Final Fantasy VII Remake Free On PS Plus

For those with a PS4 (or PS5) and a PlayStation Plus subscription, the "full" (yes.. we know it's not technically the full game yet) version of FFVII Remake is free to download.

In the UK, this would usually set you back £60. Unbelievable. I know what I'll be playing for the next week. Played the demo sometime last year, but aside from that, I have avoided everything else about it til it was reduced in price. So excited to finally get to play this, I am a huge fan of the original. It's what got me in to the series back when I was a kid.

This month on PlayStation Plus

Surprised this went free, if only I waited a year!

It was a tough wait, believe me lol. I was so close to caving in, and am glad I didn't.

Oh wow is it doing that bad? I blame SE for this travesty.

yeah, I would have actually considered keeping Plus if they shortened the window to 1-ish year old games instead of 2+.

It's to get people to buy the PS5 version when it comes out in June.

If we are to believe the numbers SE gave us, the title sold very well, beyond expectations.

For the joy of the admirers of this game and for the sadness of everybody else.

That's a bad sign.

I'm not sure I believe the 5 million sales numbers, after seeing how incredibly misleading they have been with FF14 "player" numbers.

Also they are in a situation where hey have to make these expansions now and each one is going to sell less than the last, the expansions maybe eat up all the profits from the original game if they sell poorly.

The way I see it, they know not everyone will have PS Plus, so SE will still make money from those who pay for it outright. Sony will give SE a great bonus for this deal, because it highly encourages new subscribers to PS Plus.

Think about it. PS Plus is £50 a year, which is less than the game itself. Subscribing gets the game for cheaper, and you also get access to a whole bunch of free games and the other perks for an entire year.

But the most important thing here is that when someone plays the first part of the game, they will want to play the second, third, and so on. I think it's smart of SE to do this, because it gets people playing the game who may never have done so.

I wasn't going to buy it til the price reduced by half, and I'm a huge FFVII fan. But there are some players who may never have bought it, or at least waited til all the parts were released til they parted money. By getting players in to the game, they boost sales for the subsequent parts, and discourages people like me waiting for price drops or til it's fully released.

a publicly traded company can't lie about sales numbers

They don't have to lie, they can just mislead though.

Shipped vs sold etc

It's been stated elsewhere but this version doesn't include a free upgrade to PS5, whereas the storebought version does. Also, sales were great for this game, especially for an exclusive.

I'm not buying the "this is a bad sign" angle. For a one-off game, sure, that might make sense. For the start of a series of games where the inital entry sold really well already? Nah, that's just a ploy to appeal to new customers and/or fence-sitters.

You can't compare the two.
For FFXIV it's easy to "cheat", and honestly SE hasn't done anything that Blizzard wasn't doing already. They don't talk about sold copies of the game but about a generic "number of players".
It's not active players though, but it's the overall amount of registered characters (or accounts? I forgot) since the beginning of the game. Of course that doesn't represent the real number of active players who are actually paying a monthly fee right now, but then again other MMO games do the same, so what did you expect SE to do?

So yeah, can't compare.
If you provide numbers of sold games it's harder to fake or cheat.
There can be discrepancy between distributed copies and sold copies, but those numbers are usually alligned.


FF7 has been liked by a lot of people, let's accept this. Just because some of us (tipically old players, boomers etc) didn't like what they did with FF7 doesn't mean the game didn't do well.
Because yeah, I'm sad to admit it, but I'm very confident the game performed very well in terms of sales and user satisfaction.

It's "sad" for me because given how I didn't like what they did with FF7, the fact that it sold well gives them motivation to continue with the project among the same lines of FF7R.
In this perspective it's no surprise that the Yuffie episode is perfectly alligned with that, instead of an attempt to steer the wheel in another direction.
So let's face it, FF7 will continue in that direction and those of us who didn't like it will just have to accept it, period.

All I care is they don't lose bunch of money on it like they did on Avengers. In my delusional mind, if they are doing well enough they might actually throw some money at this game for the 20th anniversary.

What Square do with FFXIV is they use misleading wording, they say "players" when they mean registered characters (one person can make mulitple free characters with one account). They also imply that characters made since the game first launched all still play the game because they never remove people that stopped playing from this ever growing nonsense number, they also never delete registered accounts so it will forever inflate this number.

So you will see things like 14 million players on FF14, second biggest MMO ever!*

Which is like saying "WOW! my cat ate 100 tins of cat food! MOST HUNGRY CAT EVER!" which is true.... It ate 100 tins since I first got it years ago, it didn't just eat 100 tins tho.

With FF7 Remake they can muddy the water by mixing up sold with shipped (and they are allowed to do this to investors), sold means a living human bought it. Shipped means boxes OR codes created and shipped to companies to sell.

This is like me crafting 10 stacks of Sushi and putting them all on the auction house and saying I sold 10 stacks, when only 4 sold so far and the rest are just sitting there and I'll need to repost them at a much lower price to get rid of them later on.

This is why something like their Tomb Raider game "sold" 3 million copies, they then said it sold way below expectations and 2 months later it was selling for 50% off. Aka it didn't "sell" 3 million copies, it "shipped" 3 million, and all those unsold copies had to hit the bargain basement bin fast.

The game journalists friendly to the company that pays for their advertising play along:

For instance:

https://www.gamespot.com/articles/final-fantasy-7-remake-sells-over-five-million-cop/1100-6480689/

^SOLD

As opposed to:

https://www.vgchartz.com/article/444799/final-fantasy-vii-remake-tops-5-million-units-shipped/

^SHIPPED

The total player count, calculated via trophy stats through November 2020, was 4,600,000.

The Last of Us Part 2 and Ghost of Tsushima (which I believe was the fastest selling PS4 exclusive ever), which are probably the best points of comparison, had 7,200,000 and 5,800,000 respectively as of the same timeframe. It's pretty safe to say that the game did well.

It was probably SE's highest selling single player game in...a long time. They didn't make it free on PS+ because it sold poorly. As much as I liked it, it wasn't even a GOTY contender last year. PS4 lifecycle is slowly winding down. With the lack of games on PS5, Sony is just keeping people invested.

the US retailers are pricing it around $30 (and it has been discounted to around this point in the past as well). depending how your region handles sale prices, I would expect it will follow suit - with a PS5 port set to come out in a couple of months, I think everyone selling the physical are going to deep discount to clear stock.

Thing I hate about the modern video game industry is so many of them are publicly traded. So it moves away from basic profits and moves into share price expectations.

It doesn't really matter if a game makes a profit as much as it does whether it performed as expected, under performed or over performed. Also based on the review scores, fan reception etc.

Keeping share holders happy is the top priority of a CEO, because if share holders start selling off shares due to bad news and that pushes the price down even more it opens the door for some other mega corporation like Tencent or whatever to mass buy shares and possibly take over the entire company by a hostile takeover.

Square are better off than a company like Blizzard, since most of the share holders seem to actually like the company. Blizzard is just pork bellies mk2, which is why they have to pander so hard to the share holders (and crap on the fanbase and employees) to keep them happy.

Can we just appreciate the arguments had years ago, where I told everyone they would remake FF7 for sure, and then people would say "no its impossible." I still think fondly on that.