 Hey everyone, if you enjoyed today's video, I'd appreciate if you would subscribe to the channel. We're on our road to 133,000 subscribers to match 133 years of Nintendo, and then we're off to the races to 150K. Also, we have a giveaway going on right now for a replica Hylian Shield, some collector's editions, and some Switch OLEDs. All you need to do is head down to the pinned comment or in the description, click on the link to enter. And you know what, maybe tune in for Prime Gaming Fest beginning next week on June 8th at 8 AM. We'll have a link to that as well down in the description too, so you can set your notifications. All right, let's get into this video. And today we are talking about Final Fantasy 16. In particular, we're talking about this because of who posted about it. We're talking about Imran Khan. Imran Khan is a former senior editor from Game Informer. And I say a former because Game Informer, the online publication, essentially laid off all of their staff a bit ago. So he's been out of the game for a bit. And sort of, I think there's a free agent. He has a job somewhere else, but he does do a weekly everything at once newsletter over on his Patreon that you can go subscribe to. And he does release the post publicly, so you don't have to pay to read it, but he obviously appreciates the support. So I will have a link to that post down below. Now in this post he put in there some interesting notes about Final Fantasy 16 and even Final Fantasy 7 that is getting a new entry soon. So here is what he had to say towards the end of his post. And this is notable. Imran Khan does have inside sources. He was one of the first people in the world to break the story at everybody's one to switch over a year ago, which was recently announced and confirmed by Nintendo. The guy's connected. He knows what he's talking about and he's generally a good dude. So let's read what he said about Final Fantasy 7 rebirth nailing down release date. This is what he calls a section. And what may be one of the oddest Q&A style updates on a game I've seen from a major publisher in some time, Square Enix tweeted today with a reminder that Final Fantasy 7 rebirth development is still progressing and they're working on committing to a release date likely still within the initial window of winter. I bring this up because I had heard recently that Square Enix is panicking slightly over Final Fantasy 16 pre-orders which are tracking behind Final Fantasy 15 even when accounting for the lesser number of launching platforms. Granted, those are pre-order numbers and they're usually only useful to gauge guaranteed day one sales versus potential day one sales. So the actual number could be blow everyone away. But with the current tracking, I wonder if they want to remind people that the next chapter of Final Fantasy 7's remake trilogy does exist and give it more marketing time than they had planned. The initial sales of the remake were quite good but it slowed down fast. Then Square Enix seemed to expect so I imagine they really want rebirth to sell as well as possible. Well, of course they do, but I imagine that they're really, really hoping for an uptick in sales. Now to put this in perspective, I wanted to look up sales figures of prior games. Final Fantasy 15, the last reported figures of Final Fantasy 15 was it crossed 10 million in sales last year. Maybe it's crawled up to 11 million at this point but it's right in that range and its sales have basically stopped. Final Fantasy 7 remake, the original release sold a little over nine million so not quite as well as Final Fantasy 15. And here's the thing, both of those platforms had explosive sales for those games at launch and then really, really tapered off pretty quickly. It wasn't an evergreen title as it were, right? They didn't see the long trail of sales that say Nintendo games typically get. And so even with price drops and throwing it on PlayStation Plus and other stuff like that, they still weren't really able to boost those numbers as much as they had hoped. Now Final Fantasy hasn't always sold, you know, 10, 15, 20 million units. You know, their online platforms like Final Fantasy X and X2, when you combine those sales together that's 21 million but again, that's two separate entries being added together. The Final Fantasy Online stuff has done in particularly pretty well. Final Fantasy 14 in particular, their online Final Fantasy game that's still active to this day has 24 million people who have purchased that. So that is their, by large, their largest Final Fantasy game they've ever released. But in general, Final Fantasy seems to always sit right in around the 10 to 12 million mark. I'll give you an example, Final Fantasy 12 and this is just the original version of it, sits right around 11 million units. So that's across all platforms, including the Nintendo Switch release. So yeah, when you're looking at the total sales of Final Fantasy, it does really sit between that 10 to 12 million mark. Generally, seeing Final Fantasy 7 remake after all the time and the hype and everything behind it, seeing that only sell nine million was probably a letdown in some regards because when you look at the original sales of Final Fantasy 7, back in the day, it sold, well, over 12 million. This is before the HD remasters. So we're just looking at like PSP, PC, PlayStation 1, over 11 million copies sold and then this remake was only able to hit nine. So you can see why they might be a little disappointed. And now with Final Fantasy 16, presently, and this includes digital and