If you’re paying attention to news around the gaming industry and console wars, you know that exclusivity is a hot topic. Each console maker wants to lockdown some specific game or games to its own hardware to drive gamers to buy its systems. Even just a small window of time where one system gets to brag about having a game to itself seems to be pretty valuable. Which leads us to Sony and Final Fantasy XVI.
Two things have been known about Final Fantasy XVI for a while now. We knew it would launch with some sort of timed exclusivity and we knew it was coming to the PC at some point. Now Sony has finally confirmed at least some news around the timed exclusivity portion of Final Fantasy XVI. In an ad for the PS5 DualSense Wireless Controller, Sony confirms that Final Fantasy XVI will be a 6 month exclusive. The game is shown briefly in the ad and a message is shown at the bottom that reads, “Final Fantasy XVI anticipated Summer 2023. PS5 exclusive for six months.”
It’s great to finally have some more concrete information on this exclusivity but there are still a lot of blanks left to fill in. The biggest one is the question of whether the game will launch on PS5 and PC at the same time or is the six month exclusivity tied only to the PC version? Will the game be making its way to the Xbox like the Crisis Core remake or will it stay only on PS5 and PC like Final Fantasy VII Remake? Hopefully gamers will get more information about that soon. Square Enix has said that Final Fantasy XVI is 95% done and that it would reveal a release date by the end of the year. Maybe that announcement will clear up the exclusivity questions as well.
Image from: Square Enix
