FFXV will beat out XIII at least. Probably end up between 2-2.5M in sales in Japan.

Unfortunately, this is completely true. Though its not their fault.

HD level games just cost a lot to make. In the PS2/PS1 era, a game like FF7/8/9/10 could cost anywhere between $3-$15M to make. In the HD era, you just need a lot more developers working on your game. And these developers cost more these days because of the demand for great talent. So now we look at an annual development budget of anything between $20-$30M per year of development. Thats a lot for HD level RPGs that typically take well over 3 years to make. 

A jap dev making a game will thus be looking at spending anywhere between $40M-$90M for a game that take around 2-3yrs to make. To break even they would need to sell at least 3-4M copies of that game. Thats a very scary prospect for any japan centric developer and hence the westernization of most games. This is why SQEX will make a push for Tomb raider and dues ex cause not only are those 2yrcycle games, they appeal to the western audience and can at least gurantee them around 4-6M in sales.

It might beat XIII's sales but I doubt it will reach the sales of XII.

Probably not, but FFXV promises to be the quintessential FF experience so I'm pumped either way.

It will probably match or slightly exceed FFXIII in Japan, and do better in the west I would think because of the more action-orientated elements (not by much though). However I don't the install base will ever really be there in Japan to make PS1 or PS2 era sales a possibility.

Bare in mind that FFVIII holds the all time record for Japanese debut week sales at over 2.5million (EDIT: I think). FFXIII only managed ~1.85m LTD

Really O.o Thats a hell of alot. I know its going to be huge but 2mil-2.5mil!!!!???! If it sells that in this huge decline time thats pretty damn good.

Good Luck :0

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Thanks.   :)     I'm thinking positive for it. Hopefully they offer some sweet looking bundle for it, if so that should help quite a bit.

Uhhh wat? Research was conducted last gen and the average development cost for a game was $23m with certain higher budget games going into $60m. So to break even for an average HD game you would have to sell $383k copies.

What happened with Tomb Raider was a rare occurance of SE being poor with budget management.

I love Kingdom Hearts, but sephiroth wasn't that hard. You did need a few pots though