Which is just the 7 remake. 3 parts of the same game with such wide time frames between each release that we might be probably seeing one episode per generation.
The Final Fantasy franchise in general is seeing its way on XBOX.
Microsoft acquired Activision Blizzard King for $69 Billion on 2023-10-13
- Thread starter Rangers
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The Final Fantasy franchise in general is seeing its way on XBOX.
A better opportunity instead of forced exclusions to be service inclusions, such as offering the game as part of the numerous PS+ subscription tiers instead of being paid to keep it off another platform.
D
Deleted member 11852
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Sure, now is there a legally binding contract that allows them unfettered and unrestricted freedom? Or is it just assurances and Sony can change their mind at any time?
No mitigations or obligations were reported when the FTC approved Sony's acquisition of Bungie. If Bungie's senior management team had any concerns about autonomy they could have, as part of the sale negotiation, insist that Sony provide guarantees of autonomy in their employee contracts for X years.
That would not stop Sony changing their minds, but it would mean an expensive and disruptive senior management exodus from Bungie if they did.
FTC has to file an injunction to stop the close of the deal as once the deal has closed the FTC has no remedies. Usually the FTC gets 30 days to review, can extend 30 days by request and is required to file injunction if it wants any additional time after that.
Agreed. The FTC chair is fundamentally opposed to how platforms like consoles, streaming media and others operate. She published a paper on how platforms shouldn’t be allowed to compete with businesses that depend on those platforms.
She is practically opposed to the ideal of Sony, MS and Nintendo being both game publishers and platforms owners. So it easy to see why MS was targeted.
However, she basically picked the wrong market and business to go after. As consoles have been around for 50 years. Prices increases across the space has been relatively tame. Game price increases align with inflation. Console hardware prices has jumped by leaps and bounds but still align with inflation and are loss leaders. MS has the least market share of all the console platforms.
Any assertion that MS buying Act can lead to predatory practices are just that. Assertions. It requires a huge leap for MS to go from its current position to a dominant force that preys on gamers. It would take way more than just buying Act to create that reality.
If MS gives up on the deal it will be more due to the current economic conditions than how sound of an argument that the FTC is making. MS could pay a 30% premium over the today’s stock price of EA, T2 and UbiSoft and buy all three for the same price it’s paying for Activision.
Silent_Buddha
Legend
It's the difference between an assurance/agreement and a legally binding agreement. The former means that the party making the assurances don't actually have to follow through. The latter means that they do actually have to legally follow through otherwise there are penalties (stipulated in the signed contract) associated with breaking the agreement.
We know of no such binding agreement between Sony or Bungie. There might be one, there might not be one. And even if there is one, we don't know if it's for a certain limited period of time or if it's in perpetuity.
It is as much speculation to assert that Sony will follow through on them allowing Bungie to remain independent and release on any platforms that they want as it is to assert that Sony won't follow through on allowing Bungie to remain independent and release on any platforms that they want.
I'm not saying they will or they won't.
And even if there is no legally binding agreement for something like that, it doesn't mean they won't so like Microsoft did with Mojang and release on multiple platforms (including competitors) anyway. Only the future will tell whether Sony is as interested as Microsoft is about releasing some games on competitors platforms.
Regards,
SB
Silent_Buddha
Legend
It's not the only Final Fantasy game or the biggest one. Square-Enix are currently contractually unable to release the largest Final Fantasy game, FFXIV, on Xbox specifically. They would need Sony to give them permission to release it on Xbox.
Regards,
SB
You are making a lot of assumptions and create stories both about Bungie's "binding" agreements and FF14's contractual inability to release.
As for why FF14 isnt on XBOX here is the status for FF14:
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Final Fantasy 14 is still coming to Xbox at some point, Phil Spencer promises
Xbox head Phil Spencer was recently reminded that he said Final Fantasy 14 should be coming to Xbox, and that's apparently still the plan.
www.vg247.com
The problem lies with MS. Stop blaming Sony for MS's failures all the time and trying to create stories where the evil Sony is larking at every corner. It has become a caricature.
There is no contractual obligation with Sony that prevents the game from coming to XBOX. Stop creating fake scenarios all the time. When will it end?
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Silent_Buddha
Legend
You are making a lot of assumptions and create stories both about Bungie's "binding" agreements and FF14's contractual inability to release.
As for why FF14 isnt on XBOX here is the status for FF14:
Final Fantasy 14 is still coming to Xbox at some point, Phil Spencer promises
Xbox head Phil Spencer was recently reminded that he said Final Fantasy 14 should be coming to Xbox, and that's apparently still the plan.
The problem lies with MS. Stop blaming Sony for MS's failures all the time and trying to create stories where the evil Sony is larking at every corner. It has become a caricature.
There is no contractual obligation with Sony that prevents the game from coming to XBOX. Stop creating fake scenarios all the time. When will it end?
