As the world teeters on the brink of annihilation, the final battle against Sephiroth begins.A meteor mars the sky, monstrous planetary guardians wreak havoc...
3-4 million less sales according to resetera. Losing 30% of your customers in the mid-point of the story is rough.
Final Fantasy VII Remake and Intergrade have sold 8.7 million units as of March 2025, according to Eurogamer. With the Switch 2 and Xbox ports, I won’t be surprised if it is between 9 to 9.5 million units at the moment.
Final Fantasy VII Rebirth has sold 4 million units on the PS5, based on what we heard from Alex Donaldson back in August 2024, and anywhere from 700k- 1 million units on Steam, according to Steamdb, but take these numbers with a grain of salt. It could be anywhere from 5-6 million units, but we can’t know for sure until we get numbers from Square Enix.
I’m sure the third one will also have ridiculously inflated review scores.
Yes, Rebirth required a hardware upgrade to play, which is going to lose a lot of players compared to the install base of the PS4 in 2020. There are also the folks waiting for the trilogy to finish before picking up either the entire set or the one in the middle they hadn’t played yet. And anecdotally, though I haven’t seen this stat tracked yet, if you make me wait over a year for exclusivity to run out before you port it to my platform, I’m not playing it the first day it’s available; they trained me to wait already, so I may as well wait for a deep sale. I still haven’t purchased or played Rebirth, but I plan to during this upcoming summer sale, and I’m replaying Remake now ahead of that.
Review scores are just someone’s opinion, and they’re only “inflated” when it’s not an opinion you share.
Yep that’s exactly it for me. I played Remake on PS5 but the wait between Remake and Rebirth was really long, and I don’t even have a PS5 anymore so it was even longer. By the time Rebirth came out on PC/Switch 2 I was just like eh never mind, I’ll wait for the whole trilogy now.
Review scores reflect the production quality of a game more than the actual quality of the game design. That’s why every piece of crap game from a AAA publisher gets a 7 or 8 out of 10 but a masterpiece can get a similar score just because they don’t look as fancy.
One of this year’s best-rated games is a 2D game that looks like it was made for the Game Boy Color, and last year’s Call of Duty got a 65 on OpenCritic. Perhaps critics like Remake and Rebirth for the ways they subverted the idea of remaking a classic while still integrating a classic combat system into a modern one, as that’s what their words would seem to indicate. The reality is that what you might consider a masterpiece is going to be grating for someone else, and that’s going to bring down its average review score.
I suppose a big part of it is: People don’t often finish games. Remake is obviously a very long JRPG on its own, so when Rebirth came out, maybe a lot of people thought “Oh yeah! I should finish Remake.” and then didn’t.
That does present an interesting idea to me though. Maybe I’ll just buy Revalations without playing Remake? I played the original - I already know the broad direction the story has gone. I could maybe just watch some cutscenes on YouTube to figure out whatever the hell they twisted the Temple of the Ancients story beat into.
The game are not long. The games have serious pacing issues because they’re artificially stretching a well paced classic well beyond what the story can support.
People didn’t finish it b cause they were bored to tears.
Their sales recovered once they left PlayStation, so now that there’s a simultaneous launch, the smart money is on it doing phenomenally well.
3-4 million less sales according to resetera. Losing 30% of your customers in the mid-point of the story is rough.
Final Fantasy VII Remake and Intergrade have sold 8.7 million units as of March 2025, according to Eurogamer. With the Switch 2 and Xbox ports, I won’t be surprised if it is between 9 to 9.5 million units at the moment.
Final Fantasy VII Rebirth has sold 4 million units on the PS5, based on what we heard from Alex Donaldson back in August 2024, and anywhere from 700k- 1 million units on Steam, according to Steamdb, but take these numbers with a grain of salt. It could be anywhere from 5-6 million units, but we can’t know for sure until we get numbers from Square Enix.
I’m sure the third one will also have ridiculously inflated review scores.
Yes, Rebirth required a hardware upgrade to play, which is going to lose a lot of players compared to the install base of the PS4 in 2020. There are also the folks waiting for the trilogy to finish before picking up either the entire set or the one in the middle they hadn’t played yet. And anecdotally, though I haven’t seen this stat tracked yet, if you make me wait over a year for exclusivity to run out before you port it to my platform, I’m not playing it the first day it’s available; they trained me to wait already, so I may as well wait for a deep sale. I still haven’t purchased or played Rebirth, but I plan to during this upcoming summer sale, and I’m replaying Remake now ahead of that.
Review scores are just someone’s opinion, and they’re only “inflated” when it’s not an opinion you share.
Yep that’s exactly it for me. I played Remake on PS5 but the wait between Remake and Rebirth was really long, and I don’t even have a PS5 anymore so it was even longer. By the time Rebirth came out on PC/Switch 2 I was just like eh never mind, I’ll wait for the whole trilogy now.
Review scores reflect the production quality of a game more than the actual quality of the game design. That’s why every piece of crap game from a AAA publisher gets a 7 or 8 out of 10 but a masterpiece can get a similar score just because they don’t look as fancy.
One of this year’s best-rated games is a 2D game that looks like it was made for the Game Boy Color, and last year’s Call of Duty got a 65 on OpenCritic. Perhaps critics like Remake and Rebirth for the ways they subverted the idea of remaking a classic while still integrating a classic combat system into a modern one, as that’s what their words would seem to indicate. The reality is that what you might consider a masterpiece is going to be grating for someone else, and that’s going to bring down its average review score.
You’re just picking out notable exceptions. The vast majority of the 70-90% games are truly forgettable and forgotten a month after release.
I suppose a big part of it is: People don’t often finish games. Remake is obviously a very long JRPG on its own, so when Rebirth came out, maybe a lot of people thought “Oh yeah! I should finish Remake.” and then didn’t.
That does present an interesting idea to me though. Maybe I’ll just buy Revalations without playing Remake? I played the original - I already know the broad direction the story has gone. I could maybe just watch some cutscenes on YouTube to figure out whatever the hell they twisted the Temple of the Ancients story beat into.
The game are not long. The games have serious pacing issues because they’re artificially stretching a well paced classic well beyond what the story can support.
People didn’t finish it b cause they were bored to tears.