Square Enix isn’t in the best place right now and it’ll be the first to tell you about it.
The gaming giant is fresh off a year that saw it lose a couple of billion dollars in market value despite the successes of Final Fantasy 16 and Final Fantasy 14. Critics partly blamed the latest mainline entry in the best-selling franchise for the loss, but the real culprits are a string of failures dating back to 2020 with Marvel’s Avengers.
Aside from Final Fantasy, Square Enix’s other AAA endeavors haven’t gone well, with the likes of Babylon’s Fall, Forspoken, and Balan Wonderland and, to some extent, even Outriders and Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy, all failing to live up to the company’s sales expectations.
However, over the past few months, the discourse surrounding Square Enix’s lack of sales numbers has shifted from its relatively lackluster marketing efforts to its reliance on a partnership with Sony.
Final Fantasy 15 was largely seen as the start of Square opening up its most guarded property to other platforms. But, for some reason, subsequent entries became exclusive to PlayStation again, and, along with it, several other titles. In the past year alone, Square released Octopath Traveller II, the Final Fantasy Pixel Remasters, Live a Life, and Star Ocean: The Second Story, on PlayStation and Nintendo platforms only, skipping Xbox entirely.
Thus, you can only imagine everyone’s surprise when Square shook hands with Phil Spencer, who admittedly has been doing a wonderful job expanding Xbox’s influence in Japan, to bring FF14 to Xbox platforms with the promise to add more to the said platform.
Given this recent development, we can safely assume that Square will, once again, try to avoid making Final Fantasy 17 exclusive on Xbox. This could possibly even include the third game in the Final Fantasy 7 remake trilogy, as evidenced by the short timed-exclusivity window of Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth.
It’s not like Sony can afford to outpay Microsoft either if it comes to that, and even if it doesn’t, we doubt PlayStation is willing to shell out enough cash to keep Final Fantasy exclusive to PlayStation.
As for Square Enix, the increase in sales on Xbox isn’t going to be massive, clearly. The main advantage of making the next Final Fantasy game a multiplatform release is added exposure with minimal effort. Aside from the initial marketing, Hogwarts Legacy basically sold itself post-launch and it worked. By staggering its release on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series S/X and PC as well as Xbox One and PlayStation 4 and, eventually, the Nintendo Switch, the open-world Harry Potter RPG became the best-selling game of 2023 by a sizable margin, presumably over Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3.
Square Enix doesn’t even have to look elsewhere for proof. To date, Final Fantasy 15 remains the fastest-selling game in the franchise ever, selling five million copies in its 24 hours.
If we assume that Final Fantasy 17, which Naoki Yoshida has mentioned will likely be spearheaded by a younger creative, will be released by 2026 or 2027, by which point the number of units sold for both Xbox Series S/X and PlayStation 5 have neared their respective peaks, setting a new record as the fastest-selling and best-selling Final Fantasy game in history isn’t impossible if it becomes a multiplatform release.
All of this is to say that, unless Square Enix becomes the next multi-billion-dollar purchase by either Sony or Microsoft, the Japanese giant’s days of making its games exclusive to PlayStation are coming to an end.
