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Nem said:
forevercloud3000 said:
Aura7541 said:
Nem said:
forevercloud3000 said:
Nem said:

Oh please... what a Sony pink world you live in. Sony bought some squaresoft stock, thats it. They did not Save them, the merger with Enix did. The company that exists now is called Square-Enix, it owes Sony nothing.

Also the majority of their fanbase in the SNES era would be attached to Nintendo and they still developed several titles for the playstation. This is not about hardware brand loyalty, its about money. The market has changed, its not Sony domination anymore. Companies need to adapt and make money. Get over it or get out.

From my understanding, Sony actually owned about 20% of Squaresoft, which is just what they needed to keep them afloat.

Wikipedia.com

"The merger between Square and Enix, which had been under consideration since at least 2000 according to the then Enix chairman Yasuhiro Fukushima, was delayed because of the failure of the film and Enix' hesitation at merging with a company that had just lost a substantial amount of money.[34]"

The merger with Enix would have never happened without that help from Sony. It wasn't until the Merger where Enix head boss bought the deciding amount of stock in the company that Sony's share fell to 8.3%.

We will have to agree to disagree on where majority of their fanbase lies. I think its fairly obvious that if you were a die hard FF fan and played FFVII on you would grow to expect them on that same platform that had always been. Simple logic.


Its only simple logic to you because you dont understand how marketing works. Its not as simple as "i put the game in this platform, therefore i should put all of them here", that only works for the generation it started in. The product is aimed at the consumer, not the fan of console X. The market changed since the PS1. Microsoft came into the market, nintendo changed strategy and SEGA abandoned the market. With each new generation its a whole new ball game. The same people dont buy the same systems every gen, every system is different from their predecessor. Square's job is to bring their product to the most consumers possible to garner the most sales/profit possible. It really makes no sense to think it should stay in the sucessor of the previous system and should assume every consumer that purchased the previous iteration will purchase the new one.

Besides that, you are totally ignoring new adopters/buyers. The consumers ultimately rule the market. This gen the consumers decided to split between PS3 and X360 and companies had to adapt to that. Its the companies that adapt to the market, not the consumers. They are the ones looking to make money.

What you're telling us is that companies should ignore the market and blindly release titles on the sucessor system everytime to expect the same result. It just isnt the case at all. It seems like the recipe for disaster if you look at the Vita for example.


And yet you're also guilty for thinking too simply. "This gen the consumers decided to splite between PS3 and X360." That's consumers, in general. Your arguments lack any demographic insight. No two consumers have the same tastes. You'd really think there are as many JRPG fans in the 360 userbase as those in the PS3 userbase? smh. The PS3 userbase has a much larger JRPG fanbase and when SE decided to drastically change FFXIII's original identity, it alientated much of the JRPG fanbase, that a lot of those potential sales went down the drain.

"What you're telling us is that companies should ignore the market and blindly release titles on the sucessor system everytime to expect the same result. It just isnt the case at all. It seems like the recipe for disaster if you look at the Vita for example." That... made me laugh... a lot. Nice try at stretching forevercloud3000's argument beyond its intended message. In case you didn't know, SE has already did what you just stated. The company ignored much of the JRPG market with terrible decisions such as excruciating linearity, no towns, and continuance of FFXIII when no one asked SE to do so. SE blindly released FFXIII-2 expecting better reception than FFXIII. Didn't work. Now, it's blindly going to release Lightning Returns in hilarious hope to save a series that was never meant to be.

This^

Thanks for explaining exactly what I have een trying to get across to him for the past few pages....

He seems to not realize consumers are creatures of habit. It takes multiple entries in a series to train consumers in which console's to get their games on. For instance, take the "Tales of.." series. The series has spanned far too many systems, so FANS of the series are hella confused on which system to get if they are to recieve the next tales game. With consistancy the fanbase know where to find the game and hence it will recieve more sales. Namco has FINALLY learned that. This is why Star Ocean suffered so greatly when they put it on 360 initially as an exclusive. Also fans would have been expecting it on PS3.

