On Drift: Buying High, Selling Low

On Creative Identity & the Cost of Drift

Final Fantasy chased action games and surrendered its identity. SCP abandoned clinical dread for narrative ego. In both cases, someone else walked away with the thing they abandoned.

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In 1997, Clayton Christensen published The Innovator's Dilemma, a business book that described how successful companies destroy themselves by doing everything right. The mechanism is this: a dominant company studies the market, listens to its biggest customers, and chases the largest audiences. It abandons underserved niches as unprofitable. Smaller competitors move into those niches, build passionate audiences, improve, and eventually climb upmarket to displace the original. The dominant company never saw it coming because the threat, by definition, started in a space the data told them to ignore.

Christensen's book was about disk drives. But it explains Final Fantasy just fine.

The Golden Era and the Goodbye Letter

Between 1997 and 2001, Square released Final Fantasy VII, VIII, IX, and X in rapid succession. All four scored 90 or above on Metacritic. All four used turn-based or ATB combat as their mechanical spine. All four married that system to operatic storytelling, lavish pre-rendered environments, and Nobuo Uematsu scores. This is the period that built the franchise's Western audience, defined JRPG as a genre worth taking seriously, and established expectations that would haunt every entry that followed.

Final Fantasy IX deserves specific mention. Directed under Hironobu Sakaguchi's most hands-on creative involvement — he served as both producer and lead writer — it was a deliberate return to the series' medieval-fantasy roots after VII's cyberpunk and VIII's military-academy aesthetics. It holds the highest Metacritic score of any Final Fantasy game, and Sakaguchi has publicly declared it his favorite. It was, in retrospect, a love letter written during the era it was celebrating: aware that something was closing, trying to preserve it in amber before it did.

FFX arrived in 2001. Its Conditional Turn-Based Battle system was the most purely strategic the series had offered — no real-time pressure, a visible turn-order queue, and meaningful trade-offs between speed and power. The story, appropriately, was about a pilgrimage destined to end in sacrifice and loss. It has since sold over 20 million units across all versions. It is the last mainline Final Fantasy with fully turn-based combat. In retrospect, it reads as a goodbye letter — which is apt, because that's exactly what it was.

The Long Drift

Final Fantasy XI launched in 2002 as the series' first MMORPG. By 2012 it was the most profitable title in the franchise's history. The lesson Square Enix drew from this was that real-time systems were the future. It was a reasonable inference. It was also wrong, or at least wrongly applied.

FF12 (2006) introduced the Gambit system: programmable AI behavior, real-time movement in dungeons, no random encounters. Its director Hiroyuki Ito described the design goal as creating "a single-player online game." The Gambit system had a certain elegance — conditional logic, emergent behavior, strategic depth at a remove — but it broke the direct transaction between player decision and outcome. You could configure your party and watch. The strategic texture was still there; the player's relationship to it was fundamentally changed.

FF13 (2009) went further. A corridor for most of its first twenty hours, with a battle system that could be reduced to pressing Auto-Battle repeatedly. Director Motomu Toriyama defended its linearity by comparing the design to Call of Duty — an extraordinary sentence, given what franchise he was directing. Fan reviews coined the phrase "Final Corridor XIII." Toriyama later admitted the slow ability unlocking made the majority of the game feel like a tutorial. Metacritic: 83. Fans weren't reviewing a bad game so much as a game that felt like something else wearing a Final Fantasy costume.

FF15 spent a decade in development and released in 2016 as a real-time action game with a "Wait Mode" offered as a concession to players who preferred something more traditional and deliberate. Director Hajime Tabata framed the action direction as a lesson learned from FF13's backlash. The series was correcting itself by running further in the same direction.

FF16 (2023) made the logic explicit. Producer Naoki Yoshida stated publicly that turn-based command combat was no longer familiar to younger players raised on first-person shooters and action games. He said the decision to go full action was driven partly by development costs exceeding $100 million — to recoup that, you need the broadest possible audience. The game's combat designer came from Devil May Cry 5 and Dragon's Dogma. The result was technically accomplished, received well by critics (Metacritic 87), and fell short of Square Enix's commercial expectations. Its PC port sold approximately 289,000 copies. For a franchise that shipped 5 million copies of FF15 on day one, this was a conspicuous underperformance.

"FFXVI feels like a very competent, very expensive hack-and-slash that put on a Final Fantasy costume for Halloween: crystals, summons, chocobos, moogles — all there but none of them actually do anything in the way they traditionally should. They're set dressing, not systems."— Metacritic user review, Final Fantasy XVI

The franchise had bought high and sold low. It abandoned a distinctive identity to compete in a space already occupied by God of War, Devil May Cry, and Bayonetta — games that do action better, on their own terms, because action is their actual DNA. The audience that wanted exactly this already had better options. The audience that wanted Final Fantasy had been told to wait.

The Rebuke

In April 2025, a thirty-person French studio called Sandfall Interactive released Clair Obscur: Expedition 33. It was a turn-based RPG with real-time parry and dodge mechanics, built in Unreal Engine 5, priced below the AAA standard, and available day one on Xbox Game Pass. Its producer cited Final Fantasy VIII, IX, and X as direct inspirations.

It sold 500,000 copies in 24 hours. A million in the first week. Three million in 33 days. Five million by October. Its Steam sales in the first seven days were more than double those of Final Fantasy VII Rebirth. It won Game of the Year at The Game Awards 2025 — the most wins in the ceremony's history. The French government awarded the studio a knighthood.

An analyst at Alinea Analytics told GamesRadar that Square Enix was "probably kicking itself" seeing the reception, having been "reticent to do it with the Final Fantasy series." Yoshida's stated rationale — that younger players find turn-based systems unfamiliar and off-putting — had been stress-tested and found wanting, by a studio a fraction of Square Enix's size with a fraction of the budget, making exactly the kind of game the market had supposedly moved past.

