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Final Fantasy 16 sales did not meet high expectations, says Square Enix president
(www.eurogamer.net)
this post was submitted on 07 Aug 2023
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Final Fantasy in it's heyday outsold Zelda by a lot
The PS1 also sold the N64 3:1, But FF7, the highest selling FF game, only sold about 9m to OoT’s 7m. Relative to console sales, oot thrashed final fantasy 7. Of course, it helps that they cranked these games out way faster than Zelda back then.
The current situation is similar, except the switch is wildly more prevalent than the PS5. There is almost 1 TotK sold for every 6 switch units, which is utterly insane when you consider how many ignored/lost/broken units are probably out there. By contrast, there is about 1 FF16 for every 10 PS5 units out there.
These are the numbers I found for 5th and 6th gen games:
FFVII: 10.0
FFVIII: 8.6
FFX: 8.5
Ocarina of Time: 7.60
Wind Waker: 6.79
Majora's Mask: 6.82
FFIX: 5.5
FFX-2: 5.4
Oracle of Seasons & Oracle of Ages: 3.99
Minish Cap: 1.76
So maybe "a lot" is an overstatement, but they did generally sell more. You have a point regarding sales-per-console, but also remember PS1 had over 1900 games to N64s 388. That's way more competition for third party FF games to get sales. Many people that buy Sony consoles don't even look twice at JRPGs, whereas most people that buy Nintendo consoles know day one they are going to get the latest Mario and Zelda.
sure, but the series and Square are by far very different than they were in it's heyday. Square has really been racking its players over the coals with shitty tactics lately and has signaled pretty loud and clear that they don't care about games at all and are just trying to get money out of you (I mean all major companies are like that, the others are just better at it and shut up about it) I said Tears of the Kingdom because it's the current high selling game, that's what they wanted this game to be and I honestly don't know why you'd even hope for something like that when handling business the way they do. (as people have mentioned they'd play it but do not have the system.)
No I agree. The fact that Final Fantasy used to outsell Zelda and now sells 1/3rd of it should speak volumes about how Square has handled the franchise. Gaming has only gotten bigger since the late 90s.
agreed