From layoffs and a delay to Destiny 2’s The Final Shape to a new Marathon director and the rumored cancellation of Matter, Bungie is in a fair amount of turmoil these days. The developer delayed The Final Shape to allow more time for polish amid reports of pre-orders tracking below expectations.
Games like Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth aren’t sustainable, and the Sony layoffs prove it
29.02.2024 - 19:29 / polygon.com / Sony
This week sees the release of Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth as a PlayStation 5 exclusive. It’s a lavish but bloated release that expands the middle section of a 27-year-old role-playing game into a giant open-world adventure in its own right, complete with minigames for every conceivable activity from parade-marching to mushroom-picking.
Also this week: Sony’s PlayStation business announced plans to lay off 900 people, or 8% of its workforce, despite strong sales of PS5 and record revenue during its last quarter. Included in the cuts are layoffs at three of Sony’s most successful studios: Naughty Dog, Insomniac Games, and Guerrilla Games.
There’s no direct connection between these two events, beyond the fact that Sony will have partly bankrolled Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth in order to secure its exclusivity to PS5 for a while. Rebirth is developed and published by Square Enix, which has yet to announce layoffs on the scale of Sony, or Microsoft, or Epic, or any of the dozens of other video game companies caught up in an industry-wide crisis. Hopefully its workers can avoid that fate.
However, Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth is emblematic of a kind of game that the industry has leaned on particularly heavily over the past decade or so, particularly in the console gaming space — and the Sony layoffs are another sign that this breed of “AAA” mega-game is no longer sustainable.
As budgets have swollen, the big publishers’ tolerance for risk has lowered, which has resulted in them pushing all their chips onto supposedly safe bets: big games in the biggest franchises, stuffed with features and homogenized in design in an attempt to get them to appeal to the broadest possible audience.
Rebirth is a particularly striking example of the modern AAA game because it has such a clearly split personality. On the one hand, it’s a quirky, characterful, and dramatic RPG, with a propulsive narrative driven by nostalgia for the original game. It leans hard into fan service and has a very specific, very Final Fantasy flavor. On the other hand, it pads out its enormous running time with many generic design elements — open-world exploration, side questing, collectibles, card games — that seem to have little to do with its core identity, and that push it closer to other big, mainstream successes such as The Witcher 3 or The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild.
For games like this, it seems, size is everything. They are the embodiment of the maxim “too big to fail,” writ large in video game design. Rebirth could have been a streamlined, 40-hour action-RPG focused on delivering its big story beats instead of a 100-hour everything-game, but that would not have met the expectations of its audience — or so publishers like Square Enix believe.
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