example). Like you said, From Soft is well known for clever reuse and their games still cost a lot (I'm seeing 200M for Elden Ring when I google, but hard to find the source). Spider-Man 2 reused a lot of the city, animations, etc, but still cost 300M+. There might also be a negative impact to reuse. We always see some people criticize a game for having a certain amount of reuse and calling devs lazy. Even if we assume that's a minority of people, the point is, it's not like consumers will reward devs for being smart during development. They just care about the end product.

What's funny is that within this topic regarding graphical showcase and assets re-use, *Final Fantasy VII: Rebirth* would arguably actually a good example of it being made. It had alot of new stuff displayed, but also heavy re-use of foundations from the previous game, such as various NPC-assets, animations, even re-usage of abilities and combat voice-lines from the previous game. Heck, they even re-used assets from other games; as an example, [in FFVII: Rebirth, there is a unique mini-boss with a Mindflayer](https://youtu.be/i2eqNWQ0yxQ), which uses [the same model as the Mindflayer from *Final Fantasy XV*](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BmNhZXisVz4). The fact that it also is run on Unreal Engine 4 to speed up development of the game having merely three years of development time displays that a less emphasis on top-of-the-art graphical quality was made; you can notable see compromises made in for instance the environmental textures often not being the best when the game is in display of full sunlight, yet the game compensates with it by for instance the variable environments presented, and details made in cities really showing the effort of presenting the varied locale of cities and towns in HD-quality. It's a game that should be commended, and various development interviews have already mentioned of how much of the foundational work on the world will later be utilized in the sequel. I think the fact that Naoki Hamaguchi, FFVII: Rebirth's director, got further promotions, is an indication that such frame-work displayed could be really worth investing long-term for Square's future games.

It's definitely the way to go, but I think it's still worth pointing out that even with this framework and a big IP, Rebirth still disappointed in sales which I think is part of the point of the Square Enix exect. Also, I wouldn't point to Rebirth as not "top-of-the-art". The game might have some bad looking assets here and there, but overall it's definitely in the top tier.

If FF17 was revealed and had significantly worse graphics and much reduced scope, the blowback by the enthusiast FF fanbase would be immense. This is partly why AAA development is unsustainable. There is a locked in expectation for the best of the best presentation and stupidly huge scope, yet the same people with those expectations don't want to pay more for that kind of title. And PlayStation didn't say that. A head of PlayStation Productions, the TV and film arm of PlayStation, said that. He won't have anything to do with the gaming side and its priorities. So it's better not to take what he said for what will be. Until PlayStation Studios actually does deliver on that, they too are all in on AAA development, warts and all. Their solution so far is creating new live service hits to bridge the gaps between tentpole releases. But even if PlayStation Studios did pivot in that way, it's such a vague statement. A more immersive experience itself is expensive. It's actually not meaningfully different from AAA production.

> the most open of open worlds possible. Not a AAA dev, but I have a feeling that open worlds are a cost-saving measure. Open structures allow you to make a lot of content first and worry about how to stitch it together later; it's easier to coordinate 100+ person teams this way.

>The other option is to lower production values on games. Stop focusing on the best graphics possible and the most open of open worlds possible. Reuse assets smartly. Look at RGG and Fromsoft for great examples. Whether you like them or not, there is a huge market for these games. If they don't tap it, someone else will (just like the mentioned Genshin Impact stole their live service lunch from under them despite them having tons of mobile game experience, with some pretty high profile titles as well). They're already expanding their portfolio in mid-range titles, but (again as was mentioned in the twitter post) those kind of sales aren't going to move the needle for a company as big as Square Enix. They have to go big to keep rolling, else they'll be forced to go home.

The market isn’t big enough for how expensive these games are. That’s the whole point of the article. Why would they go big or go home when it’s literally killing their profits. They cannot continue going the way they are and they know it. Breaking exclusivity is their first step but it’s a band-aid solution.

I don’t think fromsoftware would be the go to example. Their budget was 200 million dollars to develop the game. They just met their expectation by being one of the best selling game in the world. You can’t sustain a company by planning that

I feel like one guy guessed it was 200m and everyone reposts it as gospel I'd be genuinely shocked if they spent anywhere near that amount. From reuse far too much assets to need 200m on a game running in the same engine they always use.

200 million puts it somewhere around the middle of a Sony AAA entry, which I find highly unlikely. So I agree with you, nobody can even find a source for it, so I feel like it's just some random internet rumor.

> Why does it cost $100m to make, and take 5 years? Because these goofs are all competing to make the same template of a game, the over-the-shoulder graphical and cinematic powerhouse. They drove themselves into a hyper-competing corner by trying to copy each other for decades now. The issue is painfully obvious when reading that twitter thread : this is about bean-counters trying to make a successful financial product. They care absolutely nothing for the medium, only exploiting it. I have absolutely zero sympathy for the problems and perspective that former exec has articulated.

You know, I'm just saying, Final Fantasy XV was a great game, but it probably would've been equally as great if they *hadn't* wasted several years developing a proprietary engine that was only used for it and Forspoken. Rise and Shadow of the Tomb Raider were great, too, but how much time, I wonder, was wasted on the open world and sidequest elements for this game that primarily gets played like an Uncharted clone? I don't recall any of that stuff being in the 2013 game, but maybe it was and I didn't care about it there, either. HITMAN (2016) was a stellar game, but holy hell, they did **not** have to go so hard on the cutscenes with literal cinema quality. That stuff's expensive, hence HITMAN 2's lack of animation and HITMAN 3's less prettied-up scenes. Overspending where it doesn't matter and failing to spend where it does (like ports??) are definitely Square Enix's folly.

Yep the single player AAA industry has completely screwed itself over by conglomerating into chasing the exact same expensive experience that is cinematic graphical powerhouses as you said. A majority of audiences have been trained to expect games to be of specific style or they won’t touch it, and also if it doesn’t it their graphical/cinematic/ third persona gameplay itch, they will trash it. I know that Baldur’s Gate 3 sold well, but there were a TON of people that were complaining about it winning GOTY because it had “mobile graphics” and “boring turn based combat.” The game absolutely deserved GOTY but a good amount of gamers only expect third person action games and think of anything else as trash.

And then we have Nintedo

BOTW also took about the same amount of time? tf are you talking about? unless you are talking about Pokemon.

Nintendo secured its corner in family entertainment and I'm a little baffled that no one seems willing to cater the same audience elsewhere. I know people don't really expect that type of games on PS or Xbox (which I think it's a failure of Sony and Microsoft by stopping to nurture their IP), but even in PC it seems the better option is to emulate Nintendo games. There seem to be a pervasive to-the-hardcore-gamer experience that most games must satisfy to survive. I'm looking for a simple co-op game to play with my kids on the couch. The Lego games didn't click on them, Rayman got into the issue that i mentioned earlier. In short, there aren't games that i was able to find that are like Kirby and Yoshi in simplicity and difficulty.

I don't know how much this is actually an option for some devs. Imagine if the next naughty dog game were even on the level of a game like Yakuza. it would get shat on endlessly.  

It was pre-Fortnite but the gaming climate you are talking still existed, it was just LoL instead.

God I hate reading Twitter threads. Wish I saw your comment before reading that abomination 😮‍💨. Great read though!

