Former Square Enix Exec Sheds Light On Final Fantasy Sales Expectations & Budget Realities

A former Square Enix executive has shed light on sales expectations and budget realities of the Final Fantasy series.

Jacob Navok, former Director of Business at Square Enix, took to Twitter/X to share insight on sales expectations and budget realities of the Final Fantasy series.  According to him, a misunderstanding that has existed over the years is that Square Enix sets arbitrarily high sales requirements, and then gets disappointed when they are not met. He clarified that this was not true when he was working for the company, and is also unlikely to be true today.

As per Navok, sales expectations generally come from a need to cover the cost of development plus return on investment. If a game costs $100 million to make and takes 5 years to develop, then the company has to beat, as an example, what the business could have returned investing $100 million into other avenues.

Based on Square Enix’s recent financial year report, it will take Final Fantasy XVI 18 months to reach expected sales. He clarified that the sales figures required aren’t wild expectations, and that the number of copies sold were “too low”. He pointed out that game development costs are likely 2 times higher than before, and marketing is also likely a similar situation. He said that these factors also increased the required Return On Investment.

However, according to Navok, the core of the problem with games like Final Fantasy VII Remake, Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, and Final Fantasy XVI is that their budgets were set in a period where the expectation was that audiences would grow, which was a reasonable expectation in the 2015 era. The total addressable population is increasing and should be resulting in increased revenue. However, this isn’t happening for the Final Fantasy series, as the world radically changed in the last 6 years. Navok said that Square Enix is not just competing against the latest new AAA titles, but also against every Free To Play online game that is constantly adding content and getting more robust over time.

Navok pointed out that while the game industry is still growing in revenue, that revenue is increasingly captured by fewer live services games like Fortnite or Call of Duty: Warzone. Older gaming audiences with disposable income but less free time either have the choice of paying $69.99 to spend a 100 hours in the latest Final Fantasy title or to just continue playing Fortnite with their friends for free. The latter likely makes a more economical and socially compelling offer to many. Meanwhile, younger gaming audiences may not even be thinking about the Final Fantasy series, as they likely weren’t engaged with prior entries. The last mainline Final Fantasy title, Final Fantasy XV, was released in 2016, 7 years prior to Final Fantasy XVI.