I can only speak for myself, but in the 90s square was my favorite developer and now I grab FF via sale or not at all. I still never played 15. A few reasons FF isn't remotely my favorite anymore:

1) too much fluff in mini games, silly side quests and what not.  
2) battle systems keep being more action than strategy.
3) their stories have become rather nonsensical. Easiest example is the whisps in Remake.... cloud can see ghost and fights them to change destiny....  feels like it was written for a 13 year old.  

I do think think people underestimate the impact of titles & labelling of the games.

A lot of people simply aren't interested in messing with a franchise so deep into it's sequels. Especially a narrative driven one where the average Joe assumes they're connected. A lot of us grew up with FF in its prime but gen Z grew up with XIII saga, a whole bunch of bad spin offs and XV.

Then as far as the remakes go, naming them Remake & then Rebirth does zero favours to the marketing. Just call it part 2, part 3 lol. I actually think VII Rebirth success is less of a issue, I think it was probably one of the cheaper entries in recent memory (less than 4 years development, just above 3 if we count from Intergrade DLC). It's more what it means about appetite for the franchise as a whole.

Well, 16 is as humorless and straightforward as they go and it didn't work for Square either. As for strategy, I don't feel like that was ever the case. You can mash your way with basic attacks and cure spells through most Final Fantasy games unless you're severely underleved.

Three is a good point and it's one of the reasons the franchise misses Sakaguchi dearly. That man knew how to be subtle and rein things in. Nomura, Nojima, and Kitase? Definitely not.

Final Fantasy nowadays is a boomer franchise. It had the oldest average player age of all franchises polled in a Nikkei inquiry - in their 40s, and that was years ago. It's not renewing its user base in any meaningful way.

No young new player is going to hop in a medieval humorless RPG with 16 in the name, or the middle game of a trilogy, itself the remake of a 30-year-old game, that requires playing a lot of the Compilation to fully understand what is going on. If SE are even a bit market conscious they would reboot the series (no more numbered entries) with a more jovial design (Genshin Impact or Zenless Zone Zero-like) and make it PC/Switch 2/PS5 multiplat from day one.

Oh, and stick with the ATB from the 7 Remake games in the future since that is the most acclaimed of their gameplay loops. FF games have changed too much in the past - if a person liked 10, 12, 13, 15, or 16, there are no other games in the franchise like those for them to play.

I plan on buying 16, assuming square figures out what Steam is.

I do think think people underestimate the impact of titles & labelling of the games.

A lot of people simply aren't interested in messing with a franchise so deep into it's sequels. Especially a narrative driven one where the average Joe assumes they're connected. A lot of us grew up with FF in its prime but gen Z grew up with XIII saga, a whole bunch of bad spin offs and XV.

Then as far as the remakes go, naming them Remake & then Rebirth does zero favours to the marketing. Just call it part 2, part 3 lol. I actually think VII Rebirth success is less of a issue, I think it was probably one of the cheaper entries in recent memory (less than 4 years development, just above 3 if we count from Intergrade DLC). It's more what it means about appetite for the franchise as a whole.

We don't have numbers but it looks like it performed maybe slightly worse then XVI (+6% in the UK, - 30% in Japan, probably up a tad in US similar to the UK)

As someone said a soft reboot would be good. Maybe a naming convention by theme instead of number. Zero spin offs to avoid watering down the brand. Slightly smaller scope entries (30hour story, essentially VII Remake length more story) with the same scale of visual/audio production as we're used to. Unified production platform so developers are not starting from scratch. VII, XVI & Forspoken are built in completely different engines. A game like VII for example could of benefitted from Forspoken terrain navigation system. Back to exploring turn based/tactical combat a way to diversify.

Final Fantasy nowadays is a boomer franchise. It had the oldest average player age of all franchises polled in a Nikkei inquiry - in their 40s, and that was years ago. It's not renewing its user base in any meaningful way.

No young new player is going to hop in a medieval humorless RPG with 16 in the name, or the middle game of a trilogy, itself the remake of a 30-year-old game, that requires playing a lot of the Compilation to fully understand what is going on. If SE are even a bit market conscious they would reboot the series (no more numbered entries) with a more jovial design (Genshin Impact or Zenless Zone Zero-like) and make it PC/Switch 2/PS5 multiplat from day one.