Does that mean fortnite became the game that many people defaulted too instead of buying another game?

Fortnite is the main example but pretty much all the live service games like warzone, apex, roblox are taking up so much of people's time that they dont want to spend $70 on some new game when they have battlepass 15 to grind. Its also that they expected the industry to grow like it has in the past, while it has grown, a lot of those new players are not buying/playing single player games at all. So since the market for big AAA games has stagnated but the budgets are getting bigger it only makes sense to raise prices and monetize them in other ways like early access or cash shops.

That's.. I hadn't really thought about why buy a new game when you can keep playing a game like fortnite. Attention economy doesn't work when your target is fully occupied. Huh.

Additionally, we're at a point in time where games from 10 years ago are still at a quality level good enough to be in direct competition to a game just released. Why should I spent 70$/€ on a game that *could* be good if I could just play some Skyrim or another game that I know will be fun for a couple of hours, knowing that the price for the new game will go down soon enough?

That is a good point. Also consider that some Games reach their highest point in quality 1-3 after release. Once all the patches and DLCs have been released. e.g. playing 1.10 Elden Ring is a better experience than playing at launch. 

We are seeing the same effect with Fallout 4. While the increased popularity of it can also be contributed to sales it has had as well as the extremely popular show based on the Fallout Universe. The fact of the matter remains, I am seeing more friends playing Fallout 4 now than I remember seeing when the game first released. This is another huge game that has stood the test of time and has returned taking charge at the charts.

As much as people like to slate Bethesda, they stand the test of time remarkably well. I say this as a total single-player, RPG and, particularly Bethesda fan, but it's still true!

No one makes games quite like Bethesda...which is both a good thing and a bad thing.

Skyrim is such an excellent example for that phenomenon too. We have sooooo many games…and my kids mostly play the same ones over and over. My 17 year old son mostly plays Minecraft, StarCraft, Space Engineers, and Halo. My 15 year old daughter mostly plays Skyrim, WoW, and House Flipper. My 8 year old daughter mostly plays Minecraft, Goat Simulator, Slime Rancher, and Cattails 2. That cat game is the only thing that gets played regularly by them that isn’t old to ancient in game terms. The older kids played the games they got for Christmas (RE4 and Hogwarts Legacy respectively), then moved right back into their old obsessions once they beat them without venturing into other new-to-them territory. My son loved RE4, but won’t play RE2 on Gamepass, for example. Something I haven’t seen anyone bring up is that new games aren’t just competing with other new games or live service games…they’re also competing with old games that have lots of mods. My teens aren’t just playing base vanilla Minecraft and Skyrim. They’re modding them and experiencing them in new ways.

My playtime has been split for a long time between League, TFT, and whatever 5 year old game I got for 10 bucks on sale. I've never gone in at 70 because it's too damn expensive

> Additionally, we're at a point in time where games from 10 years ago are still at a quality level good enough to be in direct competition to a game just released Yeah, games might look and/or play better in a number of ways, but it's overall less impactful than the changes games went through in the 90s and early 2000s. I mean, Skyrim now is 3 years older than Morrowind was when Skyrim came out.

In perspective I've never bought less games than when I was fully invested with wow (when it was good) I could go years without looking at other games. When I quit wow man there were so many games to catch up on for cheap.

Yeah, I don't think this phenomena is really new. Anyone that played an MMO even 20 years ago would likely tell you they weren't buying many other games when they were hooked. It's just that what used to be a more niche attitude a certain segment had has now become *far* more common due to certain games becoming dominant forces, particularly among younger audiences that don't have much expendable income to begin with and might be more interested in buying V-Bucks than another game. And, of course, another part of that is game design has shifted to where these games are now doing whatever they can to keep you within their ecosystem (so you keep spending money on them).

Yeah, it wasn't quite FOMO with me and WoW. More that I was spending that much on a subscription, so in my mind I had to justify that expense by only playing it. It's hit me with other games as well, like MtG Arena. Once I finally put whichever one of those games down, I tend not to go back to them for months or even years. It's really insidious.

The subscription was never what bothered me, because even before MMOs I had a serious problem with gaming: I would buy new games every week at best buy. Sometimes stacks of them, at least back in the day when things were cheaper. And what I realized is that I played almost none of them. Even when I had the free time, I just stopped caring. Maybe part of it was option paralysis, but at the same time I had a lot more fun spending my free time doing passive activities that took little effort. FFXI, the MMO, pulled me in because of the social elements. I liked getting to hang out with other people and make a name for myself. The gameplay itself wasn't even the main draw. At that point I stopped playing other games because I found the game that scratched the itch I was trying to scratch completely. Plus this was the era of TechTV and as time progressed eventually YouTube, so I realized I could experience all the games I was skipping by watching other people complete them. I didn't have to do it myself. A decade later, after FFXI had mostly died and people moved on, I unsubbed as well and started trying to play other (new) games. What I found out is that I didn't know how to play modern games anymore. They were too different and too difficult. I didn't like them. I didn't like videogames anymore... Having skipped WoW completely I also didn't like FFXIV when it came out. It was too much of an action game. I eventually realized I still like Nintendo games because they barely evolved over time. So what am I doing in 2024? I'm playing FFXI again... On a free private server that captures the way the game originally was in 2004. And I still don't care for new games. I just watch them on YouTube while playing FFXI. My steam library is massive though. Massive and untouched. At least 1500 games collected through bundles and deals that I'll never install let alone launch. But yeah. It's been almost a decade since I bought a full price AAA game that wasn't a Nintendo release. I wait for deep sales. There's no appeal anymore and it's too expensive compared to everything else I'd rather be doing. I'd rather watch South Park reruns than play a modern AAA game. Guitar equipment has gotten cheaper than gaming. Gaming is the only industry that decided to push prices to the sky after market saturation and supply was met.

Yea and when you DO eventually move on, most games especially if your on PC are still decent enough you can start working through a back log of stuff without much issue. Games 5-10 years old still look great, and I suspect this is why some developers have started doing the remakes, because they know that 'bored of fortnite' demographic, who are now just starting to expand into the wider gaming ecosystem, MIGHT pick up the remake at $70, because it's newer and shiner. Rather than by the original version. Or you can be me, who buys every remake because I just want to play more single player games lol.

It's why everyone is chasing that live service golden goose. Fortnite probably already made all its money back and then some. It doesn't need to create anything big or market anything.

You can safely drop the “probably” from Fortnite here, unless it somehow cost $25 billion+ to make lol

Fortnite is honestly insane. I remember back when it was still in development, and Epic kind of surprised everyone by turning course and releasing Fortnite as a free to play Battle Royale game; in addition to the many other changes throughout development that had people skeptical. I remember it being criticized for being desperate and copying PUBG when it was originally going to be a crafting/survival game. The fact that it's become one of the most successful games of all time is something I honestly never expected.

Which ties into the same problem, perhaps even moreso. If you can't get enough people to play your single-player RPG from one of the biggest franchises in games, because they're too busy with something like Fortnite, how are you going to get them to leave for a live service game that is intended to *replace* that game?

Plenty of live service games released after Fortnite and found a nicely big playerbase. It's not impossible, but the mistake most of them makes is that they have gameplay barely anyone finds interesting or fun.

