Final Fantasy 16 is a PlayStation 5 title and one of the bigger exclusives of the year. However, it wasn’t always set as a PS5-specific game, as a Final Fantasy 16 PS4 port was once planned.
A Final Fantasy 16 PS4 version would have taken too long
Producer Naoki Yoshida revealed this in an interview with Final Fantasy Union. Near the end of the interview, Yoshida, who previously explained the offers Sony gave Square Enix for exclusivity, noted that Final Fantasy 16 was a cross-generation title at first, but the team ditched the old hardware because it would take too much time to work with. This is similar to something he said in 2022.
“We originally had a plan to possibly release the game on the PlayStation 4,” said Yoshida. “During development, we realized that, in order to get it to a level that we were gonna be proud of, we would have needed at least one or two more years of development to do that. And so I had to make a decision at that time. It’s like, we don’t want to extend it that long. Let’s go PS5 only.”
The tide is starting to change with games like the Dead Space remake, Star Wars Jedi: Survivor, and Forspoken, which are all current-gen exclusives, but many publishers are still opting to put games out on both sets of systems. Even Sony’s last big exclusives like God of War Ragnarök and Horizon Forbidden West came out on the previous console. However, Sony is just starting to more fully move away from PS4, as Horizon’s Burning Shores DLC, Marvel’s Spider-Man 2, and Marvel’s Wolverine are all only on PS5.
