Random Thoughts.....What Are You Thinking?

They spent (probably) 2 billion with a b on marketing.

Total, but a significant amount of that goes to 16.

Doesn't matter if it's good or bad for the franchise, what matters is the budget.

Final Fantasy XV cost them around $50~$100 million USD to make and grossed around $80 million its first week. (Figures hypothesized, no official statement made)

Final Fantasy XVI cost them $300 million USD to make and grossed around $84 million its first week.

Grand Theft Auto V (which is what Yoshida was chasing) also cost $300 million USD to make and grossed $1 billion (with a "B") in its first week. I'm guessing that's where he got the number from for his budget, and how he justified it to his peers.

(The above figures do not include marketing costs)

I'm not arguing for or against the game's actual quality. A lot of that is subjective. But XVI is currently, by definition, a commercial failure. And it has a lot of obstacles to overcome in order to crawl out of that.

Depending on whom you ask, a self-published developer makes about 0.25 to 0.40 per dollar on a game's sales. Selling a $70 product at even the best-case 40%, 3 million units is only $84 million in gross profit.

Where did you pull that number from? Because it doesn't sound remotely realistic. No individual Square Enix title has ever hit a billion dollars in sales that I am aware of. Certainly not in the last ten years. Only a few series out there can reach that high. So the idea that SE spent 2 billion on marketing alone is fairly insane.

Gonna feast tonight

Wouldn't be that much. It'd be somewhere to the note of 200-300 million. The grand total cost of XVI is around 500-600 million dollars.

2020 was 1.1 billion and it grew by 500m from 2019, going to 21 22 and 23 it's easy to see it hitting 2 billion

What else are they shilling for 2 billion, certainly not 11 or their marvel games or forspoken

You talking about their entire marketing budget? Give me a break, they don't A. Put that all on one game and B. Rely on one game to make that back.

If 15 needed 5 million sales to break even on dev costs, and 16 is newer and bigger and more expensive then it needs more than 15 did and that number doesn't account for marketing.

To actually break even it has to recoup its own marketing expense too. Which is some stupidly high amount of 2 billion, not all of it.


If 15 was 300m to make, 16 is higher, and marketed more. Double it.
(minus the bribe for ps5 exclusivity, to be fair)

Where is that number coming from? My searches show that no official statement has been made, but estimates put it between $50 million and $100 million USD. Supposedly it also made back its entire development cost on its first day of launch and that it would need to make about $240 million USD (10 million units at $60 apiece) over its lifetime to be considered a success.

EDIT: And provided XVI's budget was between triple to sextouple as high - even giving it the benefit of the doubt - then my previous estimate of 10m to 20m units would have been far too low. They'll need to sell about 25 million units for Square-Enix to "consider it a success". Only 22 million more to go!

5 million units at $60 = 300m and that "broke even development cost"

Square Enix announced almost immediately that the day one shipments, including digital downloads, were over five million copies, marking the fastest selling Final Fantasy game ever at its debut. This means that those five million copies were enough to recoup development costs, even if we don't know by how much.

I'm going to continue to stare at this grill happily as I don't care about the FFXVI hypothetical discussions right now, lol

Ah, I see. But that's not including the distributors and retailers taking their slice of the pie. In reality, they're only making about $24 per sale of a $60 game.

EDIT: Actually, I wonder what they consider development costs for XV. Seeing as how it started as "Versus-XIII" and it went into Development Hell for a while, I wonder if they only considered the cost of the final build rather than the probable millions that went down the drain before.

It's the details you never get to know. Like the molds for the models and the collectables and all the extra ***. The books the soundtrack.

The only thing that makes summer heat endurable

But does it plug into a printer?

The Grimace Shake has been the weirdest meme I've seen in a while.

i tried it one time, prolly wont get another one, but it was prolly the best mcdonalds shake other than the shamrock shake

I just saw this yesterday too, kinna neat. Different video though.

It's not bad compare with FF7 remake if you look at the percentage.

