Games like Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth aren’t sustainable, and the Sony layoffs prove it

Do you want mushroom-picking minigames or a healthy industry? You can’t have both

[phoenixwing]

Halfway through their article I realized they're being stupid. They criticized ff for being a big game and introducing card games collectibles and side quests like ff never did it before. They've always been like that. Also I'd like to point out the fallacy of using ff 7 rebirth as an example of the wrong game to make. The game is so revered its bound to make bank. Also I and many others bought a ps5 just to play ff. Polygon are morons. As for the layoffs by Sony it's nothing to do with their third party agreements more to do with companies being cheap ba$tards as a whole. They even pointed out sony made a profit and playstation 5s are selling well. They mention it because they already know the counter argument but stating the counter argument alone doesn't change that it's right. Polygon made a nothing burger article.

[Nitrowolf2]

They made a nothing burger of a game that just released this past Friday with no sales data or way to gauge it's success, all because they clearly wanted to bank on the games hype

[Cacabunga]

After all these years Polygon is still not clever enough to differentiate between a third party and first party game..

[senorfartcushion]

It's so dumb.

So they made online games for years on the Xbox 360 and PS3 with no microtransactions. Now they make more money than ever? This is despite the fact that every game HAS to have features that the majority of the public only prefer per CERTAIN games i.e. live service money wastes and microtransactions? And it's not sustainable?

How about if companies - Square Enxi for example - make games like The Avengers in the same way they would a Final Fantasy game? Makes sense. You won't lose any money. You'll get exactly what the public thinks you're worth.

[chronoforce]

Rebirth is part 2 of a remake of a game that in 1997 was released complete. The next part is at least 3 years away. Spiderman 2023 will have much worse margins than Miles Morales and their next games would have exceeded 300m a piece if not for cuts. Shrinking margins are a concern for all the developers making cuts so where is fallacious thinking on the part of polygon?

Rebirth has a giant open world packed full of content; we can assume the budget is much higher than Remake. Even if Rebirth opens to 3.5m units like Remake did, it will still most likely represent a degradation of margins even if the game makes a profit.

The fact that they could not make a single game speaks volumes about how much development costs and timelines have increased.

[senorfartcushion]

It's their choice ultimately

It could have been an exact copy of Kingdom Hearts 3's build with new assets. That game is full and runs on PS4 with Disney licenses being paid for.

[phoenixwing]

Ill bite. First ill pretend that ff7 has shrinking margins for companies even though they are priced more and have dlc. Let's not even get into all the merchandising. Ff7 rebirth has shrinking margins for Square Enix ergo Sony has no margins because they paid square enix a set amount on exclusivity. Which makes your whole argument moot. Do you understand that? Basically polygon used the most hyped game of the month and tried to force a circle block in a square recess. They used next to no brain power when it came to critical thinking and this article.

But even then sony doesn't make games like ff7 rebirth anyway. I've yet to play a Sony game with a bunch of mini games. Also Sony very rarely makes jrpgs its not their style. Also practically every big dev fired workers this isn't a sustainability problem this goes back to dev companies only focusing on instant cash for shareholders and being greedy companies like I said.

Edit: they padded the story that's why it isn't in a single game. If they wanted to they could have made it a single one but why would you when they know they can release it a bunch of times and make 3 times as many sales

[DOMination-]

Margins for games shouod he at an all time high, especially for platform holders. Digital games are considerably cheaper than physical games

The reason why Spiderman has low margins is because Sony have to pay a huge percentage to Disney for licensing

[phoenixwing]

I'm also never reading a polygon article again. If this is the braintrust polygon has working there then I'd rather not catch a case of their stupidity

[MrBaskerville]

You forget that Remake alone is longer than the original Final Fantasy VII. Rebirth is double the length of the original game. Who knows how long the third will be.

[The Wood]

polygon be polygon'ing. Their anti (ill say no names) rhetoric/milkshake used to bring a certain demographic to the yard. They're pretty much irrelevant nowadays....arh well

[Sciurus_vulgaris]

Sony doesn’t develop Final Fantasy, which is something that should be obvious with the most basic of research.

[Knightofelemia]

As far as I remember Sony sold off their shares they had in Squaresoft at the time. Sony did not and has not made FF7 they published the old FF7 game outside of Japan. But Sony's lay offs have nothing to do with this two different companies.

[Hofstaderman]

They resold the shares back to Square. Sony assisted Square after the Spirits Within fiasco.

[purple101]

websites like this, arn't sustainable,

and with this article, you just proved it.

[Kekewei]

But small or even indie studios are closing and laying off these days too , the studio behind Life is strange true colors lay off 20% just days before Sony did, what does that prove then?

