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Soundwave on 28 August 2023
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Slownenberg said:
Soundwave said:

FF16 being some kind of Monster Hunter World moment for the FF series (which is what I think Square-Enix was hoping for) looks like it's been a fairly big bust.

I think they are going to have to swallow their pride and pivot towards supporting the Switch 2 with day/date or close to day 1 releases for mainline FF games if they want the brand to stop declining. Yes, I'm saying Final Fantasy 17 on Switch 2 alongside PS5 and XBox. 

A series that requires sky high production values but has declining sales is not a good combination. 

Clearly the Playstation alone is not going to do it, they've been banging their head on that wall for a while. Even FF7 Remake ... the sales aren't what you'd expect for a game that hyped (I remember lots of people online acting like it would crush Animal Crossing in sales ... lol). 

For sure agreed on that. Only problem is that, as you say, FF is sky high production value for consoles, meaning it'd be hard to put it on portables. Hopefully next gen Nintendo will close the gap a little bit with helpful tech like DLSS as compared to the Switch/XB1PS4 gap. If Sony can put FF on Nintendo without drastically downgrading or having to do a significantly different build then its a no brainer as it would make FF a major game in Japan again and give the FF many more millions of sales worldwide.

I think that's another area they're going to have to swallow their pride a bit. Having growing budgets while your sales are declining makes no sense. 

It should be very possible to make a Final Fantasy game that still looks great but can still run on a Switch 2, you're just going to have to plan things from the get go a bit better. A Switch 2 is going have a feature set that is comparable to a PS5, you just have to make sure it can scale settings wise (and DLSS can help a ton in that regard). For example 4K resolution on the PS5/XSX should be scalable to 360p undocked/720p docked native on Switch 2 which you can then use DLSS on  to bring up to 720p undocked, 1440p or 4K docked. Then for the PS5 version if there's any performance left over, you can just crank the ray tracing and that will quickly cripple a PS5/XBox Series X no sweat.

I think that's going to have to be Square-Enix's direction. If they can start to build an audience on the Switch that adds even 1-2 million+ copies per main line Final Fantasy game, that would be a huge change for them. Shit, a Switch 2 version of mainline FF games may add 500k-1 mill just in Japan alone. 

They need to get the series back to being at least a 2 million seller in Japan (let alone the 3+ million FF7/8 sold back in the day) because I don't think FF16 is leading to any kind of huge growth for the IP in the West as they hoped.