Final Fantasy's sales crisis is also an identity crisis | Opinion

gamesindustry.biz:

The news that Square Enix considers its two major Final Fantasy titles in the past year – Final Fantasy 16 and Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth – to have missed their sales targets won't be a surprise to many people in the industry. On the contrary, this outcome was so predictable that it's provoked all manner of exaggerated eye-rolling.

Square Enix has form in this department, after all. Its most famous public lament for the under-performance of a key title (despite selling many millions of copies) was for Tomb Raider.

But since then, this tactic has become a fairly standard part of its financial communications, leading many to believe that the company's internal sales estimates are insanely out of touch with reality.

There's some validity to that claim – Square Enix doesn't generally seem to be very good at setting realistic targets for its games, and it's tempting to suggest that the problem is one of motivated reasoning.

This is a company that's struggled, perhaps more than most, to keep development budgets and timescales under control. It's not unfair to wonder if part of the reason for major titles so often missing their sales targets is because those target figures were calculated, somewhat wishfully, on the basis of how many sales would be needed to cover an over-inflated budget, rather than a realistic assessment of the market conditions for that title.

Although this kind of reasoning is not usually overt, it's not uncommon across the industry – large projects often become juggernauts that nobody wants to stand in front of and risk being rolled over, so numbers and projections get fudged when they suggest inconvenient truths about commercial viability.

In this specific case, however, I don't think Square Enix's tendency to over-inflate its projections is really to blame. These games have underperformed quite badly by a much more simple metric, one that no publisher on earth would be happy about – they have failed to match or exceed the sales of their direct predecessors.

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