PlayStation 5 Limited Final Fantasy XVI’s Chances Of Success, Says Former Square Enix Head
A former Square Enix executive has criticized Final Fantasy XVI’s exclusivity to the PlayStation 5 for limiting its chances of success.
As reported by Axios, Jacob Navok, who was head of Square Enix’s Shinra technologies, had a lot of strong opinions about what his former employee was doing wrong and right. In particular, he seemed to be reacting to other criticisms of the company, which he felt were misguided.
In Jakob’s words:
“The issue that I see is an issue that all of the industry should be cognizant of, which is the risk of console exclusives when you have a principal-agent problem.
When you’re the publisher relying on first party for success, you’re always at a disadvantage, because your individual title matters less to the platform holder than it does to you.”
When Jakob talks about a principal-agent problem, he simply means that there were choices that Sony made to help promote Final Fantasy XVI, which is console exclusive to their PlayStation 5, that were not necessarily in Square Enix’s best interests. In this case, it’s probably the fact that Square Enix could not promote that the game was coming to PC, that undermined Square’s best interests, even as it benefited Sony.
Since then, Square Enix revealed that they would be bringing more games to Xbox. Jakob says that’s because the company came to the same conclusion he did.
Jakob then points out that the prevailing narrative among critics, that Square Enix released too many games that flopped, is not correct, and not the problem in the company. Jakob’s defense is that the poor reviews of Babylon’s Fall, for example, did not affect sales for Final Fantasy XVI. Some of Square Enix’s recent projects were calculated risks, as the company tried new things. The way
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