Originally Posted by
Loony BoB
Has there been any main FF that was anything other than a commercial success?
That's largely my point. XV being relatively successful is great in the short term as they get to make at least some of their money back from the mess that was Versus XIII development, but it's clearly a game where money was more or less no object. They built a whole new engine for it. They gave it to a new team and rebuilt it from scratch. They made a movie, an anime spin off, mobile game spin-offs and did a deal with Audi to make an FFXV R8. I haven't seen this many eggs in a single basket since The Spirits Within.
And it was fairly well received.
If you're a Square Enix executive right now, I would expect the following two thoughts to go through your head in order:
1) Thank god we were able to rescue something from that dumpster fire.
2) ...how the hell are we going to
top that??
XV is the one that crossed the line from being a big budget game to being an unsustainably big budget game. I don't think SE will be confident that they can fund a sequel with comparable levels of spectacle, and I don't think they will have the
balls to develop a sequel without it. That's why I expect nothing but spin-offs, ports and online games for the forseeable future. Maybe if FFVIIR and KH3 absolutely knock it out the park, I'll change my tune. But if anything I expect VIIR to fail to both fail meet SE's expectations and sour another chunk of the fanbase, and that'll be the nail in the coffin for any hope of XVI.