[Skuletor]

That these so called journalists cherry pick information to support their own agenda.

[Exvalos]

Ummm.....does he realize SquareEnix is not a Sony owned developer so the layoff had nothing to do with Square

[TwoPicklesGood]

$100-200mil games aren’t sustainable, can’t argue that. The few that make it need to sell millions to be considered successful and even then it’s not much profit. The push to online/gaas is for a reason, sustainability. They need to make more money and it’s not happening when game costs hundreds of millions to make while taking years to develop.

[Crows90]

No ....they need to stop ballooning the costs. It's that simple. Helldivers 2 proves it...and it has nothing to do with being a live service. If it was a story based game it would still be incredible.not to mention mtx are entirely optional since all the content is accessible via natural progression in-game.

[TiredGamer]

You realize that most of the cost is salary, right? And you may be right, the way to stop ballooning cost is to reduce the scopes of games/assets by either using AI to generate content, or by reducing staff, which is what is going on right now in the industry.

There's no magic bullet here. Even if a game is profitable (and many today are not), it's about Return on Investment (ROI). If the ROI is low, the company is better off investing somewhere else with less risk of failure.

[DarXyde]

If you take the industry as it is, it's true some of the time: games with different budgets have different profitability thresholds. But of course, it gets very difficult with so many studios; people only have so much money and if everyone is putting out games of similar quality, in practice, someone is going to get overlooked, especially if we look at the release windows. This year is off to a wild start with quality titles. There are dozens if not hundreds of development studios now. With 12 months in a year, it can be quite difficult not to step on toes.

I'm partial to the idea of using AI as a tool to make development windows shorter while taking advantage of the power of each piece of hardware so work burden and budget decrease and studios can increase their output at a lower cost and far lower profitability thresholds.

However, in the real world, greed and aggressive cost cutting (i.e., layoffs) and keeping exec compensation high is the norm, and THAT is not sustainable. So unfortunately, it's a situation where they're mixing solutions: layoffs + AI, which is anti-labour madness. Instead of increasing output, they're happy to put out games at a usual rate and squeezing everyone.

Gaming really should not be observed in a microcosm. It's just something we can all observe.

[Outside_ofthe_Box]

"The push to online/gaas is for a reason, sustainability."

If every game was online/gas would every game be successful/sustainable?

[gigoran8]

I don't even know why I bothered to click. Whoever wrote this garbage shouldn't be a "journalist" of any kind, let alone a games journalist.

[gold_drake]

ehm, so, sony didnt actually develop ff7 rebirth or remake for that matter.

thats rly dumb

[zero_jp]

At this point in terms of budget how many copies does a FF7 Rebirth have to sell? Or any AAA game for that matter that takes years to make for it to be profitable and devs keep their jobs?

Does anyone know the actual number or are these studios going to lose money no matter what? Since the layoffs seem to be from over hiring during the pandemic.

I’m genuinely curious though as to what the truth and reality is here. Can anyone shed some insight or are we all in the dark and just guessing?

[franwex]

Square hasn’t mentioned numbers, but I’m guessing around the 3 million mark. That’s about how much remake sold first year and ff16 so far. Square seems to be happy with those numbers. I recall them wanting more than 3 million for Tomb Raider. So it seems that 3 million the first year to break even, and the few million after year one is profit.

[Ironmike]

Square are not happy with numbers it's being well documented ff16 was not as profitable as they hoped but I do think rebirth will be I enjoyed remake more than 16 I like its style more but 16 was still a very good game

[Asterphoenix]

Seems like Polygon is throwing a tantrum

[NiceneCreeder]

make sure your adblocker is on before you read this pile of shite.

[garos82]

how is polygon still a thing. its time they go down the path of Vice and #LearnToMine

[Whitey2k]

Nothing to do with or about Final fantasy. Sony boss even said that AAA is getting out of hand with the cost. I'm sure sony wanted studios with will known ips " I think" yet purchased studios that has no ips n nothing to show not even made one game. If they wanted studios that cam print money its either capcom Sega or rockstar if they wanna be really aggressive go buy EA they also have good ips sitting on goldmine

[uglymash]

very few gamers are asking for 100+ hour behemoths, one rule they need to understand is to value gamers time, its one thing absent from earlier games, no filler just to get to a length count.

Cut the fat and gamers will appreciate it. Imagine playing 20 games where they all did their thing well rather than what we have 20 games trying to be like the other top 10 games. Homonstic creative bankruptcy, its why we have stagnation , every first person shooting is copying cod and now cod is copying other games to have open world sections. If everyone is copying each other, where is the source of the creativity, who is setting trends... seems to be indies.

