According to the article at least, that is essentially what they did. But their model was based on earlier years when there was higher projected growth, so the budgets were set too high as a result.
Personally, as long as the final installment in the FF7 Remake trilogy is made with the same budget as the first two and ends on a satisfying note, I’ll be happy. A good ending gives the trilogy as a whole have more lifetime sales than it would if part 3 makes the first two less good in retrospect, i.e. the Mass Effect 3 effect.
I am happy it’s on Steam, but admittedly Kingdom Hearts 3 is not the main offender here when they still have games trapped on single consoles. KH3 was already on PC, it’s just more accessible now. Can’t say the same about Final Fantasy 16 or Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth. Hopefully that is what they fix next.
I have been in the process of doing the marathon slowly but surely over the past year and a half.
I play XIV when I can and I enjoy it, but hardly have time for one MMO, much less a second one. I decided that trying to do XI was too big an ask, so I opted to replace it with Tactics (the PSP War of the Lions version specifically).
Tactics is a much-praised game that, despite not being numbered, is considered part of Final Fantasy’s core identity (and comes up a lot in XIV), and it provides a nice tie-in to 12, both being Ivalice games, so I thought it worked well.
The only difficult part is that there is no PC port of Tactics. I had to emulate it. Though I do know that there are iOS/Android ports of it which may work better for some.
For what it’s worth, Rebirth is an amazing game that I would honestly consider to be the gold star of anyone making a AAA experience today. If the goal is truly quality, I don’t think it’s feasible to try to make every game better than Rebirth given the breadth of content in it and its overall production quality.
Really what this announcement boils down to is that they won’t be making more games like Harvestella, Valkyrie Elysium, Diofield Chronicle, and Foamstars, and they aren’t keen on keeping things platform-exclusive anymore. And maybe they’ll also be a bit more mindful of the budgets of their AAA games like Rebirth instead of taking the “spared no expense” mindset like they have been, which could come at the cost of quality, but I hope that’s not the case.
It would have still been an issue because the root of the problem is that there are a lot of regions where PSN is not supported and you can’t make an account even if you wanted to. The game was being sold on Steam in those regions, and so in practice it would have been like saying:
Please note that in a future update we will take away your ability to play with no recourse unless Valve is willing to refund your purchase. Take it up with them.
The difference is that Helldivers 2 was already a released game; people had paid for a product which was going to be taken away from them. After all the controversy, Sony decided not to follow through with that plan and let people keep what they already had.
This is still scummy, but with Ghost of Tsushima, no one has received anything yet. People put in an order, the order was canceled, and money refunded, so in practical terms there is no loss…other than not being able to buy the game.
It may be possible to set your account to a different region and purchase anyways, but in my opinion, piracy is absolutely justified in this case when the vendor literally refuses to make a product available to you. If there’s no legal option for obtaining it, then there’s no harm in pirating it.
If anything, Nintendo is likely the company about to make lightning strike twice with the Switch successor due to be announced this year. Will be interesting to see what it’s like, but no matter the case, it is going to sell like hotcakes.
I am just saying, if the concern is about putting your email on another service, then don’t put your email. You can use a throwaway one if you just want to get through it and play, or if it’s a matter of principle and you don’t want to, that’s cool too.
Just offering my 2 cents on keeping personal information safe on the web. It’s often unsafe to put all your eggs in one basket and email is no exception, so having some “burner accounts” on hand can help.
Could just make a throwaway account with Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, what have you, then. No real/personally identifiable information attached.
Not saying I agree at all with what Sony is doing, but anyone who is concerned about their email/personal information getting leaked by something they didn’t want to sign up for, there are options to protect yourself.
FWIW, no need for it to be an attack vector if you just use one of those throwaway email services to sign up for a PSN account you’ll never use anywhere else.