Ps4 had 100m+ units sold when ff7 remake was out. FF7 sold 3.5m within the first week.

Ps5 has like 40m units sold atm, FF16 sold 3m within the first week.

I would say ff16 has equal or better performance than ff7 remake as of now.

Keep in mind that units sold within the first week has nothing to do with it's performance in the long run. Persona 5 was released in 2016. After 1 year it sold 2m copies. But 7 years later in 2023 now it's over 9m copies sold.

People like to talk about how awesome persona 5 is in turn based battle system debate because "9m copies sold!" but they totally forgot its performance was FAR worse than ff16 when it was out lol.

I also love how some people praise FF7 remake and bash ff16 despite both games have similar metacritic score and first week sales performance.


This article didn't say ff16 budget was 300m. It says SE made 300m from selling the studios and most money will be used on future FF games(which is more than ff16)

"Square Enix is focusing on new titles, but there will be a "major franchise" that will receive most of what it earned from selling the rights to Crystal Dynamics and Eidos Montreal. The $300 million budget will have a massive allocation for "Final Fantasy," and the title is focusing on a trailer release coming soon."

Considering a lot of ff16 design choice such as no open world feels like it's made to cut the budget, I don't think the budget would match over ambitious games like Cyberpunk 2077, which cost over $300m including the marketing.


A lot of people like to believe what they want to believe instead of relying on data and numbers to tell what is wrong and what is right.

If ff16 fail to sell more copies after 5 years then we can legitimately say the performance is bad. Selling 3m copies before pc port and more ps5 sales means nothing in the long run though. I would at least wait for the sales data after a few years before having a conclusion.

If PS5 sales increase and ff16 do well on pc optimization in the future then it may sell more copies than 3m eventually.

To my knowledge, Cyberpunk 2077 was the most expensive game ever make, at $313m including the marketing budget. It's in development for 9 years with tons of overambitious features.

There is no way that "play safe" project like ff16 would surpass Cyberpunk 2077 since the development time is only 4 years AND it doesn't have an open world. it certainly won't be 2 billion on marketing.

Ff16 is probably closer to God of War Ragnarok, which cost 5 years and $200m to make. Ff16's development time is only 4 years so
$150m(?) is more of a realistic estimate for a game like this, probably even less if Yoshi-P did a good job on project management and if we consider how Japanese salary is lower than the US.

Edit: Found some info about ff7 remake cost roughly $140m. So I really don't think FF16 would cost 2x more than ff7 remake. FF16's budget should be closer to ff7 remake but not on cyberpunk 2077 level.

Well...

I give up.

Im dropping my orvail ring to grab a shneddick ring.

Its not like im crafting anything anyway.

And performance on content like Sortie and Odyssey sure is affected with how fast you move.

Well, if you look logically its a no brainer choice.

Still something i didnt want.

Keep in mind, the prints of Crystal Tools/XIV are all over the game. They saved untold amounts of money re-using skeletons, art assets, and internal tooling for AI & encounter design.

I'd be interested to learn the details behind their exclusivity deal with Sony, because I'm certain that in no small part is offsetting any inventory not sold on other platforms.

Personally, I'm furious about exclusivity. XVI was a resounding 9.3 for me and lost most of its points because of performance. Playing it on PC would have, without a doubt, been an overall better experience.

FFXVI was a concept in 2015 and was in full development in 2016. So nearly 7 years in full dev time.

Your knowledge is lacking,
Red Dead Redemption 2 – $540 million
Star Citizen - $415m(+)

There's 2 more games that cost more but the companies won't admit how much (800+)

GTA 6 may break a billion
Newest *** and dooky may also

Almost 600M USD, actually. It's not even fully released yet and been in "development" for over a decade, yet still raising development funds.

I can't find the RDR2 official source anywhere, just some people guessing it.

According to this list it says 170m

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_expensive_video_games_to_develop

Star citizen is crowd funded no? Idk if any private company can tolerate spending 500m+ for 10 years and never release the game. It sounds like a bad business decision. Crowd funding doesn't have such problem.