| IFireflyl said: I don't find it impressive. I do not have proof of this, but my theory behind it is this: A) Final Fantasy XIII was sold on multiple consoles to reach the greatest amount of buyers, whereas Final Fantasy IX and Final Fantasy XII were only sold on one console. Neither Individual console release of Final Fantasy XIII beat Final Fantasy IX sales, or Final Fantasy XII sales. B) Final Fantasy XIII was hyped up, and a massive amount of their sales were during the first two weeks of its release (the PS3 sold 1,644,915 copies in the December 2009 Japan release, 1,144,364 copies in the USA and Europe in the March 2010 worldwide release; the Xbox 360 sold 852,086 copies in the March 2010 worldwide release). So almost half of their sales were in the first two weeks. C) Final Fantasy XIII-2 and Lighting Returns sold 3.38 million and 1.24 million copies respectively, and that is the total sold between the PS3 and Xbox 360. If Final Fantasy XIII was so good you would expect that the sales would have been much better than that. Instead Final Fantasy XIII-2 had about half the sales of Final Fantasy XIII, and Lightning Returns had about half the sales of Final Fantasy XIII-2. That's just sad. I could not agree more. Final Fantasy XIII had too many issues. The battle system was one issue, and a major one to me. The story and character development was awful, though. |
A) At the time of XIII's release, PS3/Xbox 360 had a smaller combined userbase than the PS1 and PS2 did when IX and XII released (as the latter two released near the end of the console's life, and by then both PS1 and PS2 had sold gangbusters). Furthermore, PS3 sold half what PS1 sold in Japan and less than half of PS2 sold there, so the game had a massive disadvantage in its biggest market by default. I wouldn't say XIII had a bigger audience to reach out to than IX and XII, rather the contrary.
B) All FF titles are massively hyped up and get the majority of their sales within the first month of release. For example, XII sold 1.8 million first week in Japan and went on to only sell another 600k lifetime, or how VIII sold 2.5 million first week there and managed to only move another million copies lifetime. Whether those copies are sold in one day or over an extended period of time, that doesn't make a difference except that selling more copies closer to launch might be more profitable (as price cuts take place after). Anyway, XIII did have weak legs though and there's no denying that, surely caused by bad word-of-mouth.
C) Like I said, XIII had bad word-of-mouth so naturally there were huge drop-offs for the sequels. We were discussing XIII's sales though, so I don't see what the sequels have to do with anything.
Overall, I'd say XIII's sales were very impressive given the circumstances. Surely a big part of that is the power of FF brand, but it is what it is.
