The funniest part of the video is the FF7 Director outright saying he really wants to build a strong partnership with Nintendo and how he started gaming on Nintendo systems. They know how badly they need the Switch 2 lol.

Many developers from AAA studios in Japan have the same feeling, but honestly the Switch 1 is very weak for their games.

Switch 2 will be a fever in Japan (honestly already is), so I think many AAA studios in Japan will focus their main games on the console now.

Well the other thing to consider is these ports have a very low development cost. They're just reusing the same exact assets on similar class hardware, it's not like they have to build these games from the ground up.

Even assuming lets say 2 million total sales for a game like Rebirth on Steam/PC + Switch 2 combined (XBox also?), 2 million at an average profit of say $25/copy for Square-Enix is an extra $50 million in revenue for a low cost port. That can be a huge chunk of the development budget of the game, assuming say like a high budget price like $120 million for FF7 Rebirth (PS5 version), an extra $50 mill added to the pile can swing the game from being unprofitable to having made a profit or barely profitable to at least a half decent margin.

Because you have basically very little dev cost on ports to new platforms it means extra sales go quite far in adding to your net profit for a game. 

It can also pay for a lot of the dev cost of FF7 Remake Part III.

For a very late $70 launch in three months after it sold 3 million+ on the PS5, that's decent enough. Proportionally much better than GOW Ragnarok and Forbidden West did on Steam.

And Clair Obscur wasn't developed by 30 people, that's a myth. That's how many people Sandfall Interactive had when they were founded, but it more than tripled in size during development. They had a decently large team and funding at their disposal for CO.

Timed exclusivity has nothing to do with FF's decline/stagnation (the vast majority of commercially relevant "full exclusives" and "console exclusives" are just generational exclusives, and are therefore also "timed" in a sense). If anything, there is plenty of evidence that timed exclusivity can be smarter than day 1 multiplatform. Crash N.Sane Trilogy, Monster Hunter World, and Persona 5 for instance seemingly benefited from it.

Timed exclusives are easier to optimize, quicker to release, they benefit from moneyhatting (even "double moneyhatting" through GamePass), extra marketing, and multi-dipping (PC for specs/mods/free-online, and Switch for portability). The truth is people only act all morally outraged when the exclusive is on less preferred platforms, and will completely ignore it when it's on a platform they love.

500k is definitely conservative. It could potentially sell over 2 million lifetime on Switch 2, many of them double/triple dippers. Naturally, Japanese games will have decent sales splits on Switch due to Playstation's slow death in Japan and relevance decline in Asia. I also think/hope the trilogy's conclusion might considerably boost the combined sales. They're great games.

PC sales for Rebirth and especially 16 certainly look poor. Because you would think PS versions underperforming might have been a sign that a lot of fans chose to wait for the PC versions. But alas, the Final Fantasy problem goes much deeper.

Nice!

Hard disagree especially in the modern game landscape where post 2020 Switch and Steam have become far bigger factors and the Playstation/XBox being the center of everything has diminished. 

If FF7 Remake was releasing now and had the benefit of a Switch 2 day 1 release to go with PS5 + Steam day 1 ... it would sell more. Significantly more IMO. 

Sony is not growing their audience at all either, globally the PS5 is selling below the PS4 which already finished miles behind the PS2 LTD, they've basically hit a roof and their audience base is getting into some ugly age demographics too (lots of 40 and 50 year olds). XBox meanwhile is just in a free fall into nothingness as a brand, but even that should be concerning for the Playstation ... they should be absorbing that XBox audience, but they're clearly not growing. People are just peacing out on consoles period and going to PC or Switch. 

Monster Hunter Wilds just came out and 50%+ of its sales were on PC according to NPD charts ... that's concerning too if I'm Sony. So factoring in XBox too, the PS5 had like maybe a 35-40% cut of MH Wilds opening month sales? That's honestly a bit disappointing. 

If Rebirth can run on a Steam Deck, it can run on Switch 2. That's pretty true for just about anything with some tinkering.

Bigger news is they're committed to the entire series (trilogy) being on Switch 2, so part III (FF7 Reunion?) is gonna be niiiiiice.

FF7 Rebirth is still a pretty challenging game for the base PS5 to run, so if the Switch 2 can handle games of that scale, Nintendo fam be eating gooooood.

It's not news that Monster Hunter is bigger on PC. Sales splits aren't relevant to the publisher so long as the totals remain high. Had Capcom chosen to handle MH Wilds like World or Rise, the final platform splits would have been different, but the totals wouldn't have necessarily been lower. Evidence to the contrary (at least revenue wise) is stronger, it's just that I think Sony (and certainly Microsoft) is less interested in moneyhatting big games compared to the old days, because exclusives that sell less than 10 million on an individual platform are typically not huge system sellers on dominant platforms, and the more a game sells on a competing system, the more a platform holder has to pay to keep it off said system.

But timed-exclusives, even on less 3rd party centric systems like Switch, remain a thing for a reason. The Duskblood's existence speaks for itself, as did MH Rise before it. If the platform holder is willing to pay a fortune, almost any deal can be made, including full exclusives.

For a publisher, timed exclusivity isn't inherently a bad decision. The question is just whether or not the platform holder is paying enough. And you cannot possibly prove that Final Fantasy fell/stagnated due to timed exclusivity, because the series is marred by a ton of poor decisions. You're hyper fixated on exclusivity as if Playstation never had any successful timed or console exclusives lol.