I see people asking if they have to play any previous games on Era sometimes for sure. I do think this must factor in somehow, just how much it has an effect is going to be hard to figure out.
Persona 5 Royal its still massive on Steam and it still having great legs, thats a game that its going millions in the next years if the legs go on like that.
Rebirths good word of mouth didn't break out of the bubble of people who were already playing Rebirth. Rebirth was impressive mostly to people who were already Final Fantasy fans.
People love the called emergent gameplay and the ideia that you can break the game, people like the characters and most important of all, It went viral because two indies devs commenting how they couldnt do something like that.
They have an identity and they've been refining their games over time. Them putting out a magnificent game as their popularity has grown has led to tremendous word-of-mouth and hype. We're going to see a similar explosion if Persona 6 releases on all platforms on Day 1 and if it reviews well. It's a proven, winning formula in the industry where if you've got an identity and if you're growing an audience, you're going to have huge successes when your next release continues to improve on that identity while reviewing very well at the same time.
They really wasted time on a bad project if it sold 10 million?
its development was mismanaged and it shows in the game. it may have sold well but i lt doesn't seem to have translated into improved health for the brand
So here is the thing with the identity thing with Rebirth. It actually has one its identity is Final Fantasy VII the most influential and celebrated RPG of all time. It's baffling that is not enough.
They can't keep leaning on a game from 30 years and expecting new players to show up.
The game clearly had issues caused by mismanaged development yeh, and they need to avoid that, but if the end result is very good sales I don't think that XV can be pointed as a reason for their current problems nor was it wasted ultimately.
We have no idea why they did. But trying to spin 10 million as not that good actually is not where the thread should go lol.
The biggest moment for BG3 was when that one person talked about how we shouldn't expect BG3 levels of quality from other games. The message got disorted into "BG3 is so good, it's scaring other AAA developers" and people used it as a rallying point against modern gaming. That narrative was able to snowball because it was around the time when people were complaining about how bad new games are.
People got a taste of Final Fantasy VII in 1997. Then they got sold another taste with Final Fantasy VII Remake. And then they were told, hey wait, come get some more Final Fantasy VII with Rebirth. It's not baffling to think that not everybody wants to drop another $70 to still not finish the story.
Its exactly because of that, the scores helped but a lot of the narrative came from It and casual audiences thinking that It was about AAA games, despite a lot of people talking it was about smaller CRPGS games
I remember that, but didn't that whole conversation blow up after the game had already come out? Maybe I'm not remembering the timeline right, because it's been a minute, but BG3 was explosive out of the gate.
It does really seem that this concept of needing the to allow games to have weird unpredictable stuff so somebody can make a Tik-Tok video about it is what is emerging. Like I get it the kids consume all their media this way but it is kind of a shame that essentially most games have to be this to succeed at this point. The idea of a curated story with scripted moments seems to be out of fashion.
Not that long before BG3 came out we had a universally DnD movie came out and flop hard.
I believe it was in mid July?
Are you talking about my post? Because that's not what I said. The tweet was what kicked off the conversation of BG3 basically being the antithesis of modern gaming. There's even an IGN video that reached almost 2m views that's literally titled Baldur's Gate 3 is Causing Some Developers to Panic.
Thank you for providing that info and for contextualizing it all so clearly. I'd like to think your post will make a difference, we'll see haha.They canned the announced DLC because of creative differences between Matsuda and Tabata which left to the latter leaving the company, and because DLC ~3 years after launch is basically never a good idea for any game. The fact that the tail end of the second wave of DLC was deemed not viable due to a multitude of factors, doesn't mean that XV, and even it's first year+ of support was not a success, especially when Squeenix said they broke even day one/day zero and it was part of the reason they had one of their best financial periods ever around the release of the game.
In terms of sale prices, this is basically every blockbuster game ever. Give it a couple months and you will usually be able to find a game at half off if not more depending on where you look. We see the same thing in the Inqusiiton thread where you have users saying "But how many of those 12m copies sold at sale prices huh?". The answer for any game which has sold 10m copies is usually "a lot of them". At a bare minimum they sold probably close to 5-6 million copies at full price, which is an order of magnitude more than what a lot of games do.
FFXV, by basically every metric, was a runaway success for Squeenix.
Importantly XV had massive legs. This isn't a case of like Resi6 where the game sold a lot up front (and even then sold less than capcom forecast at launch) and then never sold much more. XV sold like 5m at launch, 1m+ within another month or so when all reviews and whatnot were out, and then like a 1m and change a year for next several years. This isn't including DLC sales either.
To believe that it was all hype or something you'd have to believe that somehow the game continued to sell in spite of presumably negative word of mouth. To believe that it meaningfully damaged the brand you'd expect to see a drop off for the next title. Unfortunately the game was/is Squeenix's best PC launch, with very positive steam reviews, and 7 Remake sold perfectly fine for a single platform with legs comparable to XV.
The constant relitigation of "was 10m copies actually a bad thing" is always so absurd. You'd think that people would be able to say "huh game sold well even if I don't like it". I literally have to do that with basically every Pokemon game lmao. It would be like if I went through Metacritic reviews for XVI and started arbitrarily excluding them for reasons to say that actually game didn't review well lol.
IIRC it was about a week after BG3 was launched and the reviews dropped. BG3 was already going viral then, this pushed it even higher into the stratosphere.
Yeah this may be more about word of mouth in certain circles also. I will say I know its not the best reason but if any game needed to get GOTY at the Game Awards is FF7 Rebirth. I get people like those to be given to the best game which arguably Rebirth is but it needs it more than any game in recent years because of its sales situation. It really is so silly a game this good is struggling to sell and a GOTY could really go a long way in exposing it to a bigger audience.
It's interesting to think about but if Rebirth was a standalone game that didn't require Remake and wasn't tied to FF7 (i.e. new characters/story in those roles), I think it probably would have done better than FF16 and may have had better word of mouth even. i.e. If it was a similar game positioned as FF17 or something like that.
13 was real time. MEnu-based, but very real-time. I'd argue the experience of playing it is closer to that of an action RPG than a turn-based one.