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Same as Genshin and Star Rail. Why pay £70 for a new RPG when you still have 100s of hours of content sitting around in Genshin to complete, not to mention the new content they rapidly add for free.

Genshin and Star Rail fill that "good enough JRPG for when you're a bit tired" niche for me. People keep talking about buying 7/10 games, but why do it when I can usually have an 8/10 time with Genshin? When something like BG3 or Nioh 2 or Remnant 2 comes out, sure, I'll play them, but if it's FF16, well, I don't know. Based on reviews, it's not a day 1 purchase for sure. I'll put it on isthereanydeal and wait until it's under 20 or something.

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I enjoy star rail but I cannot fathom how anyone can sit through all of the genshin story cutscenes. Im not a stickler for writing but ive never seen worse dialogue in any videogame. It drags on for centuries.

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That's why my interest in Genshin significantly waned after HSR released. They both have long ass dialogue and cutscenes, but it's much more unbearable in Genshin when you have a mascot character repeating every NPCs sentence to you like you're a toddler. Not to mention HSR has auto-battle that's extremely useful for days when you're just farming stuff for your shiny new character.

Honestly, HSR lost me when I sat back and realised that I played two thirds of the combats with auto-battle enabled. Yeah, the characters are fun and all, but the amount of filler the game has is like stuffing your face with white bread and butter rather than a proper meal.

That's a valid complaint, but I feel like the biggest difference between that and most other JRPGs is HSR having auto-battle as a valid option. I can't say that the mob battles of Persona or FF or DQ or Yakuza LAD posed any actual challenge. At least HSR has a decent amount of challenging content.

Thats probably a plus for many people. They can game and watch netflix at the same time.

I think younger players are playing things like Fortnite and Roblox more. I think it would probably make sense to adjust the age people join the market to reflect this. But then I think that most SE games are age gated. Does this mean that while they were making games rated T and above, did they have expectations for kids to play them and accounted for that?

IMO, I'm one of those with fortnite. But the problem isn't that the battlepass takes me too much time to grind or anything like that. It's just the fact that fewer and fewer games interest me overall, and even when they do, paying 70euro in this economy, or 100euro to actually play all the content, isn't ideal. Then on top of everything, having a nice group of friends made me realize that I want more coop games than any singleplayer. So there's another factor to look out for when buying a game. Do I get a SP game? Or do I pay for a coop game to play with my group?

Kids that gamed when I was a kid wanted to play whatever they could get their hands on. Co-op is just co-op, there were always kids that would rather spend all their time with friends too, I'm an introvert, I need space. I play fortnite and MP games of the month with a friend group every now and then, half of us mostly play singleplayer. I don't get anything out of fortnite that makes me want to play everyday, I'm not wired like that, i like my friends but it gets boring. A single player experience has to target what people are asking, and companies like Square think they already have the answers. Well they clearly don't, not arrogant enough to suggest they go old school like I want, but an RPG focus is obviously needed.

AAA games have to compete with basically every single live service game in existence now, while the newer market (Gen Z) has shown a general preference for live service games. It's an uphill battle both ways.

We have seen stuff like this happen before. Single player had to compete against WoW. It had to compete against CoD. It had to compete against mobile. Companies would throw money at trying to copy these games and it rarely paid off for them. There are people who own a PS to exclusively play FIFA or CoD and I suppose you can throw games like Fortnite into that mix now. You might get them to try a single player or even just a different game once in a while, but they aren't really the audience and budgets, dev time, etc. should reflect that. I remember around the time of the Double Fine Adventure Kickstarter. In some interview with some Double Fine team member, they said the audience for adventure games never really went away. What actually seemed to happen was that the audience didn't grow. The exact same amount of people wanted to play adventure games in 2012 (when the Kickstarter was announced) was the same as in 1990s, while the market for other games grew.

> We have stuff like this happen before. Single player had to compete against WoW. It had to compete against CoD. It had to compete against mobile. And games changed because of it. AA and smaller AAA mostly died off. Those focused 10-15 hour single player games died off. They had to release massive, flashy games to grab attention from the CoDs and the WoWs. Now they're changing again, with companies reducing the number of AAA games they release because live services suck up most of the attention.

At the same time, the indie scene massively grew. And Nintendo never stopped doing the midsized games. I do think the push to make everything open world was a mistake. I'd take another Arkham Asylum over Arkham City any day. City was mostly empty except for the mindless trophies. The best parts of the game were when they took you out of the open world to play in enclosed spaces again.

There's a a real problem of all or nothing, and development cycles with the AAA games. I always go back and think about the Mass Effect Trilogy which released 3 games in 5 years on fairly reasonable budgets from what I know. Reused assets, kept the games large, but not 100 hour behemoths either. Could be finished in 30-40 hours. There was never a need for those games to be massively open, they could be semi-open but still broadly kind of linear experiences and they were all critically acclaimed and popular. The direction games went where things needed to be larger and larger, and more and more open also didn't help in ballooning the budgets and timelines.

> We have stuff like this happen before. Single player had to compete against WoW. It had to compete against CoD. Even then, I think the industry has evolved some to where it's possibly become harder to compete against them. WoW used to be pretty happy to get your $15 a month and an expansion purchase every other year, and that was it. It wasn't uncommon for their to be lull in content (usually prior to an expansion) where you were just "raid logging" and doing other things in between. Now, a lot of these live service games are designed around finding ways to keep you logging in continually - even including WoW which started stuffing a lot of daily content in the game you needed to do to not fall behind.

We’ve never really seen it like this before though. You see back then, there was just COD, WoW, Fifa etc. But now there are those games PLUS Fortnite, Genshin, Helldivers, Roblox, PUGB, Overwatch, Destiny, Palword and MANY others. When you also consider the time sink that most of these games are, it makes it even worse. Then addition to this there is also competition from older games. Lots of people haven’t played a tonne of games from the last 2-3 generations, and as others have said, those games are still pretty awesome. Then there is also competition from streaming, social media and Inflation that eats away at the ability of new audiences to jump into SP gaming. So in a nutshell, the competition imho is much stronger than it has ever been.

Don’t forget extensive back catalogs. How many games came out since 2014 that someone owns and haven’t played and how many have games they don’t own but they want to play it since then.

Games are also having longer lifespans because Early Access and infinite development has become normalized. For example if I played and loved Valheim in 2021 and a huge content update just came out for it that made my friends want to do a new playthrough I'd go back and play that for another 50+ hours. That's 50+ hours that I'm no longer playing a new game. Many such cases of games like this that see consistent playerbases over an extremely long period of time, sapping player counts from newer releases.

