The thing is there’s also actual sales numbers that you can go off of too.
Cyberpunk 2077 has 25 million sales. Blizzard announced that Diablo 4 hit 10 million players the first month of its release. Elden Ring hit 20 million copies sold in February this year, and sold 13.4 million in the first 34 days.
To be clear, Final Fantasy 16 selling 3 million in a week is more sales than Baldur’s Gate 3 sold on release, since 2.5 million of BG3’s 5 million sales were from the 2 (almost 3) years the game was in early access. Although I’d guess that Final Fantasy 16 hasn’t hit the 10 million sales it seems people think BG3 may have hit by this point...I’m not sure where that number is coming from now that I look a little more. But there is a funny situation with those two games where they both sold similar numbers on release, but one got talked up as a major success while the other was talked up as a bomb. If Final Fantasy 16 had been a PS4 exclusive instead of a PS5 exclusive it likely would’ve sold much better.
Somewhat related: Squenix also always talks about all its games as if they've failed to hit targets, even though many of them had respectable looking numbers. I'm not sure if they're just huffing paint and then presenting data like: We're going to sell 12 bazillion of these! and then just running with it until they only sold some number that actually exists and are upset about it.
I think they’re just spending a bunch of money and expecting sales like they used to get. But people don’t care about Final Fantasy today like they did from Final Fantasy 7 up through Final Fantasy 13.
Square Enix is the jap Bioware, they wasted many decades chasing trends instead of improving their core experience they were known. Instead of building an audience over the years, they ditched their old audience every time they chased a new trend to the point of diluting their franchises so much that nobody gives a damn anymore.
A company that gives the green light to something like Forspoken doesnt belong to this world for long.
I wouldn’t say they’ve been chasing trends for decades. They’ve only been in this action mode for less than a decade; with Final Fantasy 15 starting as a spinoff game, and the 7 Remake being a project they were originally outsourcing to CyberConnect2.
Dragon Quest 11 is a pretty classic style JRPG, and that game came out in 2017. They’re doing stuff like the remakes of Live A Live and Star Ocean: The Second Story. They came out with that Dungeon Encounters game a couple years ago. The whole 360 era they were still coming out with the kind of stuff you’d expected from Square and Enix before. The only big thing, and this was a huge misstep on the part of Square Enix, is they didn’t shift gears on their whole Final Fantasy 13 Fabula Nova Crystallis thing after the negative reaction to FF13. And that first Final Fantasy 13 game didn’t sell bad, but the reaction to it was bad, and they spent a whole console generation with their flagship series (at least as far as the West was concerned) attached to an unpopular title. So they basically lost a generation of gamers to who Final Fantasy really meant something when they kept making FF13 games instead of retooling those titles into other projects. There big recent fumble was giving that Marvel's Avengers, which sounds like it was their most high profile big budget game, to Crystal Dynamics.
If BioWare acted like Square Enix today, smaller projects by former BioWare employees like NEO Scavenger and The Banner Saga would be happening under BioWare. You’d probably still be getting the types of games BioWare used to make out of BioWare, they’d just be smaller lower budget projects than Anthem, Inquisition, and Mass Effect 3.
