| ironmanDX said: The best selling Final Fantasy game was on the PS1, not the PS2, despite the PS2's larger install base. Exactly. That was the golden era. You might not agree with it but it was there.Most people regard then as the golden era of jrpg's. I'm stating to wonder if you're just arguing the point for the sake of it. I gave you links and sales figures to back up my points. |
Way to miss my point, which was that a larger user base didn't help Final Fantasy sell more this generation or last generation. You indicated that there is something anomalous about install base not mattering this generation, when it's a pretty basic thing that isn't specific to a particular time or place. Why do you think Xbox has gotten all kinds of visual novels and shmups even though it has rarely cracked 5,000 weekly sales in Japan? Because the audience for those games were established early in the system's life and because, as niche titles, they wouldn't sell any more units on the DS or Wii or PS3 than they do on the 360. If you start porting those games to everything, there's a good chance you would get a very similar number of overall sales and be out all those porting costs on top of it.
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ironmanDX said:
The PS4 is not the PS1." It's mere handwaving. How? I'm looking back at sales and games, you're just predicting. Sorry, facts beats predictions everyday of the week and on weekends. I understand you feel that the jrpg's as a whole haven't declined but show me. You mentioned many more smaller rpg's are being released that sell a couple hundred thousand that weren't FF titles and I showed you titles that sold much more that also weren't FF titles. I conceded the FFXIII versus isn't a spin off, try conceding that there was a golden era so we can get back to the op |
Again, you're missing my point. You cherry picked a few titles, all from Square except for SCE title that never got a sequel with which to compare it, and said, "Look at that decline!" I could just as easily point out that Dragon Quest IX was the best selling DQ ever, and other series such as Persona and Phantasy Star have also been having record performances this generation. That would also be cherry picking, and it proves nothing for the genre as a whole. To prove there is an overall decline you would have to show that the average JRPG is in fact selling less.
You claimed that JRPGs used to be major system sellers and they are no longer. In fact, they never were. A single game called Final Fantasy VII was a major system seller, and a lot of other JRPGs on the system benefited from that as FF7 fans looked for something similar after finishing that game. But try telling N64 or Saturn fans that there was a JRPG golden age. Today, JRPGs are primarily on handhelds but have proliferated across every system, even the 360. It is certainly a bad thing for the future of the genre that the biggest games are still Pokemon, Dragon Quest, and Final Fantasy, and that one of those has fallen on hard times this generation. But if the average JRPG sells basically the same number of units as it always has, and there are many more of them than there used to be, then I wouldn't call that a decline.
And I haven't predicted anything here. I've only stated the fact that Versus is going to primarily sell on its own merits whatever system it finally appears on. Most games have finite appeal, and you can't just assume that more ports = more sales. Especially when the fan base for the franchise is very heavily concentrated on one platform. The idea that it's suicidal to start developing a game for a system that hasn't launched yet makes no sense, otherwise no one would ever make games for new systems. When you say "The PS4 isn't the PS1" you are making it sound like it was a brilliant decision for Square to abandon Nintendo for the PS1, and while in retrospect it was, it was also far from a given that it would be the smashing success we now know it turned out to be.
