There’s been a lot of chatter about Final Fantasy lately, with Sony’s console exclusivity deals blamed for the franchise’s underperformance.
After a heavy marketing campaign mostly funded by PlayStation, the likeable Final Fantasy 16 sold approximately three million units within a week on PS5. This was considered an underperformance from series shepherd Square Enix, however, and after equally tepid sales of Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth, it confirmed that it’s “aggressively” transitioning to a multiformat strategy.
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(That, by the way, didn’t stop it from releasing Bravely Default Flying Fairy HD Remaster as a Nintendo Switch 2 exclusive earlier this month, but we digress.)
After a highly promoted PC port launched last year, Final Fantasy 16 debuted with a reasonable if unspectacular 27,508 peak concurrent players on Steam.
It’s worth repeating that concurrent players are not the equivalent of sales, and merely reflect the number of people playing at a specific time – although it’s the only data we have access to.
And during the Xbox Showcase last week, Square Enix shadow dropped an Xbox Series X|S port, amid much fanfare.
But the sales estimates leave a lot to be desired: fans noticed that the port was as low as 443 on the Xbox Most Played list, and Alinea Analytics has since followed-up, claiming that the title has sold just 22,000 copies on Microsoft’s console over the past week or so.
To be clear, we’re still yet to get confirmation of the consultancy firm’s methodology, but it promises “cutting edge” analytics and has been publishing some really fascinating data over the past few months. It’s probably roughly in the right ballpark.