And that's all happening because Sony must have released them from that requirement. Back around 2013/2014 in an interview in Japan for one of the print gaming mags., Yoshi-P said that they could not contractually release FFXIV on Xbox 360 when explaining why it was only appearing on PlayStation 3.
Good luck finding that on the internet, however, as most Japanese gaming print mags didn't have an internet presence back then.
Regards,
SB
Pretty much pointless and irrelevant argument (if not lost in translation) when all these many years MS regulations are keeping it off to begin with according to both MS and SE.
SE was preparing it for the 360....The 360....not the One.....and according to Yoshi it was MS 's regulations that kept if off since then. We are on a third generation and still not resolved.
So give it up. There is no argument. The onus is on MS. Again.
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D
Deleted member 11852
Guest
Is that 'better' from Sony's perspective in terms of marketing - which I presume is their goal. I also assume that part of the appeal of these deals if that for a developer, having to work on less platforms saves quite a bit of effort so being compensated for lost sales on a platform you're not even having to work on is a double-win.
I believe that is where SB was coming from but he can speak for himself.
Given Sony's financial statements and Phil Spencer statement on GamePass profitability being 10-15%, more games in these services and more people using these services, looks nothing more like a significant erosion of profits, and not marginally either. 10-15% for GamePass versus 50-70% for conventional sales is huge and Phil Spencer was clear that there was no prospect of GamePass ever closing that gap.
How are gaming divisions running on razor-thin profits good for gaming, particularly when Xbox hardware sales are losses too?
I think in this particular industry the boom bust is much too large, or winner takes all if you prefer to look at it that way. A small fraction of the games out there make up the majority of the profits for platform holders for that year. If 20% of your game catalog make up 80% of your profits, then these remaining 80% of games that collectively make up 20% of your profit anyway, what difference does it make if its on gamepass making 10-15% monthly as a conglomerate, or just contributing one time to that 20% of remaining profit for being part of the 'other part of the catalog' for the year. If they work out the same, then you spread the losses and gains there, and the income becomes normalized to monthly which is significantly easier for planning than pouring money into big hits and falling flat. We've seen now, a lot of innovative games show up on gamepass, and I think this is largely because its easier to fund these types of games that make up the 'other games' category, knowing well in advance, what the combined profit will be like for these folks that want to taste a lot of things: 10-15% profit as a group. Which is better than 10-15% through individualism, in which experimentation is largely not encouraged due to costs, failure and general lack of support and a lack of the market really being there to be profitable to chase.
I think it likely works out closer than we think at least for xbox. We have a pretty good idea of who the big earners are.
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Isn't that what we already have without this deal though? If gamers don't want to buy PS, they can buy XB. It's a perfectly valid, supported platform that gets 95% of all the games, same as PS gets 95% of all the games. I don't see a platform that's struggling and soon to die if MS can't buy one of the largest publishers.
In the bigger picture, MS is many times larger than Sony. Does it make sense to make MS even bigger by them taking a larger share of the gaming market and to make Sony smaller? The impact on Sony overall will be far more significant than the gains MS would get. I mean, MS might gain 1% by increasing its game market share to 50% where Sony would lose 10%, or whatever the numbers are.
D
Deleted member 11852
Guest
That would definitely be a problem, but when has that ever happened? Looking at the sales numbers for critically-successful games and their rate of release paints a different picture.
What bothers me about GamePass - as a Series X owner and GamePass subscriber - is that Microsoft want to get more people in the ecosystem. The more people getting hundreds/thousands of games for around $60-120/year (depending how canny you are in grabbing deals and codes), compared to the usually juicy sales profits. Right now Microsoft are releasing very few AAA games, but assume next year I will play Starfield, Redfall and Forza, but I'm not paying $210 ($70 a piece), I'm paying about third for these games access to hundreds of other titles, every game played a 30% real cut loss from Microsoft. How do the economics work?
On one hand, Microsoft are saying game development is expensive and they need to raise the prices of our games ($70) but on the flip side it looks like their head is in the sand about the wider economics. If you provide cheap access to games that people would otherwise buy, you're leaving piles of money on the table. And Microsoft's goal is to put more and more first party AA and AAA content into Game Pass on a regular basis with more people accessing games and paying Microsoft less money? It feels like a trajectory to financial failure.
Presumably as an encore Phil Spencer will go on stage at E3 2026 and set his dick on fire? The economics do not make sense now. With more people in Game Pass and even less people paying full price, the economics get worse. Gamers and developers love Game Pass, it's value for gamers and reduces risk for developers and publishers. The loser is Microsoft. Do we want Microsoft to lose? Nobody wants Microsoft to exit the industry.
Is that the truth ?
The new harry potter game comes out in March and the PS5 version gets extra content over the xbox and pc versions. So those people are paying the same price for less of a game. Is that really a good thing ?
