Famitsu Sales: Week 26, 2023 (Jun 19 - Jun 25)

[IcaroRibeiro]

Wyrdness said:

IcaroRibeiro said:

Imo Square Enix priority and ambition is to make a game that is also a piece of art that allow their devs to make the games they want. They seem fairly committed to it

If they wanted to maximize money, they would have changed their approach long time ago 

Granted they are a business, and a bussines needs to be self sustainable, but Final Fantasy is their flagship IP, they seem to take pride of making games that burn everything that came before and try to reinvent the wheel 

To this I highlight Shinji Mikami's interview years ago about God Hand, he highlights that developers can at times be given too much freedom in achieving their vision and the result can be worse than if they weren't given freedom. The basic message is art is always just that and only appeal to those who gel with it which is what happened with God Hand while games may utilise art they're not in themselves art. 

Well, the games keep selling a lot, even if not as much as other IPs and they have a huge following, enough to keep vesting AAA budget

While they might be concerned with sales I don't think they have reached a point they should step back form doing what they want just yet, their games sell well enough and are still very liked 

I don't think Square have ever issued a mainline FF game (sequels and spin offs are different) that scored bellow 80s. Even XV who suffered devopment hell and is arguably one of the most hated entries still sold 10 million

While FF seems to receive much stronger criticism than other IPs I believe this is just because people have their own expectations of what an FF game should be or look but keep coming back to the franchise, while in other franchises if you don't like an entry you don't have many reasons to comeback, as the sequel is likely to be similar.