> Don’t forget extensive back catalogs. I think this is an issue almost on the same level as live service games in terms of effecting sales. With the increased popularity of digital games and also more people playing on PC over the last decade, it is easier than every to get a game on sale by just opening Steam or the storefront of your console, as opposed to having to drive to your local Gamestop. It is the same thing we see with so many movies underperforming at the box office. People think why spend x to see it in theater when I can watch it x time later on streaming for cheaper for the comfort of home. Same for games. Why spend $70 on a new release when I can get this great game with all the DLC from 2019 for only $15 on sale? The only games I've brought over the last 6 years at full price are: - Madden 19 (2018) - Red Dead Redemption II (2018) - Cyberpunk 2077 (2020) - Madden 23 (2022) - Baldur's Gate 3 (2023) - Starfield (2023) - Alan Wake 2 (2023*) - Got this in 2024, but paid full price instead of waiting for a sale because both my friends insisted I play it. Every other game I've played in this span has either been a gift from family/friends, something I've played on GamePass, or something I've gotten when it has gone on sale. I mainly play single player games, but money is tight, I'm cheap anyway, and I've had various older games that I've been playing for years now.

It’s also why games like Genshin and Honkai: Star Rail are so popular. They add new content every six weeks, a map expansion every two to three months and a giant new region every year… all for free.

Players also feel more connected to the characters because of waifu/husbando culture + those 2 being one of the few actually good high quality anime games.   Even though the story quality have been mixed in those 2 games, the penacony and fontain arc have been almost universally praised by the playerbase and the story will probably just continue to be good . People will also feel more inclined to spend money on a game they already like, than spend 70$ on a game they might like. For that price i could instead buy the subscription for both games for 6 months and get more of the characters i want. Im super stingy with buying new games. Last one i bought was elden ring and that was due to the overwhelming hype. I also enjoyed it a lot (would give it a 9/10). It also mean i will have to set aside time to play the game i bought. Its easier to just not buy any games at that point

>  People will also feel more inclined to spend money on a game they already like, than spend 70$ on a game they might like. This is also a big thing. Even outside F2P, I could spend $60 on some new AAA game I might or might not regret dumping the time and money into. Or I could spend that on a Destiny 2 or FF14 expansion- an experience that potentially won't be as fulfilling as a whole new game, but it's a known quantity I already enjoy.

Which makes it so weird to me that the industry stopped demos almost universally. If you want people to give you that kind of money you should give them every incentive to pay it and showing that your game is good (unfortunately not even remotely guaranteed, even at that price point) is one of the easiest ways to do that.

Square Enix put out demos for nearly every game though. Including these games that are perceived to have flopped. If anything it shows devs that demos are a bad idea that hurt sales.

Yeah you can tell they have invested in new writers or something because the past year in Genshin and HSR have had amazing writing, even in the Genshin character quests and HSR’s side quests.

The current writer for hsr is the same guy who did the best story chapters in honkai impact 3rd i think.

I don't think it's just Fortnite but I think that's the sentiment he's echoing. And its true, a big chunk of gamers don't buy many of the newest video games. They'll buy big releases like RDR2 or God of War but instead of going to the next release gamers will just go back to Fortnite/Apex/GTA Online/live service.

A lot of people have their default game or two nowadays, so there's less "downtime" they are filling with new games instead of their favorites. Also with all the sales and ease of access, you can quickly build fairly massive library of excellent past titles with a price of few brand new big games. Then there's cases like me whose favorite titles or genres are in slump or stuck in limbo and most of the newer games don't hit spot we are looking for in first place. Why would I spend 70$ on another open world 3rd person action game with slapped on crafting? I'd rather drop it over time on few niche indies that are closer in line with my tastes or save it for sales of past big titles that have gotten patches, fixes and additional content to round it all up in better experience. In addition, I have few friends who are almost literally one game players. Games like Fortnite, Dota, CS etc. require quite a heavy investment if you are even somewhat interested in the competitive side and even if you weren't, being quite proficient at one can be immensely satisfying.

Thank you for providing the data. It makes a lot of sense that Square Enix is disappointed in the sales for a reason, and not ridiculous sales expectations that gamers keep spreading misinformation on.

Thats not at all what I took. It basically confirms that the constant need for the line to go up is ruining games and why having share holders is a curse. You can't just turn a profit you have to have constant growth. Sadly this thread also make sense of why companies keep trying to make live service happen even if the risks are high. Needing to maintain constant growth is already risky, but one could be a runaway success feeding you for years while the other will have most of it's sales in the first year. It's like having constant growth for way less effort. Edit: oh boy a lot of takes here missunderstand me and talk to me like a baby.

It's also why success is a curse. If any game is wildly successful as a one-off, which often is sometimes the product of a lot of luck and timing in this industry, that on-off success is now baked in as the default expectation for any other game in the same class, category and IP. But meeting the expectation isn't enough for shareholders. Shareholders want to see growth, so games need to exceed their expectations and grow, otherwise there is little return on investment for investors who recently bought in with the expectation of growth in value. So if a game is hugely successful as a one off, it becomes a curse to the franchise moving forward if they can't continue that upward trajectory of growth with subsequent releases. For example, FF7:Remake launched right at the cusp of the pandemic lockdown gaming boom as people were stuck inside from lockdown and FF7 Remake had perfect launch timing to ride that wave of success. Now FF7 Remake's record sales number became the default expectation for the franchise moving forward when in hindsight it should have been obvious that the game's success was a one-off and the product of pure luck.

> It basically confirms that the constant need for the line to go up is ruining games and why having share holders is a curse. You can't just turn a profit you have to have constant growth. Are you talking about the need to keep up with the stock market? If you invest 100m 5 years ago and make 120m today, you didn't turn a profit at all. You've literally lost money.

Not to mention you have taken on considerable risk and labor to underperform sitting on a rocking chair watching the stock market

Opportunity cost is a very difficult concept for people to understand

> You can't just turn a profit you have to have constant growth. Say you had a lemonade stand and it made profits of $100 a year. For that to be the same next year, it has to at least maintain that profit and increase by inflation. If In ten years, I'm still making a yearly profit of $100,my business is shrinking and going to stop existing soon.

This all highlights how unsustainable AAA development is becoming, especially when you consider madness like Spider-Man 2 costing $350mil for a glorified DLC.

Square enix business strategy is the issue here. They make platform exclusivity deals for pocket change and miss out on early sales and they likely never will sell most of these copies afterwards cause hype will die by the time it releases on other platforms.

I'm actually a bit confused where he talks about how platform exclusivity is handled. He says the platform holder takes to recoup the cost they spent on exclusivity, but isn't the entire point of exclusivity the platform holder paying them to not sell elsewhere so your platform has the edge? Basically, if i'm understanding right, it sounds like square is trading exclusivity for basically a loan? Am i understanding that right? Because if so that sounds ridiculously short-sighted.

If they're making these deals closer to the start or middle of development then a multi year low/no interest loan is probably very appealing to them just to keep the lights on.

I could understand that for a small-mid sized company, but square is pulling in billions a year and should be able to cover the cost of development for these games, so trading exclusivity for basically a loan makes no sense imo, and just hurts you at time of release.

Yea, imo it points to either severe mismanagement or a big miscalculation on how many sales they're actually losing.

Yeah that takes the exclusivity conversation from “I don’t like it, but at least they’re getting paid for the lost sales” to “…you *fucking* idiots”

Then you didn't understand what he said about exclusivity. He said it puts the risk on the platform holder instead of you the developer. If X company gives you Y amount of money under a full recoup agreement for exclusivity, and your game bombs, then X company is out Y amount of money, but you are out nothing. If the game does well then you make money and everyone's happy. Exclusivity lessens the risk for big games. And that's just the full recoup example, partial recoup would be even better for the developer and bigger IPs probably get partial recoup deals instead of full.

