It only sold 22k copies on Xbox in its first week according to Alinea Analytics.

https://www.purexbox.com/news/2025/06/according-to-sales-estimates-final-fantasy-16-had-a-rough-first-week-on-xbox

I'll wait till it's under 20 dollars before picking it up.

Funny because I couldn't get past the first few hours of Persona 5 and Clair Obscur is very clearly rough around the edges presentation wise.

FFXVI gripped me from the beginning in a way that very few games did. You said nothing is great about it but quite obviously its presentation is incredible. It's voice acting is another point. It's story is great at its best but I agree bogged down by side quests and pacing. The action combat is brilliant, but not as deep as I would hope for a 40hour game. There's clearly plenty to love even if it isn't your preferred type of game.

As far as fun vs graphics, I don't think that's much to do with it. Just look at how drastically different VII rebirth and XVI are. In fact one of Rebirths criticism is too many mini games. It's just down to the directors vision.

Alinea Analytics isn't reliable, I'm really not sure why people keep posting them as if they are, I had literally never heard of this company until a few months ago and suddenly people were posting them out of nowhere, somehow this analytic firm claims to have accurate sales data on every single publisher out there and somehow also broken down by every single platform, it's wild to believe that some random analytic firm has that much data unless they are being supplied it directly from publishers, not even Circana (NPD) has data this detailed, Lol.

I see a lot of people consider them unreliable lately though, plus they had completely different numbers recently from I believe Ampere? I don't know but it's like if VGChartz suddenly started reporting videogame sales again, but we stopped that because of how incredibly inaccurate it was becoming, and our data was widely mocked when we were estimating videogame sales, Lol. Idk why Alinea should get the benefit of the doubt. They are a relatively new company just spamming tons of "sales data" to get their name on the map, I've found them suspicious for months.

Also...They don't tend to explain anything on how they're coming up with these estimates aside from "pay us to find out" but they did confirm how they got these Final Fantasy estimates on their Twitter...

They're basing it on the number of reviews on the Xbox Store. 🤦🤦🤦

They deleted their post saying this though, which further confirms to me they're just making shit up, Lol. Some estimates may be close to accurate based on already known data, it would not be hard to estimate certain videogames sales past a certain point and taking into account various factors, some estimates therefore are a bit obvious in the sense that they'd be close enough to the real thing to give them cover but I do believe the majority of their data is just made up, Lol. Hardly anyone gives data as widely specific as Alinea does.

Like based on previously released sales data, and tracking trends of the increase between reports, you could "close enough" estimate a lot of videogames that already have public data on them, but I do believe the vast majority of their "new release" sales data which has no prior established official data is just completely made up. Sorry, I've had this rant in my head about Alinea for a while now, Lmao.

It looks like they are tracking player data directly from Steam, PSN etc. So their sales data is basically unique player accounts that played the game. I know this is somewhat possible and GamStat used to be able to quite reliably track player numbers on playstation, and at one point there was a way to track player counts 100% accurately that got shut down. One of the indicators of this is that they weren't able to offer any sales estimates for Indiana Jones on Xbox but did on Steam and PS(as player numbers are not useful when it's on a subscription).

If they have a system for scraping this data they might not want to reveal their hand. They could of course be completely full of sh!t though. 

They confirmed on Twitter that the data for Xbox sales is using Xbox reviews but they then deleted the post, Lol.

They do not have player data directly from Steam, PSN, Xbox, etc. Few companies do unless they've been provided it by the companies themselves, it's especially hard to scrape this data from closed platforms like Xbox or PlayStation (has that ever been done?), I know in the past people have managed to do it from Steam like SteamSpy but Steam shut that down years ago therefore making even those estimates not that accurate now.

Steam does have more publicly available data, such as follower count, wishlist numbers, CCU, etc. But even all that together won't give that accurate data, and this is Xbox, where their only data point to estimate sales is using Xbox Store reviews which is quite honestly a terrible way to estimate something, Lol. If they had a system for scrapping data it would have to be they've somehow managed to scrape Xbox, PlayStation, Steam and Nintendo's backend too, at least NPD is provided data directly from publishers but even NPD isn't this specific and wide, Lol.

Gamstat was apparently able to track trophy data for a sample of around 8m PSN accounts, but they stopped updating their website. I’m not sure why no one else uses this same method if it’s possible though, but presumably it was complex, or the method got shut down. 

I understand why Final Fantasy XVI sold less than other titles in the series—it’s just too different. For action game fans, it doesn’t compare to God of War, Devil May Cry, Elden Ring, Dark Souls, or Monster Hunter; it feels very average. I’ve spent over 100 hours playing it and found the game enjoyable, with some fun boss fights. However, the combat system is the weakest of all 16 mainline entries, and the side quests are among the worst in the series (yes, even behind Final Fantasy II). The dialogue also feels padded with filler, possibly to extend playtime.

That said, the production value is fantastic!

I’m currently 45 hours into Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, and it’s a night-and-day difference from FF16—I love it. It’s remarkable how different these two recent major FF releases from Square Enix are. In my opinion, FF16 is the weakest 3D Final Fantasy game, while Rebirth is the best since the FF7-9 trilogy.

I do wonder if this could make it's way to Switch 2 eventually; I imagine it would do better there than on Xbox, as JRPGs like Dragon Quest 11, Octopath Traveller, and the Xenoblade games did well on Switch 1. 

The exclusivity period is clearly over, and the FF7 Remake series is already on its way to Nintendo's newest console.

They already talked about the Switch 2, seems inevitable