Any fan of gaming is more than likely at least vaguely familiar with the Final Fantasy series. An icon of video game history, it’s one of the longest running series in the industry, with multiple entries that have revolutionized gaming in their respective genres. From Final Fantasy VII’s meteoric impact on the JRPG and the rise of PlayStation, right through to Final Fantasy XIV’s reinvigoration of the MMO – it’s a series of many highs and few lows. The series has always been incredibly popular in its native home of Japan, as well as globally depending on the entry. Final Fantasy always sells, but in recent years, things might be going a little differently.
Nerds like me who enjoy tracking the weekly Famitsu sales out of Japan (insert shameless plug to check my Famitsu coverage here) will have seen the less than stellar launch figures for the recent Final Fantasy VII Rebirth. If you’re out of the loop, Final Fantasy VII Rebirth is the second part of the Final Fantasy VII remake trilogy, and the direct sequel to 2020’s Final Fantasy VII Remake. The game released with just under 263,000 sales in its first week in Japan. Note that these figures only include physical copies, not digital. That’s hardly a bad way to debut, but honestly for a major game with a lot of hype, it really could have been better.
These numbers are a drop from just last year when Final Fantasy XVI released to a little over 336,000 sales physically in Japan in its first week. Again, take another step back and in 2020 Final Fantasy VII Remake sold over 700,000 copies. There’s clearly a sales fall off taking place here, and the further back we go, the more we see this cycle recurring. Using a lot of archival data thanks to our friends at Install Base, we can see that Final Fantasy XV had 716,000 first week sales, Final Fantasy XIII sold over 1.5 million copies, and so on. Sure, Final Fantasy XIV is an outlier, but it’s an MMO, so physical sales would make up very little of its sales total (but for the record, it sold 184,000 copies on PS3 week one).
The split between digital and physical is a big mystery when it comes to figuring out sales numbers and trying to make judgements, but in the research for this piece I’ve found something that will allow us to estimate. A CESA poll of gamers in Japan found that the digital/physical split for PlayStation 5 users is roughly 35/65%. Yes, the sample size is relatively small compared to an entire nation of gamers, but it’s a start! Using this data, we can do the math and add a 35% bonus to Final Fantasy XVI and Final Fantasy VII Rebirth to try and guess their full sales counts in Japan with digital included. This brings us up to just shy of 517,000 sales for Final Fantasy XVI and just over 404,000 for Final Fantasy VII Rebirth. It’s certainly better, but a gradual decline in release week franchise sales is still visible.
So, let’s take these local Japanese numbers and roll with them. Are these sales numbers bad? There’s certainly a trend downwards within the franchise, but let’s take a broader look at things. Final Fantasy XVI sold a lot less than Final Fantasy VII Remake in Japan, but VII Remake had the boost of the ongoing pandemic and associated lockdown behind it. If we look away from Japan and try to gauge global franchise sales, Final Fantasy XVI did pretty impressively in its first week. After just seven days in stores both physical and online worldwide, the game sold three million copies.
To draw some comparisons, XVI sold more than Resident Evil 3 (Remake) in its first week by half a million, on par with Resident Evil 2 (Remake) and 4 (Remake), and less than Monster Hunter Rise by one million. Sure, it’s a lot less than something like Hogwarts Legacy’s 12 million in two weeks, but it’s in good company when it’s selling anywhere near Resident Evil or Monster Hunter numbers – especially for a game exclusive to the PS5.
At the time of writing, there has been no official sales press release from Square Enix for Final Fantasy VII Rebirth. In Japan, the game has yet to surpass Final Fantasy XVI’s first week sales, and it’s been five weeks on the Famitsu charts thus far. The sales have been slowing to a crawl, and a lack of an official sales figure announcement, unlike XVI, suggests the game may not be performing as well as Square Enix has intended it to. For comparison, its predecessor Final Fantasy VII Remake, got an announcement of 3.5 million sales in just three days.
Taking in the information we’ve discussed, it’s clear that whilst sales have slowed down, the Final Fantasy franchise is still performing well. Final Fantasy XV shipped 5 million units globally in one day, Final Fantasy VII Remake sold over 3.5 million in three days globally, and Final Fantasy XVI sold 3 million in one week. There’s a slow down for sure, and VII Rebirth may be lagging, but it’s also hardly terrible sales performance.
The reasons for the sales slowdown may be easily explainable for those familiar with the franchise history. The last Final Fantasy that had an impressive launch (disregarding VII Remake and its pandemic boom) was XV, with XIII behind that, and XII further back. Clearly, mainline series entries sell. The exceptions? XIV and XVI. XIV is an MMO and made most sales on PC, and XVI, whilst a solid entry, changed up the series formula a lot. It returned us to a time of medieval armies and crystals, but mixed up the gameplay by taking an action RPG approach to combat and bosses. This switch may not have been a welcome one.
As for VII Rebirth, it is a sequel to a game that had an explosive sales boom due to the pandemic, so a drop was expected but perhaps not to this degree. The game has been received especially well critically, so perhaps the issue here is a marketing one. Rebirth is a sequel to Remake, but is still itself mostly a remake of the original Final Fantasy VII, something which the title Rebirth does not communicate particularly well.