Oh, and stick with the ATB from the 7 Remake games in the future since that is the most acclaimed of their gameplay loops. FF games have changed too much in the past - if a person liked 10, 12, 13, 15, or 16, there are no other games in the franchise like those for them to play.

I honestly do not believe the naming convention is an issue and numbering isn't either, well I have my own issue with numbers and will explain in a mo.

In a day and age when we get umpteen amount of yearly sequels of CoD or Assassin's Creed, all for intents and purposes "sequels" that do not follow on from the last game but are set in a world of the same mechanics. Also, Persona 5 is the best selling Persona game ever by a long way. Did people get confused there too? Expecting to have to play the first 4 games first to understand 5? I do not think the mass of gaming audience are so stupid to think they need to play 15 sequels to understand FF16.

Obviously times change and gaming habits change. The millennials who grew up with certain genres and games are still here wanting to buy and play those games but a younger audience need to be appealed to as well right? But they aren't buying games like Final Fantasy or the Witcher and their parents aren't buying them for Christmas, they are playing (F2P) Fortnite and taking the mick out of each other for having default skins. :P

The number thing I think is different, a numbered sequel thing is fine but I do think they should have called FF11 and 14 "Online" or some appropriate things and not had them as mainline numbered entries because people like me, geeks, don't count them as 'mainline' titles.

And let's not stick with the ATB from FF7R. "ATB" in that is bad when you don't control an character and has practically zero use for MP. The sooner this franchise gets rid of "stagger" the better, easily one of the worst mechanics in video games in decades and it's still around.

In the end, what can help FF, I don't know. I know what I want from the series but it's never going to happen again. I don't think a number is the issue, I think it's regular main line titles not releasing enough.

You'd be surprised to learn that yes, they are. Anecdotal evidence, but I've seen people refusing to play FF16 not because they think it's a sort of Marvel shared universe and they need to play the others to get the full experience, and others being confused by FF7 Remake flashbacks and thinking it's stuff from FF6.

(Not to mention just having a 16 in the name screams "boomer game" and the market demographics are there to prove.)

Except for KoF - which is a fighting game and even then doesn't consist entirely of numbered titles - no one else in the market has been doing that as long as SE and most series let go of numbered entries after 3-6 of them (Mario, Sonic, Halo, Resident Evil, Call of Duty, Assassin's Creed, etc.) which suggests this sort of naming practice doesn't fare well in marketing tests.

I guess basic comprehension isn't something I should expect from the Fortnite generation of gamers. :P

5 seconds of thinking for themselves would know it's they aren't a direct sequel but I just don't think renaming them to like Final Fantasy *insert something to do with the game* will help either. You've mentioned the idea that Final Fantasy has one of the oldest fanbases but it's hard for it to gain a newer younger fanbase with trying to appease old fanbase with a remake (which missed the mark) or taking so long between entries. In the PS1 era, FF7 was released in 1997, then FF8 in 1999, FF9 in 2000 and FFX in 2001. That's 4 of the most critically acclaimed games in general in 5 years. FF11 followed a year after.

Square seemed to be doing all they could to give gamers and the market what they wanted, they spent a lot as well at the time and it paid off... then the Enix merger took over and this seemed to slow right down. We had FF12 on PS2 then we've had 1 mainline FF title per gen (so far) since. They havent' even announced FF17 yet. This isn't good enough and as many have rightly said this is all just badly mismanaged. I'd take regular good games over graphical masterpieces that don't offer anything special or different to the sea of action RPGs we get nowadays and I really don't think superficial things like the games names will help.

But I can completely understand the points.

I feel like longer waiting times are inevitable nowadays, even smaller-budget JRPG games like Yakuza are seeing 4 years between titles, Xenoblade was 5 years, and Dragon Quest and Persona will be some 8 years (!). Square has fared more or less well in that regard recently, from 15 to Rebirth they released four massive scope games in less than ten years plus multiple 14 expansions.

The problem is that two of them are partial remakes of an old game, and the other two have little to do with one another in terms of gameplay and premise. Not exactly fanbase-building stuff even among the people crossing the naming barrier, but at least the potential for a mainline game every 3 years or so is there.