A former Square Enix executive has criticized Final Fantasy XVI’s exclusivity to the PlayStation 5 for limiting its chances of success.
As reported by Axios, Jacob Navok, who was head of Square Enix’s Shinra technologies, had a lot of strong opinions about what his former employee was doing wrong and right. In particular, he seemed to be reacting to other criticisms of the company, which he felt were misguided.
In Jakob’s words:
“The issue that I see is an issue that all of the industry should be cognizant of, which is the risk of console exclusives when you have a principal-agent problem.
When you’re the publisher relying on first party for success, you’re always at a disadvantage, because your individual title matters less to the platform holder than it does to you.”
When Jakob talks about a principal-agent problem, he simply means that there were choices that Sony made to help promote Final Fantasy XVI, which is console exclusive to their PlayStation 5, that were not necessarily in Square Enix’s best interests. In this case, it’s probably the fact that Square Enix could not promote that the game was coming to PC, that undermined Square’s best interests, even as it benefited Sony.
Since then, Square Enix revealed that they would be bringing more games to Xbox. Jakob says that’s because the company came to the same conclusion he did.
Jakob then points out that the prevailing narrative among critics, that Square Enix released too many games that flopped, is not correct, and not the problem in the company. Jakob’s defense is that the poor reviews of Babylon’s Fall, for example, did not affect sales for Final Fantasy XVI. Some of Square Enix’s recent projects were calculated risks, as the company tried new things. The way Jakob says it, it’s OK to take risks that don’t work out, but Square should have put a greater focus on a major title like Final Fantasy XVI.
But that’s not all. After this interview, Jakob came onto Twitter to elaborate on his arguments even further (probably because Axios’ style summarized his interview so he didn’t get all his points out). We will share his comments verbatim below, but he added a key insight.
Jakob credits Sony for making PlayStation 5 a successful platform, but he pointed out that other companies have to help in the promotion of their games to maximize word of mouth. He laid out a common scenario that games sell more on PlayStation, because Xbox raised visibility and awareness of the same game on their own platform.
As Jakob points out, ultimately 3rd parties like Square Enix are more likely to see success on PlayStation 5, when they make their games multi-platform.
You can read the text of Jakoib’s tweet below.
“I was quoted in @stephentotilo’s excellent Axios newsletter today. I wanted to reinforce my strong disagreement with the position taken by analysts and quoted by former staff in this month’s @business piece on Square Enix.
To start, as a reminder, I reported directly to two Square Enix Holdings CEOs (Yoichi Wada, Yosuke Matsuda) for the better part of a decade, and I ran a subsidiary for them.
The notion that the producers “fiefdoms” are an issue is laughable and I’m puzzled by which employees (and contractors??) @6d6f636869 spoke to that would give this position. (note: @6d6f636869 is Bloomberg reporter Takashi Mochizuki)
The company’s SUCCESSES are thanks to their producers; it is an auteur-driven company. This means SQEX lives or dies on their successes, but I would argue that the opposite- committee driven game products- is worse.
Nintendo’s successes are credited to Miyamoto or Aonuma, Fortnite to Donald Mustard. Etc. Games should be driven by producer visions.
Yes, SQEX had several games that were poorly reviewed. Sometimes you take a swing at a new IP and you miss. To not try to make new IP is worse; all we would get is sequels. We should laud them for trying.
What is the correlation between previous titles failing to sell and FF16 sales? None.
There is no fan that said “Man, Babylon’s Fall was poorly reviewed, I guess I won’t buy FF16 because of that.” This is nonsense logic. It is not how brands work in games, people don’t skip ATVI’s CoD because the publisher made a bad Skylanders game.
An analyst in the piece was quoted as saying Square Enix “flooded the market.” This is also false. The publisher released a handful of these titles in the last year; Babylon’s Fall was from 2022, Forspoken in 2023, and Avengers was from 2020 (and wasn’t even developed by SQEX Japan, meaning the argument on org structures here is not relevant.)
Meanwhile, FF16’s metacritic is 87. FF7R’s metacritic is 87. Quality bar is consistent with a game also hailed as a success. And both are higher than FF15, which was an 81, and was also considered a success.
I was flabbergasted by the takes here. The sales problem (and note that Kiryu himself has said that sales were in line with expectations) is very clear- platform exclusivity in 2023 is harming more than it helps.
Playstation has a huge line-up of titles. And many upcoming, highly anticipated first party titles. They are great titles, of which the FF series is now one of many high quality titles that Sony promotes.
This is why Kiryu’s first decision was to bring back Xbox support. Let’s be clear- I am not suggesting Xbox sales by themselves can radically change the numbers. We know how the series has sold on Xbox traditionally.
Rather, the point is that you need multiple platforms promoting, pushing your product and incentivized toward its success.
An FF title having its latest gameplay revealed in another State of Play doesn’t expand the audience. But Xbox putting out billboards for your title in Times Square can drive more awareness (even if it probably leads to sales on PS rather than Xbox, this is still good for SQEX.)”
