Square Enix recently spoke out that the Final Fantasy 7 Remake is episodic mainly because they didn’t want to condense any of the content. Game journalist, Jim Sterling, has given an alternative reason based on the sources he talked with.
Jim Sterling gave his reasons based on the sources he talked to in a new video he posted earlier this week. There may be more reasons why the Final Fantasy 7 Remake is episodic as Square Enix may not be telling us the full story.
Sterling goes into detail that Square Enix had a business decision a few years ago to break up games into little pieces to sell to customers before a game was even finished. It is a method for customers to pay for a game now, and then you pay more when they finish developing more features.
Sterling heard from his sources about Square Enix breaking games into multiple parts back in 2013. Now we are seeing the results of this business decision with the new Hitman game and the Final Fantasy 7 Remake.
He asked the same sources from 2013 about new details and additional information was given to him about Square Enix’s weird business decision to break up games into many parts.
According to his sources, publishers like Square Enix were worried about the success of the PS4 and Xbox One consoles. Before they came out, publishers weren’t sure if they’ll be popular or not based on low software sales during the latter years of the PS3 and Xbox 360 generation.
Mobile games and the PC were considered to be more future proof so publishers didn’t give full effort on the newer consoles coming out. This is why we saw a lot of remasters early in the PS4 and Xbox One’s lifespan.
Square Enix had no faith in traditional $60 single player console gaming experiences. They tried new ways to earn more money without investing too much time on making the games the traditional way.
The business plan backfired because they didn’t expect the PS4 and Xbox One consoles to be so popular. Not to mention proper single player games like The Witcher 3 and Fallout 4 selling so well too.
The upcoming releases of Hitman and Final Fantasy 7 Remake are the results of Square Enix’s old business model. Now we know consoles are popular as well as single player games too. In the near future, we might see games with more content as gamers have been voicing their opinions lately. Gamers have spoken with their wallets.
Sterling’s sources and reasoning makes sense. It’s not just Square Enix either. We’ve seen multiplayer heavy AAA video games released such as Titanfall, Evolve and Star Wars Battlefront. The publishers misjudged the gaming audience early on. Now they know people want proper console gaming experiences instead of half-baked games.
- This article was updated on February 21st, 2018
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