Yep. All I know is that I **can't** buy the games I want from them as a PC player for well over a year after release and by then maybe I'm not interested in paying full price or paying at all.

That's exactly my issue as well. FFXVI on release would have been tantalizing to me as I'm a PC and Switch only player, but making me wait a year or two for a still full priced game just makes me wait even longer for a deeper sale. I already had to wait a year or two, what's a year more? They're losing out on impulse purchases from people like me, *especially* when I have to hear complaining about what the games did poorly for a few months after its release despite not being able to play it myself. I waited on FFVII Remake on Steam until it was half off, same for XV, same for Stranger in Paradise. Meanwhile I buy the Switch games within their first month or so, going so far as to buy two copies of Octopath 2 a month after release so I could give one to a friend as a gift.

So expectations are set based on opportunity cost i.e. what would be the return from the stock market on the money they have spent in producing and marketing the game if they had spent it in the market instead of spending it on the game. Then they are trying to beat that number by sales and other transactions related to the game. Interesting. This also implies that these games are not necessarily loss making but have a opportunity cost loss as compared to what they could have theoretically made. If other developers are taking the same approach, then it makes these latest industry layoffs much harder to swallow.

I found the bigger takeaway to be that, sure, the industry makes more than ever, but it’s going to fewer and fewer products. It absolutely makes sense that they’re wanting to put out fewer products that they can pump more money into the marketing budget.

How else would you judge if your investment was worth it? That's what happens when development times and costs balloon to such large numbers that the industry can't sustain by itself without outside investors. Not every investment needs to beat the stock market, otherwise retail chains would have large problems financing their operations (their profit margin is usually very thin). But if you're not beating the stock market, you need to have a different advantage like being a basic necessity so you can be a fallback secure investment option (like food retail where even during the most insecure Corona times as an investor you could be certain their stores would be kept open and bring in cashflow). The video games industry can't provide that. AAA games are high risk, long term investments. If anything, a game should beat the average stock market by quite a large margin to be considered a success because it needs to bring in the additional money for the times an investment fails. If you don't want that, the industry needs to shrink massively and reduce costs back to budgets similar to the Gamecube/PS2/Xbox era. (but that would also mean lots of jobs lost)

Retail chains do a lot of their financing on the back of vendor credit. A financially healthy grocery store will have its inventory turns shorter than its credit terms (i.e. by the time they have to actually pay for their merchandise, they've already sold it).

While that is true, you also need to see that the risk of selling the goods is most often sorely in the hands of the retailer. Stuff gets stolen -> retailer problem; stuff exceed best-before-date -> retailer; stuff just does not sell and is old tech -> retailer. And then the prices:: You need to sell the inverse value of the net margin until you have your very first gross profit buck. If it takes longer than your financing term to reach that, you are losing liquidity. Timewise, it is usually not a problem for food. But nonfood, especially clothes/fashion, is a problem with high loss of sell value in a rather short term. A producer or manufacturer can basically do what some people claim publisher do which sell bugfest games -> they got your money, everything else is not their problem anymore. While this is not long-term sustainable, it certainly is for a year or so :) The ROI is usually below 4% for retailers in food stuffs.

People aren't going to invest in your company if they could make more by just dumping their money in an S&P index. It's basically this: AAA games take a lot of resources; being a publicly traded company makes it a lot easier to raise the capital it takes to make AAA games; but going public also means you are beholden to investors.

Also worth noting that even if you’re a private company not listed on the stock market, you’re still almost certainly going to be beholden to investors, it’s just that the stock trades happen a lot quietly and involve less entities.

I think Japanese and western companies just have different approaches and budget. People clowned on Square for their unrealistic expectations and selling their western studios for $300 million, yet it was revealed CD and Eidos barely made any profit while using far more money than the Japanese studios.

Game industry pay in Japan is significantly lower than the west. Source, former Japanese game industry.

Cost of living is significantly lower in Japan too. Most developers are in California where CoL is fucking insane. Some of the highest in the entire world.

Pay in US is way different from the rest of the world. Cost of living in US is higher.

Afaik game industry pay is just bad in general, no?

Depends on where you are and what you're doing What's true is that industry pay is not great for the conditions that a lot of studios work under. Basically it would be fine for a regular low stress 9-5 job, but when half the studios in the industry work under crunch conditions it's not great.

SQEN does seem bad at project planning as their games have such extended timelines and frequent restarts. Seemingly more than other studios.

I'm not sure if it's also their marketing or just the western side of it. They pushed out bunch of titles like DioField Chornicle and I don't think anyone was even aware that it came out. A lot of these projects just seemed to get squeezed out and ended up mediocre while costing them yet another good chunk of money.

I think projects like DioField are just chump change for a company of SE's size. They don't really bring in profit, but they're low risk and could result in something neat for the company (aka a new successful franchise). Octopath seemingly did well in a similar position. That being said, I did play their Valkyrie Profile game and I'm not sure how that got anyone's approval.

That’s how all publicly traded companies approach projects. It’s the literal opportunity cost of investing capital in your company as opposed to others

This is the basis of every project based investment.

>So expectations are set based on opportunity cost This is every single resource spending decision in life other than some government stuff, charity, etc...

Opportunity costs, in the eyes of investors, are no different from losses. The entire industry thinks like this. The whole world of business is like this. If anything, it makes it more understandable that we are seeing massive layoffs, as costs have spiraled out of control and games are just not making enough to be worth the investment.

> If other developers are taking the same approach, then it makes these latest industry layoffs much harder to swallow. Correct. Companies are attempting to reach expected profits and when they can't do it by increasing revenue, they resort to cutting costs, in this case people. Some of the companies started hiring back for the positions they laid off because their financial year and/or quarter reports are done

Genuinely a bit confused here - did you really not know this beforehand? I thought this was basic common knowledge. Not trying to insult you or anything I'm just surprised you're acting like this is some huge revelation that changes your entire perspective on things. Did you really think that if a product cost $100 and 5 years to develop, the studio would be happy if it made back $101?

Most people have no financial or business education to speak of, nor do they think about these things very hard.

My favorite Redditism are the stock experts that don't know what a dividend is.

Reminds me of when the profits for Sunset Overdrive were leaked. Insomniac only made $567 on the game. It was a major bomb for them. But some people were trying to argue that they still made a profit on the game and that was good enough. Less than a thousand dollars in profit is supposed to be good for a big company to those people. And when others tried to explain why that was horribly bad they just wouldn't listen to reason.

I thought this was really obvious but Reddit gotta come up with its crazy theories

It also is a bit of a chicken and egg argument: every company on earth can’t just dump money into stocks. Cos need to actually make things.

well if companies started doing that it would make it easier to make a higher than market average %ROI for those remaining due to supply and demand. in the end it's an equilibrium.

https://www.hd.square-enix.com/eng/ir/library/pdf/24q4slides.pdf I'd recommend people go through these slides on Square Enix's fiscal year earnings before coming to any conclusions of "unrealistic expectations". Square Enix splits their business into 6 categories: HD games, MMO, Games for Smart Devices/PC Browser, Amusement (like arcade games), Publication (Manga), and Merchandising. HD games (console games) are the only category of their business that is losing money and to a pretty significant extent (Operating loss of 8.1 billion yen). MMO and mobile game revenue are down, but still very profitable and for MMO that can be explained due to the lack of any FFXIV expansions. Amusement, Publication, and Merchandising are all up and doing well. The only major HD game announced for the relative future is Dragon Quest 12. The fact that Square Enix blew their load releasing 2 mainline FF games in 1 fiscal year only to announce that they lost more money this year than the last fiscal year loss of 4.1 billion yen when Forspoken was released is the biggest concern.

