People in the East don’t game the way that they used to. Home consoles are on the decline in Japan, and most gamers seem to prefer playing their games in more bite-sized chunks. There’s a good reason, you know, that every major game developer and publisher is making a big push to mobile. There are some mobile games in Japan that generate tens of thousands of dollars of revenue every single hour. Consider Dragon Quest, one of the biggest franchises in Japan for Square Enix: Dragon Quest Builders sold way more copies for the PS Vita than it did for the PS4. That may seem strange to us, but that’s the growing trend in the East, and it’s affecting the way publishers think about their future.
Final Fantasy XV director Hajime Tabata is acutely aware of this trend, and in an interview with Game Informer (via TehcnoBuffalo ) he wonders what this means for the Final Fantasy franchise as a whole. “If the Final Fantasy brand is on its demise in terms of its numbered mainline series in Japan,” Tabata says, “then I feel like it would also follow suit globally. The Japanese console game market is definitely getting smaller and that directly connects to the fact that the demand for consoles and console games are declining. At the same time that means a decline in the Final Fantasy IP.”
While that sounds rather grim, I really can’t imagine a world where a new Final Fantasy game on consoles wouldn’t make millions. Of course, if the opportunity cost is a couple hundred million dollars versus what you’d spend making a mobile game, which itself would generate millions in return, I can see how these publishers and their investors would see more sense in the latter. Only time will tell.