Final Fantasy VII went to Sony because of storage arithmetic

Until 1996 Square was Nintendo's key role-playing partner: all six numbered Final Fantasy titles shipped on the Famicom and Super Famicom, along with Chrono Trigger and Secret of Mana. The studio's move to Sony is usually described as a falling-out. It is more useful to do the arithmetic.

Counting the medium

The Nintendo 64 shipped on cartridges. A typical cartridge of the era held four to eight megabytes; late ones reached sixty-four. A compact disc holds six hundred and fifty.

Final Fantasy VII shipped on three discs. That is roughly a gigabyte and a half, and almost all of it is pre-rendered video and backgrounds — precisely the visual approach the game existed for. Hironobu Sakaguchi estimated that in the 64DD format the game would have needed around thirty disks. No compression scheme was going to squeeze that into a cartridge.

Then the economics. A cartridge is a manufactured object: plastic, a board, a memory chip. It costs between ten and thirty dollars a unit, takes months to produce, must be ordered in a fixed run in advance, and the factory is Nintendo itself. A disc costs under a dollar, is pressed in weeks and can be repressed on demand. For a game with an unpredictable run, that is not a difference in margin but in whether the risk can be taken at all. Sakaguchi said it directly: on a cartridge, Final Fantasy VII would have had to sell above ten thousand yen, and the market would not have carried that price.

The choice of medium is a decision about who can afford to publish on your platform.

What followed

The Square and Sony partnership was announced in January 1996, a few months before the Nintendo 64 launched. Enix followed with Dragon Quest VII, and then much of Japanese publishing. Nintendo had chosen cartridges for clear reasons — instant loading with no disc seeks, and resistance to copying — and both reasons were real. The price was that an entire genre moved to the competitor.

The numbers landed like this: the Nintendo 64 sold around 33 million units, the PlayStation over a hundred. Final Fantasy VII has sold more than thirteen million copies and became the game through which Western audiences discovered Japanese role-playing games at all.

The plot repeats each generation in a new form. Blu-ray against DVD on the PlayStation 3, the removal of the drive in digital console editions, today's hundred-and-fifty-gigabyte builds that must be downloaded before launch. Each time the platform picks a medium for its own reasons, and the publisher works out whether its game fits and what a copy will cost. And each time somebody leaves for a place where it fits.