From my understanding. Square is so scared of FF16 becoming another 10+M seller. They are giving us a sequel to Chrono Trigger. A Monolith Soft remake of Xenogears. Sequel and remake to Vagrant Story and a new Final Fantasy tactics game. Just so those can sell only to a small cult audience and be happy with the results of at best 1M sellers.

If this was la la land. FF16 will come out on PS5 and XSX and sell 15 plus million. It will be a single-player focused game.

Woah now!  While your point is valid, Chrono Trigger was the best game ever made in my opinion, and I will always want a new one as unlikely as it is.  Final Fantasy has gone downhill since IX, with X being good and everything after that being meh to awful.  Having played XV for several hours before stopping due to a complete lack of caring for the characters, I'm not really looking forward to another one this point.  XVI will come and it will sell great, but I can see the series continuing a downward trend.

Moneyhatted like Sony pays a dev to take a game away from other platforms. FF7R didn't sell so well because it got an exclusive release on PS, it sold so well  because it's a very good remake of a legendary game. It's not as if people only bought it because it didn't release on PC or Xbox yet lol. 

And it's obviously wise from Square to take the money if it is more as they lose from less sales on PC/Xbox. I didn't question that. 

Yes, it's a rumour but it wouldn't be a surprise.

No reason to let it sound better as it is. No gamer really gains much from it. Same with Tomb Raider on Xbox in 2015 as example. 

Thats not how it works, I work in Finance and I can tell you that financial news releases from companies will do everything they can to be vague and paint a good picture since most of the people do not have a proper knowledge of how it works.

For example, what exactly covers the development costs? The total revenue generated by the sales or juts the portion that stays with square? The number already exclude taxes? The development costs includes the other products related to FFXV that may not had good sales, like to 2 hour movie and the other related games? Does it include all the marketing expenses? Was there any write off of costs when the game was still called FF Vs? What about the development costs post launch? Also, development costs does include overhead costs, what about the net final profitability after all overhead costs?

We will never know the answer to those questions and believe me, they will never tell us in their financial statements.

Im not saying the game had a loss, just saying the probably the net final % profitability of the game was probably lower than the good old FF7-FF10 times.

It didn't, if VGSales is anything to be believed, it's pegged at around 10m sales, while FFXV sits at around 9m. https://vgsales.fandom.com/wiki/Final_Fantasy

Either way, even if you take away unit sales, FFXIV is a subscription based MMO and brings in far more revenue over time than any SP mainline entry in the series.