Another sticking point for Final Fantasy when it comes to sales is its platform exclusivity. Final Fantasy XVI and the entire VII Remake trilogy are timed PS5 exclusives, with eventual PC releases coming later down the line. The series intentionally limits itself by drumming up hype for a release on just one platform, excluding those who play their games elsewhere in a time when cross-platform gaming has never been more popular.
So, what does that mean for the series going forwards? Final Fantasy is certainly not doomed. The massive sales of VII Remake all but guarantee the trilogy will be finished, with development already underway for the third and final installment despite Rebirth’s underwhelming performance. As for the next mainline entry, perhaps the future of the franchise and the key to finding rejuvenated success lies with an old industry friend.
The Nintendo Switch not only sells a lot of systems, but it sells a lot of games too. Particularly in Japan, JRPGs sell considerably more on Switch than they do on PS5. The Switch however has received no Final Fantasy mainline titles at launch (except maybe the Crisis Core remake which sold almost as well as the PS5 version but is still a spin-off), as has been the case for decades now since Square Enix and Nintendo parted ways in the 90s. With a rumored Nintendo Switch successor incoming with a lot stronger hardware, could we finally see a glorious franchise return to its home platform company, and would the Switch sales magic make the games take off? It seems like it could only help Square Enix to take a multi-platform approach akin to Capcom, but we’ll see.
There will always be an audience for Final Fantasy, and I will always be interested. Sales have slowed down, but the Final Fantasy franchise is still selling like any good franchise does, with solid sales on a global scale even if they are trending downwards. Square Enix will have a lot of choices to make going forwards as to which way the series pivots, what platforms it releases new titles on and how it should reinvent – but it’s far from game over.
Have you played any of the latest Final Fantasy games? What do you think of their sales performance, as well as their gameplay evolutions? Let us know in the comments below, and keep your eyes on GameLuster for more gaming news, reviews and more.
The last true Final Fantasy game was FFIX, well technically Final Fantasy Dimensions/Legends was the last true FF game. It’s hard to call FF7 and FF8 true FF games, they strolled too far from the FF formula, although FF8 is a truly great game.
Anyway, FFX was amazing but not really FF-like, FFX-2 was pathetic, FFXIO is now an amazing game after a decade~ of quality of life improvements but it was purely abusive for it’s first 10~ years, FFXII was like an offline FFXIO but much much much shorter and not as good as FFXIO, FFXIII was garbage and so were it’s sequels, FFXIVO was beyond beautiful with the most impressive hollywood-like cutscenes but it was an extremely difficult game, not for noobs at all, so it lost all casual users who couldn’t handle it and was left with only the best gamers who handled it just fine, which was unfortunately not enough users for Square-Enix to be happy so it was was removed and replaced with FFXIVOARR, which is beyond crap, graphically a big step down and cutscenes went from hollywood quality to lazy and stiff, plus it ruined the lore to the point where even the reboot’s makers admitted it was full of errors and contradictions, FFXIVOARR uses nothing more than a repeated pattern for all it’s expansions (a few talk quests, then a dungeon, then a few talk quests, then a boss Primal battle, now repeat that pattern for 10+ years across all it’s expansions and absolutely no exploring the world, you have to unlock every part of the world via the main story/scenario, removing exploration completely) and constant shortcuts taken by Yoshi-P’s team, like new races not being able to use headgear and using enemies from FFXI/XII/XIII as a cut and paste, not even making them for FFXIVOARR+, just putting ps2 and ps3 graphics directly into a ps4/ps5 game as is, it’s just a really crappy game (I should know, I have been a nonstop subscriber of FFXIV since the real FFXIV launched and all throughout the rebooted FFXIV and the rebooted FFXIV is utter garbage, nothing more than a FF circus now, I only still pay for my subscription because Yoshi-P takes away all your properties in the game if you don’t pay for the FFXIVOARR subscription for 1 month…beyond a dick move that forces gamers to pay even if they don’t want to play for a few months…freaking Yoshi-P…SMFH, pay real money every month or lose your extremely difficult to get and beyond expensive properties that you worked years to get…)
Then there’s ffxv, just an action game with rpg elements and cars and modern cities and all that unwelcomed nonsense like FF7 and FF8 had, should’ve stayed as FFvXIII as it was originally planned, then there’s the woke garbage known as FFXVI which is famous for it’s unneeded gay kiss…and Square-Enix is wondering why nobody cares about FFXVI…if you add political topics to a game, then you will chase away sales from those that are sick and tired of everything being made with a political side being chosen, oh well that’s what happens when you let Yoshi-P make a FF game, he has NO idea what made FF legendary and he never will.
Hello many dont have $$$ in this crappy economy!!! It just shows now!
Square went woke. It did not help them censoring old games before Rebirths release
This is mainly because it of two things. Those games for the most part released on more than one platform. Being locked on PS5 was not going to help Rebirths sales. Not as many people have PS5s and are willing to get one for Rebirth whereas Remake MANY living rooms already had PS4s ready and waiting for it.
Take in the fact that modding for Remake on PC was a lot of fun for people and you get another group of people that are willing to now wait for it to hit PC even if they do have a PS5. Sales were going to take a hit no matter what. 1: launched on one platform. 2: not as many people have that platform as assumed.
I mean, the golden age was FF6-10. Since then… Eh. 12 was boring, 13 was confusing, 15 went through development hell, and 16 went through the biggest identity crisis I’ve ever seen in a game. And they dropped the ball hard with the 7 remake, so where does that leave us? With ever dwindling faith in the franchise.