Final Fantasy 16 will be exclusive to PS5 for six months after its expected summer release.
That's according to a new advertisement from the official PlayStation Twitter account. Final Fantasy 16 makes a brief appearance (around the halfway mark) with an important disclaimer: "Final Fantasy 16 anticipated summer 2023. PS5 exclusive for six months."
Enter new worlds and immerse your senses with stunning visuals, 3D Audio, haptic feedback, and adaptive triggers from the DualSense Wireless Controller on the PS5 pic.twitter.com/FIuqGjDZy4November 7, 2022
The JRPG's target summer release date has been known for some time, and we also knew it would be a timed PlayStation exclusive, but this is the first we've heard of the duration of that exclusivity.
Summer starts in late June and ends in late September, so with six months added on, Final Fantasy 16 probably won't be playable on anything besides PS5 until 2024, and even that is optimistically assuming it comes to PS5 right at the beginning of the season and comes to other platforms as soon as the deal is up.
In any case, Final Fantasy 16's six-month exclusivity window looks to be a fraction of the delay seen with Final Fantasy 7 Remake, which was PS4-locked for over a year and a half leading up to its December 2021 PC release.
Incidentally, another timed exclusive deal is reiterated in the same advertisement: Forspoken, Square Enix's magic-infused action RPG, will be a PS5 exclusive until January 23, 2025 – a full two-year lock from Sony.
Final Fantasy 16 is apparently 95% complete, and a demo is in the works. In a recent interview, director Hiroshi Takai explained that the game earned the mainline series' first M rating because "we decided that we wouldn't tell a juvenile story."
Final Fantasy 16 producer Naoki Yoshida sparked controversy with recent comments explaining why the cast of the pseudo-historical game lacks ethnic diversity.