MS invests a lot of money into making the xbox . IF xbox doesn't deliver on the profit side then they can simply exit the console market and instead just focus on xbox for pc and xcloud on other devices. There have been calls in the past by large share holders to exit the xbox business . Would it be a good thing for the market if a player exists the gaming market ? This year we had the first console since the jaguar to increase in price after launch.
As for the bigger picture well its hard to say. Sony is in multiple markets. Should be we be worried about how large Sony is in the music or anime markets to limit what they can do on the gaming side or vice versa ?
D
Deleted member 11852
Guest
No!!, people are buying the wrong console you fool!
It's not so cut and dry in my mind here. When something disruptive comes along, you need to get on it or fall behind and become irrelevant. MS was late to music, late to mobile phones, and late to tablets, etc. And they almost became irrelevant for it. When Satya took over, he made the big push into cloud which largely represents the major profits for MS today. I think we can look today at the market, like Facebook, and ask why they are investing so much into VR. It's because they've hit their peak, and they are about to die if they don't have something else to latch onto. Where is the future..? VR/AR/Wearable headsets. And they know this, because if VR/AR sets manage to shrink enough, it would replace the mobile phone.
Thus we've come sort of full circle as to why cloud gaming matters. It's the reason all these big tech companies are chasing it. If you can solve cloud gaming, you can solve a lot of other problems too, like the fact that mobile and AR devices need to continually shrink further and yet have more power and battery life. Well, the obvious solution is again, real time cloud processing beaming directly into these devices.
It's the only reason why Meta is investing so much into VR and why MS is investing so much into games, and we see Amazon moving into Luna, and Google getting involved. They are aiming to be present for that future but going about it in different ways.
But that costs money too, and it's a huge risk that can still result in failure. We've seen MS fall flat on its face many times here. It's not like MS can continually grow forever, all major products hit a saturation point, and the only way to stop from contracting, is to have a handhold in the next thing that comes after and grow into that, while the previous market contracts.
We've seen Apple cannibalize it's own products this way, and a famous quote from Steve Jobs is that you've got to, because if you don't, someone else will do it to you anyway, so you may as well be in control of that.
That's what is happening to Sony right now. They saw the future and bought Gaikai a long time ago, but didn't invest into this future, and MS came in and began cannibalizing themselves in preparation for the future. If Sony doesn't migrate to cloud, they will die. That's just reality and they know this, the purchase of Bungie was a signal of this, it is just a matter of time due to silicon limits, we cannot keep pushing the better graphics and power narrative, when eventually the watts/cm2 get too high for a mainstream home product, you've nowhere else to go. You are left with little to work with except perhaps even more specialized hardware accelerators. While there will always be a place for the high end, even those are getting overbearing, (looking at the 4090). The size of that graphics card just to cool it and it's still melting itself.
As far as I can see right now, Sony will not exit because they lose COD, they exit because they fail to migrate to cloud. They are doing their best to drag out this traditional gaming generation as long as humanly possible because they need more time to switch over, or, likely, they want as much time as possible to reap as much profit as possible before it's gone. Keeping MS from having these companies will delay change in the industry. Making marketing agreements to block gamepass delays changes in the industry.
It's all this is imo. We can really talk blue in the face of the arguments, but that's the high level trend I'm seeing playing out. You don't like cloud gaming that's really too bad. The future will be like Netflix moving to TVs and the removal of these streaming boxes. The future will be game pads and TVs accessing games through an app. The future will be VR/AR sets not tied to a massive PC, and being able to walk around with them freely being streamed in incredible lifelike graphics.
I'd disagree, if there were only 100 major releases each year, I think it would be fairly accurate to say 20 of those titles will make up 80% of the revenues, the reality is that, there are way more than 100 releases each year.
I'm talking about total share of the revenue for the game industry.
The majority of the profits each year are largely generated by the same F2P titles.
And sadly, F2P titles and the majority of those profits are largely made up of a small population of people who keep buying monthly.
When we look at the traditional gaming model: It's a big launch at maximum price point and then it goes quickly on sale and discounted over a short tail and then there are no more profits. The only company that doesn't really do this is Nintendo. So if you're going to look at maximizing the tail side of any game, having people subscribed to gamepass is likely going to net you a weaker launch but a much stronger long tail for these titles that failed to capitalized on the launch.
Sony and Nintendo first party titles are the only ones, and GTAV, Minecraft and a few others are the only ones that manage to keep selling long tails at profitable price points. Most other games die off very quickly. This is my general observation, and when I refer to Sony, I really am just referring to Spider Man. Even their other critically acclaimed titles do fall off rather fast but much longer than anything Xbox would produce.
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Link
So according to Microsoft, Gamepass injects more money into the gaming economy. I don't know if those numbers are actually correct, because we've also seen anecdotes that Gamepass has kneecapped the used game market for Xbox. So if a person's personal gaming budget was mostly on used games, the publishers and Microsoft get $0 from those transactions. With gamepass, they get a cut of the sub and apparently 20% more from sales.
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