physical, tracking behind Final Fantasy 15 and not, you know, they adjusted the numbers, right? Like it's releasing on less platforms at launch anyways, right, it's PlayStation 5 exclusive. So I understand, of course, that they had to adjust their expectations, but even after adjusting the expectations for having a more limited platform release, it's still underperforming and they are kind of panicking. And now you're seeing, you know, these tweets firing up about Final Fantasy 7 out of nowhere, even though there's no release date, Final Fantasy 16 is around the corner, but they want to talk about Final Fantasy 17 because they think the hype is bigger for Final Fantasy 7 over Final Fantasy 16. I think it's in 17, sorry about that. So as an example, developer comment one, the question was how is development progressing on Final Fantasy 7 rebirth? And the answer was development is progressing smoothly and according to the plan, we're working to nail down a release date for the game. And this came from the producer of the game, Yoshinori Kitase, and then they released another one today. Same Final Fantasy 7 rebirth development comment number two. And by the way, comment number seven lands on the game award day. People note seven Final Fantasy 7, you know, maybe the game award, sorry, summer game fest. So maybe there could be, this game could get shown off there possibly. It says, how will players journey through the world outside of Midgar in Final Fantasy 7 rebirth? And the answer was players will be able to journey across the wide and multifaceted world with a high degree of freedom, experience of the mirror, you got different stories along the way, pretty much a non-answer. And they came from the director, Naoki Hamaguchi. So they're not even really giving us any concrete information when answering these questions. What they're trying to do is put Final Fantasy 7 rebirth fresh in people's minds, hoping that possibly knowing that's coming, it could boost interest in Final Fantasy 16. At least that seems to be what Imran Khan is suggesting over on his little newsletter on Patreon. So it's a very interesting perspective when looking at the future of Final Fantasy and potentially, you know, maybe, I'm just throwing this out there. I wonder if Square Enix is possibly regretting the exclusivity partnership with PlayStation. I'm just, I'm throwing that out there. They're disappointed in the sales. They were disappointed at how Final Fantasy 7 fell off. If they're disappointed in how the pre-orders are going for this, I wonder if that's making Square Enix rethink internally whether or not they should be doing exclusivity deals with Final Fantasy for PlayStation. PlayStation really wanted this game blocked on Xbox. And while Xbox isn't going to, let's say, add another 8 million in sales or something like that, realistically it could add a couple million and that could make a big difference in their forecast. And this is a game that Square Enix has a massive budget behind. Now, even imagine on top of this, they were able to get this out day one on Nintendo's next platform. Who knows the amount of increased sales you can get there because we obviously have a Final Fantasy audience on Nintendo platforms. Look at all the Square Enix RPGs and how well, look at RPGs in general and how well they perform on Switch. Having Final Fantasy on a Nintendo platform could also do really well, a newer one. So I'm not saying that they would be able to get this game running on Switch or anything. But what I'm just pointing out is I wonder if this is going to affect the future relationship of Square Enix and PlayStation. Time will tell, of course. Maybe it means nothing because they got the payday from Sony anyways and the bottom line is probably the dollars. But maybe it will. Obviously we'll have to see how well Final Fantasy 16 sells, how well Final Fantasy 7 rebirth sells. Those are the two games Sony has paid for, upcoming here to be platform exclusive or at least console exclusive to PlayStation 5. So we'll see what happens. But for right now, guys, all I know is I am excited for Final Fantasy 16. It just feels like everything we've seen so far for the game just sort of feels like we're playing Final Fantasy 15 again. And that's not a bad thing because Final Fantasy 15 is a good game. But I also wonder if there's some fatigue coming in over the style in which they're making Final Fantasy games. Yeah, obviously insane visuals. But maybe even the combat systems and other things, maybe people are ready for something fresher. Maybe Final Fantasy needs its breath of the wild moment where it just does something crazy out of the box that's so fundamentally different from what Final Fantasy's ever been. Or maybe they have to go back to the roots and do a more term-based combat system. I have no clue, but all I know is they're obviously worried about the dwindling interest in Final Fantasy. And I can understand because it is literally Square Enix's premier franchise. They view this as their most important IP. Even though you can argue that Dragon Quest might be a bigger deal, I mean, Dragon Quest XI, I know, sold utterly fantastic and outsold the prior Final Fantasy games. So anyways, let me know what you guys think about this stuff down in the comments below. Did you enjoy this story? A fresh look at something happening outside of Nintendo? Let me know and I, you know, if the reception's really positive with this, we'll just keep bringing out more videos just like this to compliment our Nintendo news. Catch you guys in the next video.