The Horizon franchise embraces the sci-fi genre, but also subverts it by not glamorizing the idea of taking to the stars and leaving Earth behind.
Gravemaster writes: "Game of Thrones and A Song of Ice and Fire is a successful franchise, but it hasn’t had much luck when it comes to video games. Many were released, but only the one from Telltale games received more or less recognition and it was cancelled after one season anyway. Now, we have news of another Game of Thrones game in development."
Final Fantasy VII Rebirth publisher Square Enix has declared a $140m loss based on a shakeup of its internal development pipeline.
What are they doing over there? Sounds like they canceled something big. I read a rumor a while back about ff9 remake . Here "Final Fantasy IX has gone through a very challenging development, the game is still in progress but may undergo changes drastic enough that we won't hear about it for a couple of years."
This could be one of the reasons if the rumor is true. That was Silknight i don't know how credible he is but it's something and it would make sense.
I hope IX is still on the cards
Just a straight up remake which they expand a little bit nothing over ambitious
If IX dosent happen then VI and VIII will never be thought of.
What are they doing? Sales are falling and the costs are out of control. Big releases need to be absolute sales home runs now, and Final Fantasy sales have stagnated.
Now we know why Square didn’t fall over themselves to remake the original FF7 all these years ago. It certainly wasn’t a license to print money, at least not with what the expectations were. Each of these full on remakes drains an enormous amount of company resources for a razor thin profit margin.
They lost the magic in the remakes. And the story is incomplete. The original FF7 is still way better. The Remake / Rebirth are just fan service. Like an Anime/Manga with "optional" filler content. FF7 had pretty much zero filler, it was paced extremely well, and still today flows much better than the grindy story and spongey enemy battles in the remakes.
I hope people understand usually when a loss is declared it means a game which had been in development got cancelled. For example Sony Santa Monica before GOW-PS4 had cancelled a project which Sony had spent 7 figures on
As far as square is concerned they release a bad game once a year. Forspoken anyone?
For those making comments on remake not selling well, I hope y’all realize that Sony is the only reason this remake is happening. If Sony didn’t fund it the remake wouldn’t be happening. Just like Konami didn’t want to remake SH2 because development costs of 100 plus million
I'm waiting for them to release the complete edition bundle, but it's definitely on my list.
Not rocket science. Compare sales numbers, development cycles, and budgets to the previous gens. We are all collectively burning up the industry from the inside out. Expectations are ludicrously high now for every release and sales are dropping for even the most prestigious of series.
We used to be satisfied paying $50-60 for a game that took 1/100th the budget and staff to make. Now gamers feel cheated if they have to pay the same for a game that took 100x the budget. We may be reaching the end of the line for this model of gaming.
@tiredgamer I think your point is one that ppl don’t understand and you hit it on the nose .. some gamers don’t want to take accountability but it’s some of the gamers fault the industry is where it’s at .. we as gamers set the standards for the industry not the shareholders , ppl forget that the shareholders and the industry want and need OUR Money. Both the Xbox and PlayStation are seeing a drop in hardware , the industry is very stagnant right now.
Speaking to Square:
Turns out their mismanagement wasn't related to the western studios they dumped to Embracer, but their own fault.
With regards to Xbox - a good way to kill your brand is to pull support on high quality titles and only dump B and C-tier titles to it
With regards to PC - Epic Games Story exclusivity for any duration and piss-poor optimization will hurt you.
With regards to FF Pixel Remasters - y'all messed up by barely releasing them on physical, like wtf that was free money!
And lastly, you don't help a franchise by releasing a mainline title that undermines every title that came before it. FFXVI was a DMC-like with bottom-of-the-barrel side quests and I can't imagine that helping Rebirth at all considering its marketing is directly tied to how big that game is.
Sony is getting their best titles and with the most polish, so what about it? Nintendo gets their top properties too, for titles that can run on Switch hardware.
It's the other fanbases that get the second- and third-class treatment from Square. If that's due to agreements with Sony, that's not a Sony issue but a Square one for accepting those terms. Sony is doing its best to look out for Sony.
The industry implosion is continuing. Sky high budgets, prolonged development windows, stagnant sales numbers, and falling currency values (inflation) are wreaking havoc on the legacy industry. AAA games will slowly become the rarity.
Oh I’m with you. What’s worse is they can say, “Well we tried to make this amazing game and spend all this money on, but not enough people showed an interest. So no more of these since we can’t take a hit like that.”
The industry is going to take a dramatic shift. Mark my words on this.
I think there is quite a large portion of individuals like myself who held out on buying it on PS5 because I can get it on PC eventually. To be able to mod the game and also have custom graphical settings to my liking
same
but im not sure if it matters at all. im sure they made sony pay a hefty sum for the 3parter to come on ps5 exclusively. so watever they made in sales, might have come bk in profits for square, but i dont know
and we dont know what "underperformed" even means for square.
Danish from eXputer: "The Witcher's upcoming sequel needs to overhaul the series' combat system if it wants to make a big splash among gamers."
after what we see ( 2015 - 2024 ) in dark souls 3, blood borne , sekiro , dragon's dogma 2 , rise of the Ronin combat they should really careful and bring very good combat in Witcher 4 this time
Great article! Great game series!
The premise og this article does not make sense. Sci-fi has not glamorized space exploration, sure there are some standouts that do, but most true to genre Sci-fi is usually more about the human consequences of technology/progress. It is most often quite dystopian and almost never celebratory.
As such Horizon's reference to space exploration does not buck any trend in Sci-fi. In fact it follows the trope.
I get that this article was supposed to celebrate horizon. Which it deserves. But the superficial nature of that premise stands out to me.
It's like the author thinks all Sci-fi is like star trek, yet still ignoring how much of star trek, while celebratory of space exploration, still tries to warn of the hubris of man.
Haven't played that far, but assume it's something like Dan Simmons' Illium, but probably less interesting. Not a bad thing though, it's hard to compete with the ideas in Simmons Sci-Fi.
Blade Runner, Snowpiercer, District 9 and .....there is a metric ton of Earth-bound sci-fi.