Since its announcement at E3 2015, fans have been waiting in agony on any news of the Final Fantasy 7 remake. Despite Square Enix having an actual press conference this year, the game was again a no-show. Now Tetsuya Nomura, director of the game, has admitted that the game was indeed announced too early.
In an interview with Italian gaming website Multiplayer (translation), Nomura states “I am well aware of the fact that we announced it too early, but even in the industry, word was beginning to spread that we were working on the game, so we just decided not to keep it more secret and officially reveal it.”
He also agrees that Kingdom Hearts 3 was revealed much too premature, which was already done so in 2013. The game was finally given a release date at E3 this year and will come out on January 29, 2019. “Deciding when to announce your game to the public is always difficult,” he said. “In our case, we receive pressure from the fans even when we do not announce anything. … People are waiting for new information regardless of whether the game has been announced or not.”
In both cases, Nomura had decided to reveal the game to avoid leakers from revealing the games online. This is surely a sentiment we can understand. Leaks are running rampant nowadays and a huge number of games were leaked and revealed before E3 had even started. As a designer, it’s probably a punch in the gut when a game you’ve been working on passionately is revealed in such a manner. It clearly shows that Nomura doesn’t necessarily want to announce his games so early but feels it’s better to reveal them by himself.
Game reveals have been a point of debate for a while now, and they are so after every E3. This year Nintendo was also targeted by fans for announcing Metroid Prime 4 last year but not showing anything on the game this year. This year Bethesda also made an extremely early announcement of The Elder Scrolls 6. The 1-minute video has already spawned countless discussion videos and will surely backfire if they don’t reveal any new information on the game in the coming years.
It’s clear that modern-day leakers have made revealing games much more difficult for companies than it used to be. Nowadays companies have to walk a thin line between revealing the game too early and having the game being revealed via leakers. Nomura has clearly chosen the former and I think fans should be more appreciative of this fact despite the long wait.