Take a look at the sales of something like FFXIII, with 4/6ths of sales on PS3. Its on both consoles so why is it not even or MORE on 360 seeing as it had the larger fanbase? Because....as I have said till I am blue in the face on these forums, games do NOT sell dramatically more due to larger userbase but simply grow or fluctuate with the fanbase's desire for it. And with that simple fact, there is no real reason to make a game multiplatform as it justs costs a company more money with sales they would have gotten anyway on one platform. Shit, FFXIII is the worst selling FF game in years for it's respective correspondence in the generation timeline. Every first entry of the series on a platform has been the top selling  for that gen since PS1, FFX sold 8m while FFXIII struggled for 6m.

Its funny to me, because his logic dictates that some mysteriously new "2million  adopters" got the 360 version and had never played a FF game before. Seriously? New adopters are subtle in their practice and usually only do so in small portions. Any reasonable person will tell you that majority of those buyers were already existing FF fans, same goes for on PS3. What it really means is that 2million consumers bought a 360 with its head start and cheaper price, whom might have gotten a PS3 once a game such as FF came out for it, if they didn't have the option of getting it for 360 (also mind you, the game was heavily bundled in the US and only for 360 as they had exclusive marketing rights for the game in US).

I'm just so done explain to people that games don't magically double sales(or increase at ALL in most cases) because they are spread across multiple consoles and it is foolish to think so. lol

 

Why dont you make the math on how much % of the installed base of Xbox360 in japan bought the game and how much of the PS3 one? Where are your fans now? Also dont forget to see how the game sold better in the X360 in the west than in the PS3.

 

As for FFXIII you are seeing in absolutes. Its not about wich console sells the most, its about making money!

In Italic, poor atempt at spinning. I never said those 2 millions were only new buyers. Recall me saying that not everyone buys the same system every gen? Yup, theres new buyers and theres old buyers that ditched the Playstation for various reasons. They ammounted to those 2 million, wich if you had your way would never have seen the game and square wouldnt have made as many sales.

What you have to understand is that the market is divided in half in share, but not necessarily with an equal ammount of consumer types across them. Releasing in both platforms might double sales or it might not, but it certainly increases overall sales than releasing in just one platform. Easy example: compare Halo sales with CoD sales. If Halo wasnt an Xbox exclusive it could potencially hit alot bigger numbers. Double? Not necessarily. I never made that argument, but definitly more.

Do you understand now why its best to have the game be multi-platform instead of PS3 exclusive? I bolded the why in this post, and i will 1-up that with reaching a higher overall number of fans. The idea that everyone should buy a playstation 3 to buy every series that ever came out in the playstation 1 and 2 exclusively and therefore the companies having better sales is completely obtuse. That can only be the case if the playstation 3 had the large majority of the market share. It happened with the PS2, but it didnt with the PS3. Time to learn that was the result. Why not blame Sony´s tardiness and arrogance price wise in the market? Those are the real reasons why the trend didnt continue.


It costs more money to make a game multiplatform than to make a game for only one console. Considering the very different architecture of the PS3, it's a no brainer to say that it costed way more to make FFXIII for both consoles. Had SE just stuck with just the PS3, which would've not gimped the final product, FFXIII could've sold just as much as the combined sales of both versions of the actual product. Maybe even more. Which way would've gotten more money for SE? The PS3 exclusive route. Why? Because SE would've only had to focus on one console, which in turn would require a lot less resources and energy. In addition, SE wouldn't have had to make the FFvXIII team to work on FFXIII had it kept FFXIII only for the PS3, which would also be more cost efficient. Why? Because FFvXIII would've been a lot closer to being finished had the FFvXIII team not been forced to reallocate. SE really dropped the ball big time and it's going to hurt the company long term.

"That can only be the case if the playstation 3 had large majority of the market share." Again, "market share" is general. This isn't just the market share, it's the JRPG market share in which the PS3 still has a large majority of. Please read forevercloud3000's post more carefully. Look what happened with Star Ocean. Look what happened with Tales of Versperia. The 360 userbase didn't care. Here's another one. The Lost Odyssey, one of the best turn-based JRPG's this generation, and the 360 userbase did not give a damn. Now look at some the PS3's RPG's. Valkyria Chronicles sold over a million. Tales of Xillia sold about 3/4 of a million copies and that's only in Japan!