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Soundwave on 12 March 2024
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Kyuu said:
Soundwave said:

They ported Dragon Quest XI to the Switch and it looked and played fine and that was a PS4 game. 

Maybe too you don't need to go balls to the wall with every stupid graphical effect, they have a version of FF7 Remake (Ever Crisis) that looks fine even on smartphones during the battle sequences it basically uses the same assets as FF7 Remake. 

I mean relative to the alternate ... destroying what was one of the best selling franchises in Japan and turning it into a joke sales wise, they've driven that IP into the toilet with bad business decisions. Was a few shiny textures and higher end sparkly effects here and there really worth cutting off a userbase of 140+ million and the no.1 platform in Japan by 10 country miles. 

FF would sell worse on Switch than on Playstation even in Japan. Too much effort/time/cost for a small return. The decline has little to do with the platform they're on, and Japan is not nearly as significant a market as it once was.

First of all, games can be on both the Playstation and Switch and the world isn't going to explode. Dragon Quest XI was made for both systems. FF7 Remake on the Switch as a port of similar quality to DQXI or Witcher 3 or DOOM probably sells about 1.5-2 million extra copies, which isn't nothing. 

Secondly, a big part of the reason the Final Fantasy brand which used to open at nearly 3 million opening week in Japan and is now in the toilet fishing around for 246,000 is because Square has tied all their fortunes to the Playstation brand in Japan, and people in Japan don't want home only consoles. 

So they've watched their entire audience based pretty much walk away in Japan. I have to wonder if it was worth it, what did they get out of it? Did the "pretty graphics" cause the franchise to explode in sales in the West? No, it didn't, FF7 and FF8 even were the peak sales for the franchise even in the West, since then they've been trending below that, but in Japan the franchise has completely fallen apart. 

You need to cultivate a fan base too, Dragon Quest and Monster Hunter can sell millions on Nintendo platforms, because they've also had a steady flow of cultivating an audience there, Square never really bothered with Nintendo and mainline Final Fantasy games after FF6 (other than remakes of older games), and really I think long term it was to their detriment.