Sony’s PlayStation 5 announcement included plenty of games that helped to further guarantee them all of the support they needed from their already dedicated fanbase. Huge titles like Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart, Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales, Horizon Forbidden West and the long-awaited Demon’s Souls remake have injected hype into the gaming world during a time when it matters most.
Sony’s dominance over exclusive content isn’t anything new, of course, as the PlayStation 4 was home to a massive collection of first-party exclusives and tons of timed exclusivity for major third-party games and DLC. But the company is not willing to rest on their laurels and seems intent to tighten their grip even further as we approach the next generation of hardware. In perhaps their most substantial move in a while, they recently secured Spider-Man as a PS5-exclusive character in Crystal Dynamics’ upcoming Marvel’s Avengers, leaving Xbox without any exclusive content of their own for the highly-anticipated title.
Now, if reliable leaker Navtra is to be believed, Sony may even have landed timed exclusivity for an unannounced project in one of gaming’s most successful franchises ever. In a recent post on ResetEra, Navtra claims that Final Fantasy XVI was expected to be shown alongside the PS5 announcement and that it would carry with it some kind of PS5 exclusivity, though it appears that specifics are still undetermined at this time.
XVI is real. It was supposed to get announced in June’s event. It’s supposedly closer than most people would think. It has some kind of PS5 exclusivity (it was vague back then but it seems to be full timed exclusivity now). And I have no idea why they haven’t announced it yet.
Navtra successfully predicted multiple games that would show up at the PS5 reveal and the aforementioned Spider-Man exclusivity for Marvel’s Avengers, so that certainly adds some credibility to this rumor. Besides, this year’s wildly-successful Final Fantasy VII Remake is already a timed exclusive for the PS4 until March 2021, and the franchise has a long history with Sony platforms, so it’s not a stretch to assume that Final Fantasy XVI may be PS5 exclusive for an undefined period of time as well.