The director of the Final Fantasy 7 Remake trilogy says modern RPGs need to feature more player agency, to discourage players from choosing to watch streams instead.
In an interview with 4Gamer, Naoki Hamaguchi explained that these days if an RPG simply has the player following a predetermined path without much scope to change it, the experience will be the same for everyone.
As such, he argued, some players will be happy enough just watching an influencer playing the game on a stream, instead of buying it.
“One thing RPGs like Final Fantasy need to be careful about today is the possibility that people might simply watch a stream and feel satisfied without ever playing the game themselves,” Hamaguchi said (as translated by Automaton).
“This is a bit of a crisis for the work itself – or rather, it’s not something game creators can wholeheartedly celebrate.”
Hamaguchi explained that while he doesn’t have a problem with streaming in general, it can be detrimental to a game’s success if the entire story can just be watched for free without the viewer feeling the inclination to play it themselves.
“If people watch a stream and it makes them think ‘what would I do in that situation?’ or ‘how would I experiment with that?’ then hopefully they’ll be inspired to try it themselves,” he said.
He added that developers shouldn’t stick with an old-fashioned gameplay style and maintain “this is the right way” when the way entertainment is being consumed is changing around them.
As a result, Hamaguchi noted that while the upcoming Final Fantasy 7 Revelation – the final game in the Final Fantasy 7 Remake trilogy – only has one ending, it will have enough branching content that the game will require multiple playthroughs to see everything it has to offer.
In a recent interview with VGC, Hamaguchi said he was excited to see how fans of the series would react to the ending of Revelation, which he says is something that had been planned since the beginning.
“Obviously, I can’t share actual details on how this story is going to end, but in terms of how we envisioned the conclusion, we did have some sort of an idea of what we wanted to do at the end,” he told us. “So we did have a kind of direction from the early days of development.”
Final Fantasy 7 Revelation will be released in Spring 2027, and will be available on PS5, Xbox Series X/S, Switch 2 and PC on the same day.
