from the let-them-eat-playstations dept
We’ve been talking a lot about video game exclusivity over the past couple of years. The sudden uptick in concern over a longstanding practice that ebbs and flows with time is largely related to industry consolidation of studios coming out of the COVID pandemic. In times of financial stress in an industry, that is often when bigger companies gobble up smaller companies that can’t survive whatever the crises is. In this case, Microsoft began gobbling up studios, with Sony following suit. Suddenly everyone had to wonder if certain titles were going to be exclusive to those platforms. The wishy-washy responses to public concern by those big companies far from helped.
Sony appears to be going with exclusivity even outside its acquisition. Final Fantasy 16 is set to drop later this year. Much like the Final Fantasy 7 remake, it was always going to be a timed exclusive for the PlayStation 5.
Scrubbing through some old Final Fantasy XVI trailers, such as the “Awakening” one from September 2020, it was definitely stated that the game is “not available on other platforms for a limited time after release on PS5,” suggesting it could possibly hit other consoles in the future at the very least. Such was the case with the Final Fantasy VII Remake, where the “limited time” window was about a year.
As Kotaku notes, the more recent marketing output for the game has removed much of that language, leading many to have wondered if this was now going to be a purely PlayStation title. FF16’s producer, Naoki Yoshida, was interviewed recently and stated that the game would not come out on PC, unlike recent other games in the series, and instead advised any disappointed PC gamers to simply go out and buy Sony hardware.
Producer Naoki Yoshida, colloquially known as Yoshi-P, was interviewed at a Mahjong tournament over the weekend, where he was asked whether Final Fantasy XVI would come to PC, something Square Enix confirmed when it revealed the game almost two years ago. However, despite that detail found in the footnote text at the bottom of the trailer, Yoshi-P said the release information is wrong, according to a “rough translation” by the Japanese gaming news Twitter account Genki_JPN. In fact, there may not be a PC version coming at all, as Yoshi-P is apparently suggesting folks go out and buy a PS5 instead.
Now, perhaps that “(laughs)” was intended to do more work than it comes off doing by Yoshida. And I certainly hope so, because otherwise his suggestion very much brings to mind the potentially apocryphal quote: “Let them eat cake.”
I should also say that there are plenty of Twitter replies suggesting that people were getting this wrong and he was suggesting that anyone that doesn’t want to wait go get a PS5. I find that slightly hard to believe, given the scrubbing of the marketing material.
Regardless, a company representative being unclear and, frankly, that capricious over public concern about any sort of game exclusivity isn’t a good look. Sony can do as it likes with the game, but the company doesn’t have to come off as uncaring about it, assuming it does in fact care about its customers.
Filed Under: exclusives, final fantasy, final fantasy xvi, naoki yoshida, playstation
Companies: sony
