Final Fantasy 16 will be ‘exclusive’ to PS5 for 6 months

The next mainline Final Fantasy game will be a PlayStation 5 exclusive for six months, according to a new ad for Sony’s current-gen console. Final Fantasy 16 has always been pitched as being tied to some sort of PlayStation exclusivity — despite being initially confirmed for PC as well — but Sony’s new promo for the PS5 makes it explicit, letting players on other platforms know how long they’ll have to dodge spoilers for the game.

What’s unclear about Final Fantasy 16’s exclusivity is which platforms that designation applies to. Elsewhere in the same ad, another Square Enix-published game, Forspoken, is described as PS5 exclusive until Jan. 23, 2025, two years after the game launches on both PS5 and PC. Does that mean Final Fantasy 16 is simply console-exclusive during the first six months, and that an Xbox version is due sometime in early 2024? It’s unclear, so Polygon has reached out to both Square Enix and Sony for clarity, and will update when the company responds.

Further muddling the PS5 exclusivity of Final Fantasy 16 is Square Enix’s track record for previous RPG exclusives. The publisher’s Final Fantasy 7 Remake was initially exclusive to PlayStation 4 when it was released in 2020. A year later, the remake came to PC — initially only for the Epic Game Store, though! — and PlayStation 5 with Square Enix’s Final Fantasy 7 Remake Intergrade expanded release. (Remake still hasn’t made its way to Xbox.)

Yet no such exclusivity applies to another sizable Final Fantasy project: Crisis Core: Final Fantasy 7 Reunion. The high-definition remaster of 2007’s Crisis Core: Final Fantasy 7 is coming to Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Windows PC via Steam, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X this December, in what is a platform-agnostic release.

Final Fantasy 16 is slated for release in summer 2023. The action role-playing game tells the story of the kingdom of Valisthea and Clive Rosfield, known as the First Shield of the nation of Rosaria. Clive serves as guardian to his younger brother Joshua, a Dominant, who has the power to summon a powerful creature known as an Eikon — FF16’s version of a summonable monster. Unexpected events set Clive on a dark and dangerous road to revenge, Square Enix says in the game’s official description.