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shikamaru317 on 29 December 2022
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Qwark said:
shikamaru317 said:

Except we know that alot of what you are saying here is false. There is tons of evidence that Sony is paying for exclusivity on various franchises. Publishers don't give out timed exclusivity deals that have set time periods on them for free, that makes zero sense. FF7R was shown at a Sony show with a trailer that stated it was a timed exclusive like a year before it released, and the case for the game also stated it was timed exclusive. 

Then the timed exclusivity period lapsed, and the game still hadn't been ported to Xbox. Then Final Fantasy 7 Remake Intergrade was announced for PS5 a month later and people naturally assumed that Sony has paid to extend the deal by another year. Problem is, another year passed and the game still wasn't announced for Xbox. Now we have Microsoft stating in official documents to regulators that Sony paid to keep Final Fantasy off of Xbox. And the language of the Final Fantasy 16 exclusivity deal and the Forspoken exclusivity deals also suggest timed hats by Sony, 1 year for FF16 and 2 years for Forspoken. Same goes for Platinum's Babylon's Fall, also published by Square Enix (though it flopped so hard that it died, meaning it will never come to other platforms for sure). It has also been heavily speculated that Valkyrie Elysium was a timed hat console exclusive for Sony from Square. 

Yes, development resources are limited and sometimes a console gets exclusives for free because the developer can only work on a single or a few platforms at a time, but you really think that Square Enix chose to invest development resources into Xbox versions of far more niche games like Star Ocean: The Divine Force, The Diofield Chronicle, Chrono Cross Remaster, and Balan Wonderworld, yet don't have the resources to put their biggest franchise onto Xbox? Heck, they put a side Final Fantasy game onto Xbox just earlier this year, Stranger of Paradise, but none of the 3 main series Final Fantasy games that released between 2020-2023 are coming to Xbox currently, you think Square decided to do that all on their own? Come now, that is nonsense and you know it, especially when we know FF15 sold somewhere between 1.5-2m copies on Xbox One (which would have generated at least $50m in revenue against a significantly smaller budget on the Xbox port), and Xbox One was a platform that will have a much smaller install base than Xbox Series will have by the time the 3rd part of FF7R releases, in Japan alone Xbox Series has already almost outsold Xbox One by 4x, by the end of the generation it could possibly be up 10x or more over Xbox One. Square would be foolish to skip Xbox on their biggest franchise unless Sony was paying them to keep it off of Xbox. 

Then we have the various timed exclusive AAA deals they are signing with other publishers, Silent Hill 2 Remake from Konami, Ghostwire Tokyo and Deathloop from Bethesda, KOTOR Remake from LucasFilm Games. Has been rumored for 2 years now off and on that when Bioshock 4 is officially revealed it will have a Sony timed exclusivity deal in place too. Not to mention the timed exclusive content they have hatted in games like the upcoming Hogwarts Legacy. You can't just bury your head in the sand and pretend that Sony isn't using large amounts of money to keep 3rd party content off of Xbox.

If you want to make the argument that comparing Microsoft acquiring ABK to Sony moneyhatting AAA 3rd party exclusives left and right is false equivalence, then go right ahead, I disagree with you but that is you stating your opinion versus me stating mine. However, don't try to make up facts that say that Square is choosing to give Sony exclusives left and right simply because they have a good relationship or because development resources are too limited to develop Xbox ports for their biggest franchise.

Squares funds in general are not enough for ambitious projects to begin with that's why they either need Playstation or Nintendo to jump in for most big projects. They want 3rd parties to invest in their studios. Also the net worth of the 1.5 milion copies sold on Xbox for Square was far less than 50 million, since a lot of those units aren't sold at full price.

Around 30 percent off the revenue goes to Microsoft. It's also odd that the Xbox version only needs to make back it's porting costs to be worth it, whilst the PS and PC version needs to make back all marketing and development costs. Taking an exclusive deal (which MS has made plenty of themselves Ark 2 for example) makes more sense for SE its guaranteed Marketing (which costs a shit ton of money) and guaranteed funds for making the game and probably manpower if you need it. SE takes the latter for pretty much all big projects, especially since FF15 in the end was not very profitable.

I actually factored in many of those copies being sold at a discounts. I'd guess the range is somewhere between 1.5m copies x $30 average price per copy = $45m in revenue and 2m copies x $35 average price per copy sold = $70m in revenue. Hard to know without exact sales data from Square, but regardless of where it falls into that $45-70m range, it would still be profitable for sure, I would estimate it would take an internal Square team of maybe 30 devs just a few months to develop an Xbox port with how similar Xbox and Playstation are these days. Let's for the purposes of example say 30 devs working 3 months to do the port. Average salary of $70,000 per year on those 30 devs, divided by 4 since 3 months goes into 12 months 4 times, that is $525k in monthly salary for the dev team on the Xbox port. Then you have Xbox licensing fees, and the cost to print Xbox discs, and lastly the 30% cut of revenue that all 3 console makers get on 3rd party software, including Xbox. Even factoring all of those costs in, FFXV on Xbox should have turned a tidy little profit for Square. If it didn't, I highly doubt they would have been willing to pay Koei Tecmo's Team Ninja studio to develop an Xbox port of Stranger of Paradise: Final Fantasy Origin.