I went to The Grand Canyon to Preview Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 and pilot a Vision Jet!

Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024: The First Preview

I think the late release hurt both FF7R and FF16 on Steam personally. FF7R came a year and a half late at a price of $70, Steam gamers saw that price and said heck no. Even now, 2.25 years after it released on Steam for $70, FF7R has yet to drop lower than $35 in any Steam sale. As a result, FF7R has sold less than 1m copies on Steam according to Steam Spy and another 3rd party Steam sales estimator. 

Square did at least learn their lesson on pricing, as FF16 came in at $50, $20 less than FF7R, and so far peak concurrent players are nearly double FF7R (and it's not the weekend yet where the true peak on FF16 may be). But even with the lower price I think the 1 year late release hurt sales for FF16 on Steam most likely, compared to what it would have sold Summer 2023 when hype was high. 

In the end though, I think Square needs to get their budgets under control, it was reported that FF7R Part 1 had a budget of $140m, with FF7R Part 2 and FF16 both likely exceeding that figure. Clearly they need to find ways to cut the budget on their games, considering that FF7R and FF16 both sold over 3m first week at full price (with FF7R currently tracking toward 10m lifetime considering the 7m figure they gave in 2023, and the fact that both an Xbox and Switch 2 release for the game are still to come most likely), and still Square finds the sales of these games disappointing. Clearly they want Final Fantasy to have sales like Skyrim and Witcher or something, and I'm just not sure the series could ever have the mainsteam appeal needed to reach those numbers.

Dragon Age: The Veilguard impressions coming out and so far, they are VERY positive!

That is a big team. What other Xbox teams are that big? 

Not including Activision Blizzard, not many lol. I think the only Xbox studio that has at least 500 members would be Mojang. The Coalition and Playground Games as possible maybes. 

For Bethesda, I think only Zenimax Online Studios and Bethesda Games Studios has at least that amount as well. 

I never delete my games. So I have around 100 installed

Flight Simulator 24 is blowing my fucking mind and Flight Sim 2020 already blew my mind. Flight Sim 2020 was already one of the most technically impressive games ever and I'm pretty confident in saying Flight Sim 24 will be the most technically impressive game of this generation by a mile.