"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."
You bolded the wrong part. Here you go. Even if not
all of the 300M went to XVI, most of it would have given the scope of it. There's no way XVI didn't cost that much money. Not only did they make a brand-new engine for it, but 7 years in development with a massive team is not cheap. And
even if it only cost $100 million to $200 million USD to make, their marketing allocation was absolutely gargantuan.
If anything that should make you
more mad. Knowing that more of your money is going towards hyping up a product than is going back into making quality products.
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.
Like the people who believe really, really hard that Square-Enix is a smart company that doesn't make bad financial decisions? Despite the fact that their directors are still fully committed (now more than ever before) that video games are not profitable and NFTs are the way of the future. Despite the fact that they had to shut down five(5) different games that didn't last a year. Despite the fact that they bought a bunch of Western developers, ran them into the ground, and then was forced to sell them for way less than they were worth. Despite the fact that the only reason they're even still in business at all is because they still have goodwill from a decade and a half ago.
I'm not even saying that all of their games are utter trash. I'm not trying to say "You're wrong for liking (blank)" or "(blank) is a bad game". My entire argument this whole time has been that Square-Enix is run by idiots.
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.
Except that PC port is itself going to add to development cost. It's not part of that development cost. Yoshida figures it's going to take at least a year more to develop the port because the new engine was so heavily geared towards the PS5. By then the marketing will have worn off and they'll have to spend another couple hundred million USD to bring the hype back. And then if the port doesn't work (as is the case with so many console-to-PC ports) it's going to have an uphill battle.
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.
I can't imagine they paid very much for the exclusivity. They were already going to be excluded from the Xbox because Microsoft doesn't want to deal with them, and the PC port's development time far exceeds the very short exclusivity window so Sony didn't technically even need to buy the exclusivity.