Kyuu said:
Yeah, multiple popular platforms means that whoever making an exclusivity deal will have to pay a lot. That's just common sense. But exclusivity deals still exist and will continue to for a long time. Final Fantasy 7 Remake likely sold between 8-9 million so far, and might end up exceeding 12 or 13 million lifetime with Switch 2 and Xbox versions. It's not "capped at 7 million" lol. Rebirth and the next game being sequels will probably lead to weaker sales. Final Fantasy sequels never sold as much as their predecessors and the same unfortunately seems to hold true with the FF7 trilogy. If they released FF7Remake on all platforms simultaneously, platform splits would have been different and the sales would have been even more frontloaded. SquareEnix would have missed Sony's money. Assuming Sony "only" paid as much for FF7R exclusivity as Microsoft did for a 1 year Rise of the Tomb Raider exclusivity, they effectively covered the sales of 2.5 million copies at full price. So that's a potential 12 million seller + 2.5 million copies in cash from Sony, not counting how much Microsoft will pay them down the line to put their stuff on GamePass. FF7R is also holding its price better than older games from what I noticed. Monster Hunter Wild is a technical mess btw, word of mouth definitely damaged its short term legs. It could've arguably been a better game if Capcom targeted a fewer platforms at launch, then released the PC version months later at a better state. Worked for them with World. I don't know why you keep making this about how bad Playstation has it! I don't have a PS5 yet and most likely never will, because I have a PC and a partial access to my brother's PS5. PS5 indeed doesn't have enough exclusives for even me, an actual Playstation fan, to get one at the price it's at. But none of that has anything to do with explaining why timed-exclusives aren't a doom spell, and why they will still exist if at a fewer quantity. |
No if anything Capcom should make the PC version the priority ... it's the no.1 platform for the game, lol, this idea that PC should be given the short end of the stick is stupid. You go where the audience is. That will sell likely several million more copies on the Switch 2 if/when Capcom ports it also.
FF7 Remake would clear 10 million on its initial release if it had been a multiplat release. Not doing that cost Square-Enix 3 million sales probably easy.
The economics of this are also utterly, utterly stupid, there's no way Sony was given Square-Enix enough of a money-hat to cover a lost 3-4 million in sales. At even a conservative $25 net margin per copy for SE, that's 75-100 million dollars lost, Sony paid them 75-100 mill? I doubt it. It was probably some dumb marketing deal in the ball park of maybe 20-25 million total. Square-Enix is stupid to have accepted, what they thought was now that the PS3 era was over (where they had to go multi-plat to the XBox 360) and the PS4 had dominated the XB1 was that everything would go back to how it was in the 90s/2000s.
But that's not what has happened. Yes the Playstation has beaten the XBox, but its stagnating as a brand and hit up against a roof with no growth, not even as the XBox brand declines. Instead what has happened is the Switch and Steam/PC ecosystems exploded especially since 2020 in unprecedented ways and that was what Square-Enix didn't bank on. That and thing like a lot of the core Playstation 1 audience that bought FF7 back in the day has no interest in a PS4/5 and instead prefer the Switch's more modern take on gaming.
