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Final Fantasy 16 sales did not meet high expectations, says Square Enix president
(www.eurogamer.net)
this post was submitted on 07 Aug 2023
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It's Square, they wouldn't of been happy unless it sold as much as Tear of The Kingdom
Final Fantasy in it's heyday outsold Zelda by a lot
The PS1 also sold the N64 3:1, But FF7, the highest selling FF game, only sold about 9m to OoT’s 7m. Relative to console sales, oot thrashed final fantasy 7. Of course, it helps that they cranked these games out way faster than Zelda back then.
The current situation is similar, except the switch is wildly more prevalent than the PS5. There is almost 1 TotK sold for every 6 switch units, which is utterly insane when you consider how many ignored/lost/broken units are probably out there. By contrast, there is about 1 FF16 for every 10 PS5 units out there.
These are the numbers I found for 5th and 6th gen games:
FFVII: 10.0
FFVIII: 8.6
FFX: 8.5
Ocarina of Time: 7.60
Wind Waker: 6.79
Majora's Mask: 6.82
FFIX: 5.5
FFX-2: 5.4
Oracle of Seasons & Oracle of Ages: 3.99
Minish Cap: 1.76
So maybe "a lot" is an overstatement, but they did generally sell more. You have a point regarding sales-per-console, but also remember PS1 had over 1900 games to N64s 388. That's way more competition for third party FF games to get sales. Many people that buy Sony consoles don't even look twice at JRPGs, whereas most people that buy Nintendo consoles know day one they are going to get the latest Mario and Zelda.