Final Fantasy 16 and Final Fantasy 7: Rebirth failed to meet sales expectations

Square Enix made it clear during its recent financial earnings call that it would be overhauling its development operations, with a bigger focus on multiplatform releases moving forward. As far as actual game releases are concerned, this should have been a huge year thanks to Final Fantasy 16 and Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth. However, it would appear most major releases ‘failed to meet expectations'. 

Square Enix and ‘failure to meet expectations' kind of goes hand-in-hand at this point. This has very little to do with the quality of the games themselves and more to do with Square Enix's own sales targets. Crystal Dynamics, Eidos Montreal and IO Interactive all also struggled to meet Square Enix's expectations, despite excellent games like HITMAN, Deus Ex: Human Revolution and the Tomb Raider reboot trilogy.

As reported by Bloomberg, during Square Enix's most recent call, it confirmed that recent releases like Final Fantasy 16, Foamstars and Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth all failed to meet expected sales targets. Sales of the most recent Final Fantasy titles were hampered in part due to lack of platform availability. Both games are expected to release on PC eventually, with Final Fantasy 16 expected on PC this year. Once both games are more widely available, sales should grow to expected levels.

Foamstars on the other hand is a bit of an odd one. Square Enix made the decision to launch it as a PS+ title. This led to great revenue success in the past for games like Rocket League but the key difference here is that Foamstars is a PlayStation exclusive, while Rocket League was multiplatform. With Foamstars only being available on PlayStation, most interested players would have grabbed it for free via PS+, and any good word of mouth generated won't have helped boost sales across all platforms.

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KitGuru Says: While they may not have met sales expectations, both of the most recent Final Fantasy games have been my favourites of the modern era. 

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