Japanese players have gotten Final Fantasy 16 trending on Twitter in the wake of newly-announced PS5 price hikes, and many of them are hoping for a PC port so they won't have to shell out for new console hardware.
Earlier today, Sony announced that the price of both PS5 models is increasing worldwide (though, notably, there will be no price increase in the US). As of September 15, the standard PS5 will cost ¥60,478 yen, up from ¥49,980 yen. The digital model will cost ¥49,478 yen, up from ¥39,980 yen. That's a 20% increase, one of the most substantial of the worldwide price hikes.
As a result of the price increase, FF16 is now trending in Japan on Twitter, as aitaikimochi notes. Many of those players are Final Fantasy fans simply lamenting that the price of the console is likely to keep them away from the next entry in the series.
Others are hoping to play FF16 on their gaming PCs. The vagaries of machine translation make it difficult to pin down precise quotes, but Steam and Epic keep coming up, and it seems calls for a PC port - in the vein of Final Fantasy 7 Remake - are getting louder. Some players are wishing FF16 will be released on PS4, too, but calls for that PC port are much more common.
Some early marketing material seemed to suggest that a PC version of FF16 was in the works, though Square Enix has since backed away from that assertion, and PS5 is now the only confirmed platform.
Complaints about the PS5 price increase aren't exclusive to Final Fantasy fans, either. The broader Japanese trend around the PS5 price hike is much bigger, and many of those fans are specifically upset that the change is coming while scalpers continue to dominate the market for the console.
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