It is greed, all studios are looking at fortnite as this massive money printer but it churns content. Not all games need to do this, nor can they but they want that repeatable monthly money. From a business standpoint it makes sense, unfortuately this is a creative industry and if at the core of it business decisions outweight creative then innovation will cost.

5 year development cost, now with the help of AI , that could be brought down. Unreal engine 5 makes a ton of development quicker with no lods needed with nanite and less tweaking needed to lumen. So productivity bonuses, so to make the same game 5 years ago can be done quicker now no? Say its 20% quicker, spend that in prototyping phase, make something unique and fun. Problem is thats not a "banker" its a risk which businesses dont like doing so they go with the sure thing. Market potential will have them making the next cod..

As for FF7, its my favourite game of all time, like i love this game but so far with rebirth far far too much padding i turn it off. Atmosphere has been lost, the combat is better than original but im spending far too much time not playing the game.. im hoping i get further sucked in but all the exploration feels like a poors man zelda botw/totk .. its either so big to accomdate chocoboos or they used chocobos to try and fix the boring chocobos.

I would absolutely love one day if they did the opposite, made that much stuff but just crammed it into like a small town. Everythign is packed with stuff.. bigger spaces results in far less enoyable gaming if it isnt packed with the same content per second.

Original ff7 each screen had something, material behind a bookshelf, a chest tucked under the bed, a note stuck on a door, and took 2-3 seconds to run there. Also how can no1 understand, linear games are almost always better storywise. The developer controls the beat of the story, it plays like a film, going open world breaks that flow or story of onto the next bit, open world can be amazing for the right game. Botw / Totk do it brilliantly as it doesn't have much of a story. Your journey is your story, whereas in something like 7 which has storytelling beats feels clumsy at times. Aw shit, just witnessed someone die, thats right next step is to go wrangle up some kupos.

[SoloGamer1]

*sigh* thats all i can say about this ....."article" 🙄

[MaxiPower90]

If a games good... it will sell. I'm not sorry that all those developers who were putting out shit games lost their jobs. Make better games. it is not a hard concept. Like look at the absolute dribble London studio produced in the last 10 years. That isnt sustainable. I play some amount of games and i can hold my hand up and say having looked through their entire back resume of games not one has entered my domain. I tend to give games a chance if thye have redeeming qualities.

Not good enough.

[TiredGamer]

This is false. There are many great games out there that did not get their fair share and were neglected due to market conditions. Being a good game is important, but what sucks is that being good is not good enough sometimes. And once a studio is burned one too many times, they will migrate towards the types of games that sell to the majority of the gaming audience. And then you build the risk of oversaturation.

[anast]

Very rarely does excellence get ignored. Most of the time excellence is rewarded because it's profitable There are too many sh&% games being made. There are not enough creative people to go around. It's time to burst the bubble so to speak.

[TiredGamer]

It may not get “ignored” by critics and the general opinion, but that doesn’t mean this feeling will be commensurate with dollars pumped in. The CODs, Fortnites, Minecrafts, Assassin’s Creeds, and Maddens of the gaming world soak up a lot of the potential dollars in the market. Gaming dollars are finite, and we can all agree that the most of those titles aren’t exactly the definition of “excellence”.

[MaxiPower90]

No, we can't agree that "most of those titles aren’t exactly the definition of “excellence”

I certainly do not agree with that statement whatsoever. Whilst i do not play cod or assassins creed nor have done in years i can acknowledge that they are well made games. They are produced to a high standard and have achieved their target of gaining a following. I find the irony of your statement that you didn't list one single game that is "great" that sold well but i can guarantee you the reason isnt to do with any other game taking the money away with it but rather it's failing on its own lack of merit. Mincraft whilst looking like crap is an excellent example of innovation in the industry and rightfully earned every penny.

I don't know what people expect COD, or the other titles to be. Even Madden. Cod plays like Cod as for Madden. I hear this argument with FIFA all the time that its basically the same game every year. Of course it is. It's a sports game so it's not gonna suddently play like a platformer ffs.

If your point is referring to the casual audience that buys most of these games then you need to wake up and smell the coffee. There is always going to be a casual audience. In every market you can think of there are casual people with white bread choices. Whether it be people who stick to the hits when it comes to music or those who stick to basic foods whereas a curry chip would be considered exotic to them. these people exist and are more common than you think.

[TiredGamer]

Yikes. I guess we can agree that we all have different expectations for the definition of "excellence".

