‘Final Fantasy XV’s’ 10 Year Development Pays Off, Literally?

"Final Fantasy XV" has been tagged as the fastest-selling installment in the series. The newest installment to the series shipped a good deal of copies despite all the challenges the development team encountered before the big release.

Three days after its release, the game already shipped half of the studio's goal which is 10 million copies and still counting. The newest installment of the series may surpass Final Fantasy VII's 11 million sales across all platforms. "Final Fantasy XV" director Hajime Tabata stated earlier this year that the long-awaited RPG needed to sell 10 million copies for it to be a success which he later clarified that 10 million is the studio's ambitious outlook and that they have tasked themselves to reach that objective, "Final Fantasy XV" also broke the record for most first-day digital sales in Japan, according to GameSpot.

The development cost of the action-based Final Fantasy game is not cheap, it already costs Square Enix $65 million for the first 5 years of development, according to an article by DigitalTrends. "Final Fantasy XV's" shipment count does not interpret that all of those copies are already sold. It is the very first game of the series to have simultaneous global release which could also be the reason for the large shipment of copies.

"Final Fantasy XV" is one of Square Enix's biggest game of 2016, in 2017 however, "Final Fantasy VII" could be the studio's biggest entry. The remake of Square's best seller for the original PlayStation console is highly anticipated and most likely to utilize "Final Fantasy XV's" battle system.

According to Glixel, "Final Fantasy" creator, Hironobu Sakaguchi, believes remakes are difficult. "Look at Star Wars. George Lucas added new CGI to the original and people still prefer to watch the originals rather than the remake. Not to say it's a bad thing. I just think it's difficult."