First of all, FFXIII didn't flop. It just was on both a system Japan wasn't interested in and not properly handled. As well, they expected the game to be the next Final Fantasy VII, when the public was just looking for the next 'main' Final Fantasy game. SquareEnix needs to get it through their heads that they no longer can keep making 'bigger and better looking' Final Fantasy games with the hope that it'll sell like FFX or FFVII did. There's too much competition now adays.
The real thing they would have to do if they expect to sell more copies for the next title is put it on a system people want to buy. Look at Dragon Quest. Its no secret what's been helping that series all these years. They didn't give people extra items with their games or have something unique Final Fantasy didn't have in terms of storyline. They just put the games on the most popular console every generation. And this gen, Final Fantasy bucked that trend instead focusing on 'Graphics' and 'the western market'. And it lost some sales for that, mostly in its Japanese market.
| dib8rman said: FF7 increase means that FF 6 was a success and that FF7 was very anticipated. FF 8's lower sales means that FF 7 was a failure and FF8 wasn't hitting a sweet spot FF 9's lower sales means that FF 8 was a failure and that FF 9 wasn't hitting a sweet spot rinse repeat and you have a justification for that slope. |
There's so many flaws with your point, I don't know where to begin. I guess I'll just point out the most obvious one. The reason sales tapered off from FF7 on is not because FF7 was a 'failure', but because its nearly impossible to sustain ever increasing sales to a major breakout title. The only way they would have been able to surpass the sales of FF7 would have been to spend proportionally 2-3x more money and time advertising FF8, so that 2-3x more NEW people would have known about it and bought copies to cover the people who decided to skip FF8 after playing FF7. But since FF7 already had one of the biggest and most costly ad campaigns up to that time, they didn't want to double or triple that just for FF8. That's why you didn't see the sales for FF8 match FF7. But the fact that it still got close shows you that a resonable size of its fanbase still bought FF8.
Rinse and repeat on down the 'slope'.
However, some amount of repetition and series stagnation could have affected sales later on come the PS2/DS era. When the FF lineup jumped from 2-3 games a year to 10+ a year. That's a bigger factor to the negative impact of the series.
Six upcoming games you should look into:
