Square Enix is in a bad place at the moment, the storied video game company coming off a rough year, $2 billon lost in market value since the launch of Final Fantasy 16 this past June.
The loss is not blamed on Final Fantasy 16 specifically, but rather the more important elements were outright failures like Forspoken and Babylon’s Fall, with the latter being one of the worst reviewed large releases in recent memory. A 41 on Metacritic, a literal death sentence .of the recent issues, and one key point drawn out is that Square Enix has been relying on its longstanding relationship with Sony much too frequently. Final Fantasy 16 launched exclusively on PS5.
As such, it stands to reason that Final Fantasy 17, whenever it arrives, is almost certainly going to avoid Sony exclusivity and instead launch simultaneously on Xbox, and hopefully PC as well. Unless Sony is paying Square Enix an astonishing amount of money to keep it exclusive, it’s not going to be worth it, even though Xbox sales will be fewer than PS sales, clearly.
There’s also the quality control problem. Forspoken was a miss, still better than Redfall, I suppose, but it was supposed to be a big new IP for them. Babylon’s Fall was just…that should have never seen the light of day at all. This extends before this as well, the ill-conceived idea to make Marvel’s Avengers a looter. The idea that solid games like Tomb Raider and Guardians of the Galaxy need to be megahits, and because they weren’t these studios get pawned off to Embracer for dirty cheap .