Without going down a rabbit hole of analyzing semantics, the general point is that the overall volume of entertainment choices out there most certainly impacts that sales/success of individual offerings, and just being a great product doesn't guarantee that you won't be overlooked. This is a real problem in the entertainment industry... competition for everyone's time and money. And it crosses borders between music, gaming, movies, streaming, and social media. There is a finite number of hours and dollars available to the growing list of options for our leisure.

If you don't believe that the growth of gaming options AND the dollar sinks of the big casual games don't impact the overall distribution of dollars, you are kidding yourself. Even for me, I find myself overwhelmed by choice and sometimes just stick to a few casual games of Rocket League rather than partaking in so many of the other fantastic offerings out there. As an example, I am a huge fan of ICO, Shadow of the Colossus, and Resident Evil, but have yet to play The Last Guardian or any of the recent Resident Evil releases simply because so many other things have occupied my time (like retro gaming - another rabbit hole of choice).

If you need any other proof, there's the fact that game publishers and movie studios avoid stacking their games/movies all at the release schedule because.... you guessed it, they don't want to have their offerings overlooked or neglected due to a lack of time/dollars from the audience.

[Hofstaderman]

Square has nothing to do with Sony, Polygon. But the truth is the industry cant continue like this in perpetuity, something has got to give. I remember nineties gaming as the golden age; visually pleasing graphics for the time and with reasonable budgets that allowed for experimentation and a more diverse choices for gamers. Now every game has its content dictated by a publisher who is not willing to take design risks due to the cost of investment.

[Terry_B]

polygon being polygon.

[TriniOutsider]

And this is Sony's fault how?

[VincentVanBro]

What about the Witcher 3? It was done nearly 10 years ago, has a similar scope, and didn’t require any layoffs. This article’s logic is completely fallacious.

[D4RC]

Polygon are a cancer to gaming, just as Kotaku are. They are activists, not journalists.

[Dandizzle]

Polygon is barely any better than Kotaku. These are bottom of the barrel click bait news sites

[RiseNShine]

That's why the first game was so ridiculously succesful that green lighted an even more ambitious sequel, because it wasn't sustainable, right...

[DefaultComment]

But FF7 rebirth has been developed and published by Square Enix, not Sony. I mean sure it has time exclusivity but aside from that I don't understand why Sony part of the problem.
I guess the rumors are true,we probably are heading for another crash in the industry, which makes sense why Xbox is focusing on making gaming a service with the game pass and all that.

[wiegraf]

It's not big games that are the problem, it's exclusivity

[Ironmike]

Totally agree I think we slowly see it come to and end

[derek]

Sony's layoffs prove nothing but that corporate/shareholder greed is a real thing. Playstation made the most revenue and the most profit in their history their last fiscal year but it was below expectations. The profit margin wasn't enough so they cut a bunch of jobs to get those margins up. AAA games including Playstations continue to sell the most and make the most profit while AA games or less do not, apart from a few break out hits. Of course they're sustainable, nobody says this about COD or GTA ect, where does this nonsensical narrative come from.

[phoenixwing]

Totally agree

[Becuzisaid]

Sites like Polygon are far worse for this industry than anything else.

[Miacosa]

Sony does not own Square Enix nor control how they make their games. Investing funds to have games produced exclusive for PlayStation users is not equivalate to first party production.

[frostypants]

The industry struggles are more due to spiking interest rates which have had a similar effect in office jobs across the economy. It literally costs more to run a company than it did before. The good news is things will stabilize after the adjustment. But it will cost more to grow. Polygon should stay in their lane. They don't understand economics and are just describing a correlation that is convenient for their narrative.

[anast]

This comment should be pinned.

[anast]

Another anti-gamer/consumer article.

Yes, we can have both. If not, lower the price of the hobby. We shouldn't pay more for less. But paying less also means less jobs.

Sony is the publisher in this case. The writer should be writing about something he/she knows.

[SpacedDuck]

Well if I had a choice between

Starfield - Unfinished mess with many features missing or overlooked
Halo Infinite - Failure in every sense of the world thanks to trash live service
Crash Team Rumble - Live service already abandoned
Skull and Bones - Probably has less than a year of life left and just launched
Suicide Squad - Live service already disappointing reception from fans/gamers

Or FF 7 Rebirth, a beautiful fun game with over 40 hours of gameplay with epic music, visuals and voice acting.

I will take FF7 Rebirth.

[MrBaskerville]

They are not wrong, but it's a weird example considering that the same team will inevitably make a third game and probably also a Kingdom hearts 4. So doesn't really work, this teams is sustainable because of the size of the franchise.

[Angyobangyo]

correlation doesn't equal causation......unless you're polygon.