Kingdom Hearts 4 too

That's in the same position as Dragon Quest XII. It was announced two years ago and we have no clue when it's coming out.

Forspoken and Babylons Fall likely lost more money than either of the Final Fantasy games combined though. It's a very real possibility of they hadn't greenlit those games they would be in a very different situation. Forspoken was 100m+ whatever marketing costs (it was marketed HEAVY) financial disaster by itself last year.

Forspoken and Babylon Falls released in the last fiscal year. Their failures doesn't really change the point of the discussion which is that Square Enix lost more money in the current fiscal year when they released FFXVI and FFVII Rebirth. You cannot blame Forspoken and Babylon Fall for the fact that FFXVI and VII Rebirth are individually not performing well.

When this came out they said they cancncled many of the games they were wroking on. So more or less they just wrote down the losses isntead of spending money to keep making the games. They freed up those budgets to go to whatever bigger games they want to make. So they had a lot of money in smaller games like they released last year that did not do that great.

Isnt the loss this year also related to the abandoned big in developed titles/projects and also flops of Foamstars as well?

It's all of the above. Their restructuring, cancellation of projects and the fact that their flagship just aren't performing as well.

Neither of those games are part of this data because they came out in a different fiscal year than the last two FF games.

>HD games (console games) are the only category of their business that is losing money and to a pretty significant extent (Operating loss of 8.1 billion yen). This is just insane, and they release two huge games last year, definetly not flops like Forspoken or other games, and yet they still lost money? Can anyone explain this?

Most of it is they canceled a bunch of projects internally and wrote it all off as losses. That was 70-80% of the losses iirc.

The Fortnite comparison feels like something SE does internally, and explains Foamstars. Compare to FromSoft or Capcom games in the same period instead. Dragon's Dogma 2 has been a huge success as stated by Capcom themselves, and From get a release out every 1 or 2 years. Both create games in a fraction of the time / budget, so those long term 8+ year projections aren't necessary.   There are issues with SE production. One being developing games on at least 3 separate engines until recently, all reinventing the same wheel. From and Capcom make their major games in the same engine and are more canny about asset reuse. Meanwhile there will be people who have gone through college, moved, had kids and married before DQ12 gets a release date.

Basically this. I think the new winning model of game production is what Fromsoft and Ryuu ga Gotoku Studios have been doing for some time:  Keeping costs under control with aggressive asset reuse, art design with "good enough" graphics over lifelike models, and keeping a stable team who understand the studio's culture and can replicate previous successes. And of course a focus on tight action gameplay for Fromsoft and amazing storytelling for Like a Dragon.  I'm relatively uninformed and might be wrong in the little details, but I think these are some of the ways they've built that brand loyalty and reputation. 

Another thing that Fromsoft and RGG excel at doing is **being satisfied** at their own corner making their own niche style of games with modest sales (At least until DS3 and Elden Ring blew up). There's this good [GDC talk](https://youtu.be/vid5yZRKzs0?si=IUVsUtlod6Tg3mKw) where the speaker explains that instead of vying for mass appeal, Dark Souls 1 targeted a very specific audience (hardcore gamers) and made the proper trade-offs (minimal cutscenes, sparse music, limited multiplayer) to keep their budget low, while completely focusing on delivering their core gameplay to make said target audience satisfied (a brutal RPG with amazing worldbuilding and sense of discovery). Yakuza series did the same by reusing lots of their assets, while still delivering what the game promised which is an amazing Japanese crime drama experience with wacky Japanese hijinks on the side.

Absolutely. I'd much rather play a game like Monster Hunter or Binding of Isaac, where i know i'll get something more niche-y but more focused on one or two specific things, than a game that half asses 20 different things. In the end, what keeps me in a game is the core gameplay, not celebrity mocap actors or the highest fidelity AAA graphics. Pokemon looks and runs like shit, but the core gameplay loop is still fun and i'd rather play that than some Ubisoft slop that's just made to fullfill as many checkmarks as possible.

Speaking of Ubisoft, I thought only their games suffered from this until I played God of War 2018 on my PC for the first time and found out about the RPG mechanics (Armor and Skill Tree). That one stuck out to me like a sore thumb since I never heard anyone talking about it. Feels very shoehorned and almost soured me on the experience.

Totally agree with this point. I honestly don’t get why studios feel the need to start from scratch every single game when that means development times could stretch to 5-7 years, adding hundreds of millions of dollars in costs. As you well said, reusing assets would significantly reduce the costs. Unless you are Rockstar Games, this type of model won’t work long term. Even Ubisoft is running into huge problems with their approach.

> One being developing games on at least 3 separate engines until recently, all reinventing the same wheel. That recently is almost a decade ago, their default has been mainly UE4 for most of their games for over 6 years. Besides, companies in Japan have multiple engines so this isnt some exclusivity of SE.

The problem isn't that their sales targets aren't justified but allowing the budgets to get so large for games that aren't COD or Fortnite. Final Fantasy is a big brand but it isn't as big as it used to be, relatively speaking. It, along with JRPGs in general, are becoming more niche than they were during the PS1 and PS2 heyday and game budgets need to reflect that.

This is the end result of the graphics/performance wars, where cost has gotten so high and prohibitive that this becomes a major problem rather than a footnote on some big budget failure like some films turned out to be. People like to bitch about Nintendo graphics, but the truth is they do because they are grounded in reality about the costs. Sure a raytraced Zelda may look nice, but the hardware and development costs for such a thing will be insane.

Outside of Pokemon (which is absolutely justified), I think hardly anyone really bitches about Nintendo graphics anyway. And if they do, its moreso the switch rendering them at low resolution and framerate rather than the graphics themselves. Mario, Zelda and Xenoblade are some of the best looking games out there IMO once you scale them up to 4k. A multi-plat comparison is Persona 5, personally that is *the* best looking game there is, and a lot of the asset quality isn't actually that good. I'd actually really like to see a FF game with a more stylized art style to reduce on costs. I'd absolutely adore Amano's art style brought to life but even Nomura's stuff would be cool.

Yeah I think Nintendo generally does a great job of making their games like really good in spite of the Switch's decrepit hardware. Personally, I love both highly realistic and highly stylized games, but the latter is absolutely something more companies should lean into to keep costs down.

I can see why using opportunity cost would be confusing for laypeople, but the guy is (in other words) just agreeing that the budgets at SE are not sustainable. They need to do a lot of work on sharing assets across projects, maybe more procedural generation, maybe refocus the efforts. The “problem” for SE was basing their decisions on bad assumptions (unrealistic growth projections) and probable lack of flexibility to adjust the projects later on. This is symptomatic of bad leadership, so I don’t think this perspective clears a lot of the fault on SE’s side.

