Cognition Dissemination: Pixel Remaster Preorder Disaster

Square Enix confirmed during the Final Fantasy franchise’s 35th anniversary celebration that the Final Fantasy Pixel Remaster series, pixel-perfect remasters of the first six FF games, are coming to PlayStation 4 and Switch. The titles are finally leaving their prior homes on PC and mobile platforms. They also confirmed physical releases and limited editions for both platforms.

Merely providing that info is leaving out a lot, however, as the company is releasing them in the most Square Enix way possible, especially outside Japan and Asia. There are plenty of unhappy fans who wanted these but may not get them.

Square Enix decided they didn’t want to print too many copies, and is releasing the packages exclusively through their online store. The standard edition goes for a whopping $74.99, with a similarly-bulbous $23.99 shipping fee, pricing the package at around $100 when factoring in sales tax depending on the state. It’s also available in an expensive $259.99 Anniversary Edition, priced similarly to the Japanese equivalent despite the western versions lacking the Ultimania guide. But the priciness of the release didn’t matter after all the packages sold out after a couple of hours when the company made them available. Even better: The listings went live late on a Saturday night/early on a Sunday morning, hardly the opportune time for those who had other things to do with their lives.

This was all a fiasco, but an unsurprising one. From a certain perspective, it’s a pleasure that Square Enix is providing physical options at all, even while they’re goading and betting on most of the intended audience to buy them digitally.

Square Enix hasn’t been big fans of providing physical options for updated ports of their older titles. All the SaGa remasters in recent memory, for instance, have only been offered digitally. The same goes for other examples, like Chrono Cross: The Radical Dreamers Edition (a release they couldn’t be bothered to patch to fix any issues) and the Legend of Mana rerelease. This even goes for rereleases of other FF games, like Final Fantasy VIII Remastered (streamed in its entirety by our own Angela Moseley) and the rereleases of Final Fantasy VII and IX for current-generation platforms. The exceptions were the Final Fantasy X|X-2 HD Remaster and Final Fantasy XII: The Zodiac Age releases, though you’ll have a moderately difficult time finding them physically now.

By far the biggest exception was the Collection of Mana for Switch, which includes ports of the original Final Fantasy Adventure, and the Super Nintendo versions of Secret of Mana and Trials of Mana with its first official English localization. Heck, it can still be found new for close to its original $39.99 price three-and-a-half years after its release.

It’s logical to observe that example and wonder why Square Enix couldn’t have simply done the same with the Pixel Remaster collection. It would have been nice, but the answer for why they didn’t do so lies within that very Mana collection’s release method. The company wanted to provide something that would feel more valuable, and damn-well knew their fanbase would pay top dollar for packages available in such low quantities. Sure enough, their allocations for the expensive collections sold out, leaving plenty who wanted to get them with nothing.

Publishers also receive higher margins for digital purchases, so it’s no surprise that they’d rather have most of the audience purchase them from the PlayStation Store and eShop, just as they currently can from Steam, the App Store, and Google Play. For the same price, at that, considering the collection of all six titles on Steam goes for the same $74.99 price they were selling the physical collection for, albeit without the exorbitant shipping cost. Anyone who wants to buy the games separately will pay even more.

There’s still potential for the Japanese and Asian versions to receive standard releases of the collection to multiple stores, meaning the best hope now for English speakers who want physical copies is for an Asian version with English text options. There is much precedent for it, considering the Asian releases of the FFVII and VIII remasters and FFIX included English options, as well as other titles like the Legend of Mana remaster and the recent Romancing SaGa: Minstrel Song Remastered. If this option exists for the Pixel Remaster set, import retailers will know they’ll be in demand, so expect wild price mark-ups.

The best to expect from Square Enix’s western offices from now will be a statement acknowledging that they underestimated demand, perhaps admitting to making some mistakes. The result of this could be another small print run of the standard and limited editions, but “small” cannot be emphasized enough. Perhaps they’ll give an actual heads-up this time around before the preorders start. It’s clear they want most others to purchase them digitally, whether separately or in a digital collection priced identically to the physical one without the shipping charge. A general release of the collection was apparently too much to ask.

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