Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth, Final Fantasy 16 and Foamstars all sold less than expected, Square Enix president says

Three of Square Enix’s most high profile recent releases sold worse than expected, the company’s president has reportedly said.

According to Bloomberg’s Takashi Mochizuki, Square Enix president Takashi Kiryu told analysts that sales of Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth, Final Fantasy 16 and Foamstars all fell short of its expected revenue and profit.

As a result, the publisher expects to earn an operating income of ¥40 billion ($255 million) this financial year, instead of analyst estimates of ¥57 billion ($364 million).

Explaining in more detail in a post on X, Mochizuki reports that Kiryu said sales of all three games fell short of expectations. Final Fantasy 16’s sales were reportedly in line with expectations when it was released, but it couldn’t keep momentum and eventually failed to reach Square Enix’s total goal for the financial year.

Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth and Foamstars, meanwhile, failed to reach internal targets from day one.

Kiryu also reportedly said the publisher was confident Final Fantasy 16 would be able to achieve its goal over its 18-month plan, and that while Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth and Foamstars weren’t as much as expected, that didn’t mean they were bad.

All three underperforming games were PS5 console exclusives, and as such it could be argued that had they been released on Xbox Series X/S too Square Enix could have generated extra income from them.

The company now appears to be adopting that line of thinking – on Monday it published a new medium-term business plan, which includes making its AAA games multiplatform going forward.

The plan, which the publisher has dubbed ‘Square Enix Reboots and Awakens’, lays out a three-year strategy which it hopes will lead to “long-term growth”.

One of the four pillars of this plan, which involves “strengthening customer contact points”, will see the publisher “shift to a multiplatform strategy”.

The plan says Square Enix will “aggressively pursue a multiplatform strategy that includes Nintendo platforms, PlayStation, Xbox and PCs”.