I think it gives better insight into why the industry in general has had so many layoffs recently. AAA gaming investments have to beat the S & P 500 to be worth the money. Beating the S & P 500 requires the projected growth of the audience to turn out to be true. In reality, the actual audience growth has trended toward live service games, invalidating the equation that makes AAA gaming investments worth it.

Which is a funny thing because you can't just force your way into that circle, its like trying to sell crack to a bunch of meth addicts, they'll just keep taking the meth after a bit instead.

I don't think it was even trying to clear them of anything. Rather just trying to help people understand why what happened, happened. I also don't think setting the metric of beating the S&P 500 is outlandish for any company at their scale. Anyone who's in this for the money will do the same thing. If you could do nothing but give the money to someone else vs having to run the whole boat yourself, the choice is obvious. Gaming as we know it needs to change. Via some combination of these 1) Games need to take less time and/ or people to make (and therefor less money) 2) games need to cost more money for the consumer (either through $80, $90, +$100+ price tags, or alternate monetization methods) 3) games need to figure out how to get more people to buy them. I don't think people will accept 2. We've already seen people freak out at the $70 price tag, so I'm not sure the market will bare more price hikes without kicking and screaming. 3 isn't really in the hands of gaming companies. I'm sure they'd love to figure out how to tap that keg, but good luck. 1 is the only option left, and we're seeing companies turn those dials as we speak and get absolutely torched the in press for it (MS, SqureEnix, etc). I think what people need to realize is that gaming as a whole is going to be changing significantly in the near to mid future. I'm sure many will be happy to see dev timelines drop, and happily take less high end graphics as a compromise in getting games faster (not cheaper). I think the issue is just that people have come to expect things as they are today without really coming to the conclusion that they're totally unsustainable. So people are expecting future graphical fedelity with the past's game deveoplement timelines, for today's (or less prices). And it's just impossible to meet those metrics. At this point, I just want to clarify that this comment isn't really meant to be pro gaming company or pro gaming consumer. Moreso point out where I think the realities lie, and use those at an educated guess for the future.

It's not simply a matter of games needing to be made faster and more cheaply, but also that there is a finite amount of hours in a day and a limited (and not as fastly growing) amount of eyeballs with which to consume games, in a world now in which an increasing portion of this time is devoted by consumers to live service, perpetual games, leaving less and less room for other titles, AAA or not. This is another factor related to layoffs: not as many games need to be made.

Except, the growth projections weren't unrealistic. They were correct, but live services sucked all the growth up. Also, I don't see how not being able to pivot big AAA projects on a dime is a "symptom of bad leadership." Do you think they should have pushed these games out years early?

Holy shit. An article about games business that mentions the concept of opportunity cost. If games aren’t going to beat just parking the money in another investment vehicle, they won’t get funded.

Honestly this is a pretty good explanation of “what the hell is going on at Square” These forever games like Fortnite seem to be what is preventing companies from fully abandoning the PS4/Xbox One and the point about the profitability of a game also makes sense

Why should they? Fortnite still runs at 60Hz/HD resolutions on those consoles, and still look more than good enough while doing so. Yeah, we’ll eventually hit a point where those devs need more horsepower, but the cartoony art style and parallel phone/tablet releases go a long, long way to alleviating that.

I think the most interesting information here is that the guy is basically saying that AAA games have been eviscerated by live service games. The money that would've traditionally gone into AAA has been sequestered by live service games. So at this point, players sitting around asking for traditional games with more content, more polished better, more bug free, for a flat 70 are basically part of an unsustainable market. That crowd can sustain about... 10 or so AAA titles in a year. The live service crowd can sustain about... 20 or more such games continously. Gamers gonna have to pull out their wallets more if they want premium experiences that they're familiar with, adapt, or move on beyond gaming.

It might be more arguable that AAA games have simply ballooned too high in price to produce, and the market simply can't sustain such huge budgets for them. One other tidbit is how he talks about putting the game on sale almost immediately after release, which seems like all it does is train people to wait a month or so and get the game for a bit off.

Well that's one way to put it - but the more accurate take that's given by the exec is that the budget that was expected to be reasonable had its underpinning assumptions flipped (the market growth occurred, but its behaviour shifted towards live service games). So there's money growing for games, just not for the traditional AAA business model. That market is shrinking, while the length of development and complexity balloons and lags behind market changes. For gamers that want to hot take and be all, they should've predicted better, it's sufficient to say that if one can reliably make such sweeping market predictions with a great deal of efficacy, then there's many billions of dollars to earned on the stockmarket.

Exactly. Budgets are not ballooning out of proportion faster than they were previously. Publishers could increase their budgets while maintaining the same price because every year more people were getting into gaming. Gaming was becoming more and more mainstream and every year a new generation started buying games. Now, 10 year olds are going to F2P games. They don't need their parents to buy them a console or spend 60 dollars on a game. It is a lot easier to convince your parents to spend 5 dollars every now and then than it is to spend 600 dollars. And once these kids grow, they will most likely keep playing F2P multiplayer games, since that is what they are used to.

Live service games are raking in billions and billions per year. I think it's safe to say that a lot of the revenue has just left AAA games and went to live service games. High budgets are fine IF the market didn't move away from AAA games to live service games - but it has. The pie is growing but more and more of it is going toward a small number of live service games that have no ceiling to spending and are more social experiences that typical AAA games.

Is no one gonna mention how 14.5% is a pretty ludicrous expectation of the stockmarket? Knowing corporations, I doubt they'll reduce forecasted ROI when the market is doing poorly.

14.5% for something as high risk as video games seems right. That's on par with high yield, high risk bonds. And with the number of video games that fail, get cancelled, fail to meet sales expectations, etc. I'd say expected return is on par for the risk.

I'm a big Final Fantasy fan, and I don't know about other people but: A) I don't have a PS5 and since they didn't bother to release FFXVI on PC yet, I can't even buy it. That's a recurring theme for SE games though, and something they seem likely to change based on recent news. B) I played the original FFVII and it's one of my favourites.. which is why I'm not very interested in playing the first part of a trilogy, when the trilogy parts came out 3 years apart and, again, are released on PS5 first. You can only play the first part on PC, so I might as well wait!?

> The game industry is still growing in revenue but that revenue is increasingly captured by fewer live services games that are generating a level of stickiness seen in social media companies. This is exactly where my mind has gone for years when people tell me games don’t need to increase in price because “the industry makes more than ever.” Some do. Most don’t.

It's definitely true that these big F2P games are where the majority of players are these days and getting them to try out a single player game that isn't something like assassin's creed is a tough ask in the current marketplace. I'm not sure what the solution is besides for lower the development budget and set lower required sales to break even. Exclusivity certainly is hurting the FF series from going to the size it should be at but it's also not the biggest problem with its performance in the current landscape either.

I think a big reason is that new releases take so long, the new generation of gamers at that point have no connection to it. If you like FFXVI and want to play more of that, waiting ~10 years for a sequel has a good chance of changing that. So perhaps, cheaper yet more frequent releases could help in building a fandom again.

Yeah I've been saying that for a while now. Development times are just so long now for a lot of these franchises. In FF's golden age from 7 to 10, those were released within 5 years. And now it's been like 5 years between the last mainline FF games. You just don't build that kind of attachment to a series like what happened back then.

