Tag: final fantasy 7 rebirth

Square Enix Says Sales of AAA Games Like Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth, Final Fantasy XVI Fell Short of Expectations

Shares of Square Enix Holdings Co. tumbled 16% in their biggest decline in 13 years after its president said sales of recent big-budget games disappointed and that it would take years for a recent reorganization to bear fruit.

Sales of Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, Final Fantasy XVI and Foamstars — all released exclusively for Sony Group Corp.’s PlayStation in the previous fiscal year — fell short of the Japanese game publisher’s expectations in both revenue and profit, Takashi Kiryu told analysts the previous day. The company now expects to earn an operating income of ¥40 billion this year, widely missing the average of analyst estimates of ¥57 billion. Its sales and dividend outlook also fell short of expectations.

Shares in Square Enix fell by their daily limit on Tuesday to a four-month interday low.

Kiryu, 48, has overhauled the company’s structure around big-budget games while scrapping many mobile and console games under development to focus on quality over quantity. The publisher’s also departing from its practice of releasing its top-tier games first on PlayStation, and will make them available to as many platforms as possible, including Nintendo Co.’s platforms, Microsoft Corp.’s Xbox and the PC, Kiryu said.

But it will take time for such efforts to translate into sales, he said.

“It may be great that the company’s overhauled its game-making pipelines and is rebooting the company, but what do they have to sell this year and next?” Toyo Securities analyst Hideki Yasuda said. Jefferies analyst Atul Goyal downgraded his recommendation on the stock to underperform and cut his target price to ¥4,600 per share.

Kiryu’s remarks suggest the company’s failed to lift sales momentum on Final Fantasy XVI, which investors had anticipated would bolster its bottom line after its June release last year. After the game’s tepid reception in its first week of sales, Kiryu had said the company planned to sustain sales of the title over the longterm. No sales figures have been released for Final Fantasy VII Rebirth and Foamstars.

Square Enix’s mobile games have also been struggling, with many games shut down in a little over a year due to poor sales. “Our winning formula is no longer effective,” Kiryu said. “It took us a long time to adjust the course.”

© 2024 Bloomberg L.P.

(This story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)

Affiliate links may be automatically generated – see our ethics statement for details.

Check out our Latest News and Follow us at Facebook

Original Source

Horizon Forbidden West: Complete Edition Is Reportedly the First PS5 Game to Ship on Two Discs

Horizon Forbidden West: Complete Edition is reportedly the first two-disc PS5 game. As per an image posted by the ‘Does it play?’ Twitter account, the base game, its Burning Shores expansion, and some digital goodies all total out to 121GB, and will be available on the two discs included in the physical edition. The game is slated to launch Friday, October 6, and with that, it has beaten the upcoming Final Fantasy VII: Rebirth to the punch, which was also planned for release on two discs. This move is a big win for console owners who value physical media — or rather, the ability to access games anywhere and anytime without restrictions such as a constant internet connection.

The hefty new edition is priced at $59.99 (about Rs. 4,999) and includes a Horizon Forbidden West digital artbook, a digital soundtrack, Horizon Zero Dawn Vol. 1: The Sunhawk digital comic book, a few extra poses and makeup in the photo mode, and some outfits that can be unlocked via in-game progression. As mentioned before, all of this is packaged with the acclaimed 2022 RPG, which charts the adventures of young huntress Aloy across a majestic post-apocalyptic frontier, in hopes of protecting mankind from an infectious red blight. There’s also the Burning Shores expansion — released in April — which turned the city of Los Angeles into a volcanic archipelago, bringing new machines to hunt.

Horizon Forbidden West: Burning Shores Review

Horizon Forbidden West: Complete Edition is also headed to PC, albeit sometime in early 2024. Nixxes Software, PlayStation’s in-house porters who brought Spider-Man Remastered to PC, has been tasked with this job and the release will indeed include all the aforementioned bonus content. There’s no word on PC-exclusive features yet, but going by past ports, we can hope to see keyboard + mouse compatibility, alongside support for ray-tracing, Nvidia’s DLSS and AMD’s FSR-based upscaling tech, and being able to experience the game’s beautiful vistas across ultra-wide displays. This adds to haptic feedback when using the PS5 DualSense controller on a wired connection.

