We have a new rumor that confirms something that we speculated on just last week.
Last week, on an episode of XboxEra, Shpeshal Nick Baker was given a rumor about an upcoming Xbox game, live on the stream, that he refused to talk about. As we reported it, it was not Nick, but his XboxEra co-host Sikamikanico, who alluded to the title being something that would “set the internet on fire” and “cause drama.”
Now, hilariously enough, Shpeshal Nick confirmed the game, as a guest on a totally different podcast, the Infinite Podcast. We timestamped his statement here, and we’re paraphrasing to the relevant parts, but these are the things Nick said:
“(Final Fantasy) 16? (Final Fantasy) 16 was the game I was f_ing talking about last week…
I got the DM and they were like, if you want something for the rumor mill, Final Fantasy 16’s getting an Xbox port. And I’m like, I don’t want to touch that. I don’t want to touch that. I don’t want to talk about it.
He didn’t give a timeframe, he just said that there was an Xbox port.
I will say, this is the same guy who told me that Visions of Mana was going to be at the Direct.”
So, as you can check on our reporting above, we managed to predict what this title actually was. To be fair, it was not that hard to make an educated guess on this game. Square Enix was vocal about how Final Fantasy 16 did not perform to expectations after being made PlayStation 5 exclusive and getting the huge marketing push with Sony.
We also saw Square Enix had started a new relationship with Xbox, and that they announced plans to bring Final Fantasy XIV over to their platform. In this Developer Direct, we saw further proof of that relationship, with a spotlight cast on Visions of Mana. So it was reasonable to guess that a title like Final Fantasy 16 was being planned for Xbox, alongside other potential titles, like Theathrhythm, and the Final Fantasy Pixel Remaster series.
But we also understand why Shpeshal Nick was wary of getting near this rumor. It isn’t so much that Final Fantasy 16, which had some commercial and critical success, was as much of a critical and fandom darling as Baldur’s Gate 3, or Alan Wake 2.
The big issue here is that Final Fantasy 16 was announced as a console exclusive for the PlayStation 5, and this rumor seems to have dispelled that exclusivity entirely, making it prime grist for fanboys in the online console wars.
But you can’t really blame Square Enix for planning something like this. They may even consider bringing this game to a Nintendo platform if that was possible. Given the huge cachet of the Final Fantasy name, the expectations it carried and especially the large budget, Square Enix really needs Final Fantasy 16 to make a lot more money than it did.
Fanboys may see it in one particular way, but for giant companies like Square Enix, they have to live in a real world where games are not just there to make fans happy, but to be profitable, profitable enough that they can keep making more games. If that means that Square Enix will be even more multiplatform in the future, maybe that won’t be the worst outcome.