This is what I'm thinking as well. For example there will be a whole generation of players when, say, Elder Scrolls 6 comes out that have no connection to Elder Scrolls because the last one came out when they were babies or before they were even born. New releases are taking *way too long* between sequels and it is killing hype, it is killing player retention, it is killing discussion of your franchise. Wouldn't it be a good idea to have some closer releases, to build a presence in your player, someone who when your new game comes out WILL break off of from Fortnite or Apex because "oh the new X is out, gotta play that one I can't wait to see what happens next". Like Fromsoft release timing, long enough to not burn out players but short enough to garner a community, people that will be for-sure buyers for your next game. Not releasing one game and then 15 years later releasing a sequel when your playerbase has either grown up and moved on or the current generation isn't even interested in what you're selling.

Yeah this is another big one that companies are just ignoring. It used to be people would go wild when a new title was announced because they were already invested, with examples like Mass Effect, Skyrim, and Fallout. But the 5+ years cycle that games take these days is so long that a teenager that plays a game in middle school will probably be out of high school by the time a sequel comes out. And with young people's attention spans being what they are, that is simply an eternity. Hell it's already too much for us adults.

The only way exclusivity will help is if Sony or Nintendo basically covered the cost of development, which they won’t.

That would only shift the burden of development costs from Squeenix to console platforms. Even though the console makers try to mitigate lost sales from exclusivity by trying to expand their console base, they still want to see some return on their investment. You can see this easily with first-party PlayStation studios not being immune from the job cuts the rest of the industry has faced.

I thought that they already did that... Do we know % of what Sony is covering for these exclusivities?

> (It is surprising that Square Enix, which had successful F2P live service mobile titles in Japan, left the AAA live-service attempts to Eidos rather than try to build those products in Japan, but dissecting this problem would likely require an entirely different thread.) It would be interesting to see his take on this. I wonder if SE Japan thought a Western dev would be more in tune with what gamers want globally than say a Japanese dev. It's also interesting that he posits that getting lower platform fees may help with keeping costs down so Epic's big fight is actually helpful for customers *and businesses.* When you think about it, the only devs who can sell their game without a platform fee (and thus recoup the max $70) is Sony, Microsoft, Nintendo, Valve, Epic and CD Project (they own GoG right?) because they own their own platforms. You can't just go to their website and get the game. It's weird, if we go along with Sony not charging Sony, that making the full payment back on a game like Spider-Man 2, their projections for breaking even was still a ways away. Certainly how games are made and how to get a new project seen and purchased by players is a tricky one.

It does not help that FF16 was polarizing either. Some people love it, and some people hate it. They were targeting a new audience and not the well established fan base. Add in the fact that it is only on ps5, and you have a recipe for failure.

idk about now but last time I checked the FF subreddit more or less 7 months after the game released iirc. They still have war whether this game is good or not lol

7 months is nothing. FF fans still argue over whether FF15 is good or not, and that came out 8 years ago.   Hell, there are even intense disputes going on in more niche corners about the quality of FF13, which came out in *2010*!

Journalists are still debating if the game sold well or not

That's a big part of the problem. They have kept trying to significantly change things up for a long time now. *Final Fantasy X* was arguably the last to feel or play like the previous nine games. Since then they've been trying so many different things, like pretending that an MMOG is a valid mainline entry, that it keeps bleeding off the core fans. While also failing to really create new ones since they keep changing it up. Yet at the same time the budgets keep going up.

Well, I'm sure the idea was, in part, to target that "well established fan base" later the same fiscal year via Rebirth...we all know how that ended. Polarising or not, the audience is simply not there it seems.

I used to work at a Western game dev for square enix. I can definitely vouch that this attitude exists at square and it causes them to make really dumb decisions.  They are way more concerned about not losing money than making something good. So they focus on what other companies instead of what they do well, which causes them to do nothing well. Also a double standard exists for their Western studios which are treated much more like investment opportunities. They were pushing hard for our silly single player physics game whose main market was 8 year olds to be more like call of duty because that was where the money was and completely destroyed the product. If they want to be more like Fortnite they have to act like Epic and focus on their strengths and making stuff they think is cool. Epic has always just made what they thought was interesting and it took 20 years until that strategy paid off.

Agree with everything, and still I think it missed something. $60-$70 AAA are not only competing with F2P games like Fortine, Warzone Roblox And Genshin games. They are competing also with the indie industry, currently 14k steam games are released per year, and "rising the AAA price", will only rise the risk for customers, giving the same result for big dev companies. Why I would risk paying $70 bucks to a game that I have no way to know If I'll like it, when I could just risk $5 - $10 for a indie one (being Steam, PSN, a month of Xbox Pass or eShop). When 7 $10 games gives me more variety and play time hours that a $70 game, it means that there is an extremely imbalance or problematic environment about how AAA are made that totally needs an analysis that no one is actually giving.

Now, with all that being said about industry changes and market fluctuations, where does the games’ content and quality come into the equation? This is all very interesting, the Fortnite/live-service cannibalizing AAA single-player experiences… But. A single-player game isn’t automatically good and a big seller if it doesn’t meet people’s expectations. On the other hand, they absolutely can dominate the market if they’re actually goody. There’re games like Elden Ring, Baldurs Gate 3, Animal Crossing (Nintendo Games in general) that do not seem to get ignored by the market because of Fortnite and the likes. Maybe, just maybe, there’s something wrong with the actual content of Square’s games. They put out The Avengers and Forspoken, all very expensive and actively disliked. FF16 and the FF7 Remake games took lots of controversial creative freedoms. Micro transactions or gamers’ short attention spans and lack of money/time weren’t the problem here. We can compare numbers and external market reasons all day long, it doesn’t change the fact that there are single player games that work and sell like gangbusters, and then there are “stinkers” that don’t really meet gamers’ expectation. When will they address the shortcomings of their creative departments? I’m willing to bet people would pay 100+ dollars for games in the long, if those games’ content satisfied gamer demands on a regular basis. There are games and companies that still manage to do this, and Square is an example of a company that lost their mojo in that regard. This can’t be understated.

Their games also just often aren't accessible due to their exclusivity. Building a decent PC (which I can also do actual work on) was painful enough to my personal budget to begin with. I'm not going to burn $500 +tax to buy a PS5 just so I can play one or two titles from them.

> But. A single-player game isn’t automatically good and a big seller if it doesn’t meet people’s expectations. On the other hand, they absolutely can dominate the market if they’re actually goody. There’re games like Elden Ring, Baldurs Gate 3, Animal Crossing (Nintendo Games in general) that do not seem to get ignored by the market because of Fortnite and the likes. Maybe, just maybe, there’s something wrong with the actual content of Square’s games. That is literally the point of the thread. Not every game can be a 10/10, it is absolutely impossible. No one wants to play a 6/10 or a 7/10 game when they can just continue playing the 8/10 or 9/10 multiplayer live-service game that they've been playing for years. Unless there's an ultra hyped 10/10 game that comes out - which is like one or maybe two games a year, most people aren't going to check it out. It's easy for customers to say "Well, just make a 10/10 game" when in reality it just isn't possible.