So who's going to buy Final Fantasy Versus XIII on the 360 if it's announced as multiplat?

[Michael-5]

WereKitten said:

Michael-5 said:

4.7 million on the PS3 is less then every single main series Final Fantasy in the last 15 years, excluding the lackluster online MMO FFXI and FF XIV. That's even less then FFX-2. The extra 1.8 million sales the 360 version generated at least puts FFXIII sales above 3 other mainstream FF games.

With PS3/360 hardware sales nearly split, SE is loosing a lot of $$$ making any game exclusive. This isn't like the PS2, PS1 or even SNES and NES. Sales aren't a landslide towards one manufacterer. 3rd party exclusives make little sense this gen.

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I don't think it's that clearly cut.

Let's take FFXIII: 4.7M on PS3, 1.8M on X360.

Now let's make the counterfactual hypothesis that it had remained a PS3 exclusive, then the sales wouldn't have been these. FF might well be the most successful JRPG franchise over here but it's still an entrenched niche product: I expect it mainly to sell to people who are in FF or JRPGs already.

So, how many of those western JRPGs and FF fans would be owners of an X360 only? If the X360 version didn't exist I expect most of these 1.8M sales would simply have been PS3 ones. Let's say a 75% factor, then the PS3 version alone would have sold (4.7+1.35)=6.05M. That's a 450K sales loss compared to actual ones, or about 8%. Does that 8% pay for multiplatform development (usually quantified in at least 10% increase in costs for tools and porting)?

Probably not, but on the other hand Squeenix probably had other goals. Maybe they thought that the X360 version would have been an easier way to expand into the western market. That surely didn't work out very well, and certainly they lost some cred in the most rabid fanboish audience... Maybe they had different projections, or maybe they were interested in better business opportunities with MS for their future projects - FFXIII on the X360 might not have been a great deal for Sq.x, but it certainly was worth a great deal for MS, image-wise.

As I said, not that clearly cut.

First of all. FFXIII was PS3 exclusive in Japan for what 2 years? I doubt going MP affected sales in Japan. So we're only talking Americas and EMEAA sales, which has the PS3 version at 2.8 million sales, and the 360 version at 1.8 million.

I also disagree with much of your logic. First of all, 75% of sales migrating to PS3 if this were exclusive? That's far too high. I don't have any direct axample to compare to, but look at Mass Effect 2 on PS3. The PS3 version only gained 20% of the 360 versions sales. It's a different situation, but I think the extra boom of being an exclusive is at best around the 25% margin.

So PS3 FFXIII sales would (theoretically, IMO) be maybe 700k higher? That's still a 1.1 million unit loss, or 23%. That's still not huge, but SE has no reason to stay exclusive, and expanding their audience is essential to staying alive.

Also if 360 FFXIII owners did own both a PS3 and a 360, I'm sure most would buy it on PS3, so there isn't much cross over for this.

I think SE was trying to expand their audience. Most 360 gamers I know have no interest in JRPG's, and when you look at the demograph, outside of FFXIII, JRPG's struggle to break 1 million sales on 360 (Lost Odyssey and Blue Dragon only managed 800k). SE gets a lot of support from Microsoft, that's why so many of Tri-Ace's projects went 360 exclusive, and The Last Remnant even used the Unreal Engine.

Final Fantasy isn't a niche game (although JRPG's are). It's like Zelda, people know about it, people know they are among the best reviewed games around, but people who never owned a Playstation have never gotten a chance to play it. Releasing a FF on a 360 allows 360 gamers (who lets face it are mostly WRPG and shooter fans) to try out a good JRPG. I mean no matter how good Lost Odyssey or Tales of Vesperia are, most 360 owners probably never even heard of them. Final Fantasy has a name, and with it SE can appeal to new gamers on the 360.