For the time being, it appears PlayStation will continue sticking to CEO Jim Ryan’s promise of bringing PS exclusives to PC two or three years after their initial launch. As for whether this changes after his retirement in March next year, only time will tell. In May, developer Guerilla Games confirmed that Horizon Forbidden West sold 8.4 million copies across PS4 and PS5, with the franchise as a whole — includes the prequel Horizon Zero Dawn, its Frozen Wilds DLC, and the PS VR2 game — selling 32.7 million units. At the time, the team also claimed that Aloy’s adventures would continue in a sequel.

Horizon Forbidden West: Complete Edition launches October 6 on the PS5.

Affiliate links may be automatically generated – see our ethics statement for details.

Check out our Latest News and Follow us at Facebook

Original Source

Final Fantasy VII Rebirth to Offer ‘High Degree of Freedom,’ on Track to Release This Winter: Naoki Hamaguchi

The world of Final Fantasy VII Rebirth will offer a “high degree of freedom,” according to game director Naoki Hamaguchi, who addressed questions fans might have had about the second entry in the Final Fantasy 7 Remake project, which picks up right after Cloud and his gang left the walls of Midgar, arriving at the quaint village of Kalm, home to miners. While his comments don’t directly confirm an open-world format, we could still expect larger areas to explore, in addition to more flexibility in dealing with side content. In a separate tweet, producer Yoshinori Kitase confirmed that development on the game was ‘progressing smoothly and according to plan,’ suggesting that it’s still on track to release this winter.

While Square Enix is yet to confirm the rumoured 26th-anniversary celebration for Final Fantasy VII, it could possibly be revealed during the upcoming Summer Game Fest event, where the publisher is listed as a key partner. Of course, some final details of the high-octane action-driven Final Fantasy XVI is also expected, ahead of its release on June 22, exclusively on PS5. A PC version will also be released in time, though it could take longer than six months for optimisation. Circling back to Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, the developers are working on setting a concrete release date, which producer Kitase confirmed last year, would be ‘released next winter,’ pointing toward a late 2023 or early 2024 launch window.

“Players will witness a chain of narrative developments that lie at the very heart of the Final Fantasy VII story while discovering each character’s destiny,” writer Kazushige Nojima revealed in a separate tweet. The promotion simply states that it will have a story, with threads that would reveal each character’s arc. In a press release from Final Fantasy VII Rebirth’s announcement, producer Kitase claimed that the sequel is being developed in a way that new players could directly jump in without worrying about previous context.

“Making the middle part of a trilogy has its own challenges, but there are plenty of classic second instalments in the world of film that are defined by stunning story twists and deeper explorations of their characters. Often these second instalments become a favourite amongst the fans,” he added, hoping to make Final Fantasy VII Rebirth more gripping than 2020’s Final Fantasy VII Remake. The Remake project essentially reimagines the original 1997 PlayStation game for a new audience, tossing players into the dystopian cyberpunk metropolis of Midgar and dividing the chapters into three standalone experiences. Yes, it’s a trilogy, with some work on the final part already in progress.

The plot centres around Cloud Strife, an ex-SOLDIER operative, who joins a ragtag group of idealists called Avalanche to help destroy the Mako Reactor 1, whose bombing plunges the city into fiery chaos and brings visions of a bitter enemy long believed to be dead. Ditching the turn-based combat system of the original, Final Fantasy VII Remake employed a real-time battle system that has you switch between party members/ characters on the fly. Part one of the trilogy was released for the PS4 in 2020, before eventually making its way to PC and PS5 in the following year. The aforementioned sequel FF7 Rebirth, however, will not release on the previous-generation PS4.

Based on the current development timeline, Final Fantasy VII Rebirth is expected to release this winter on the PS5.

Affiliate links may be automatically generated – see our ethics statement for details.



Check out our Latest News and Follow us at Facebook

Original Source

Exit mobile version