The demand was there the whole time. It was just being systematically ignored.

The Parallel Case

The SCP Foundation's format was its revelation: horror communicated through clinical detachment, dry incident reports, and implied consequence. The fear came not from what was described but from what the documentation assumed you already knew.

The SCP golden era — broadly Series I through V, covering entries SCP-001 through SCP-4999, spanning roughly 2007 to 2020 — produced some of the most inventive horror writing the internet has generated. SCP-055, the anti-meme: the thing you can't remember. SCP-231, in which the horror is entirely redacted. SCP-4999, a comforting entity that appears to people who die alone. The format created the aesthetic: bureaucratic coldness as a delivery system for dread.

What happened after that was not a commercial decision. There was no Yoshida calculating development costs. It was something subtler and in some ways harder to recover from: the community began rewarding complexity, ambition, and interconnection over the original restraint. Writers who had mastered the clinical style needed new challenges. Voters who had read hundreds of SCPs needed to be surprised. The simple horror object — the Kill You Pen, as the community's own meme goes — gave way to the Kill You Pen as a metaphysical artifact of collective nihilism with a sentient identity, a relationship with an in-universe deity, and cross-references to a dozen other entries.

A staff member on the SCP Wiki forums, responding to complaints about this escalation, was candid: "It's like an addict chasing a high: you start to build up a tolerance to horror and weirdness until eventually the things you may have liked in the beginning don't give you the same thrill anymore." This is an honest description of community drift — and it contains within it the reason the drift is so hard to reverse. The people doing the voting are the most experienced readers. Simplicity reads as regression to them, even when it reads as discovery to newcomers.

Unlike Square Enix's decisions, the SCP drift wasn't driven by money or market data. It was driven by ego and the absence of any institutional sense of tradition — a community so focused on what it was becoming that it lost its relationship with what it had been. The result is the same: an identity eroded from within, a space vacated.

"Some critics will say Coca-Cola has made a marketing mistake. The truth is we're not that dumb, and we're not that smart."— Don Keough, Coca-Cola President, on New Coke, 1985

Keough's confession is apt here. Coca-Cola reformulated its product in 1985 after market research showed consumers preferred the sweeter taste of New Coke in blind tests. They were not wrong about the tests. They were wrong about what they were actually selling.

Pepsi's CEO observed afterward that through the flub, Coca-Cola had finally understood itself: it was a caretaker of a heritage, not a product developer. Its job was to defend what it had, not to optimize it. SCP's community — and to a lesser extent, Square Enix — needed a similar reckoning and hasn't quite had one.

What Fills the Vacuum

In 2019, an anonymous user on 4chan's /x/ board posted two paragraphs about a place called the Backrooms — endless office carpeting, fluorescent hum, no exits, something else in there with you. It had no byline, no continuity, no cross-references. It was pure liminal dread delivered in plain prose. The internet immediately recognized what it was: the early SCP impulse, intact.

The Backrooms became a cultural phenomenon. A sixteen-year-old named Kane Parsons made a found-footage film about it that accumulated nearly 200 million YouTube views. A24 announced a feature adaptation that is forthcoming at the time of writing. The Backrooms did with two paragraphs what SCP had once done with a concrete statue and a set of instructions for not looking away.

The parallel to Clair Obscur is obvious, but the outcome is different. Clair Obscur won Game of the Year and moved five million copies. It proved, with finality, that an appetite existed and had been neglected. There is a reasonable path by which Square Enix reads that outcome and makes different decisions going forward. The franchise has institutional memory, commercial infrastructure, and a library that still means something to people.

There is something to return to.

SCP has no equivalent corrective waiting in the wings. The Backrooms itself has already undergone the same drift — hundreds of levels, elaborate entities, competing lore. The pattern is apparently inherent to collaborative open platforms without editorial tradition.

More telling: there is no Sandfall Interactive sitting on a fifteen-year turn-based RPG debt, ready to collect. The SCP's golden era had a narrower cultural footprint than the Final Fantasy franchise at its peak. It didn't imprint deeply enough on a generation to create the kind of latent demand that a single great work can suddenly discharge. The appetite, if it ever consolidates again, will coalesce around something new — something that doesn't know it's doing what SCP once did.

The Dilemma, Applied

Christensen's insight was that markets which don't yet exist cannot be analyzed. The turn-based RPG audience Square Enix abandoned wasn't captured in any sales projection — it was scattered across old saves, emulated PS1 games, and a half-acknowledged nostalgia that no market researcher thought to ask about. The people who would eventually buy five million copies of Clair Obscur weren't announcing themselves. They were just quietly waiting.

The pattern that connects Final Fantasy's two-decade drift and SCP's creative erosion is this: in both cases, the thing that made the original work distinctive was not a limitation to be overcome. It was the mechanism. Turn-based combat wasn't a primitive ancestor of real-time action; it was a system for creating tension, consequence, and player agency in a specific way that nothing else replicates. Clinical detachment in SCP documentation wasn't a stylistic constraint; it was the source of the intrigue, the negative space that let imagination do the work. Both communities, for different reasons, convinced themselves they were evolving past a limitation. Both were discarding the mechanism.

The identity doesn't survive that. What remains are the trappings — chocobos and moogles as set dressing; the SCP document format wrapped around narratives too large and self-important for it to contain. The shape without the substance. Caretakers who forgot they were caretakers.

Christensen's dilemma has no clean resolution. The companies that navigate it successfully are the ones that maintain a protected space for the original identity alongside whatever evolution they pursue — that refuse to let the mechanism be negotiated away. The ones that fail are the ones that mistake the costume for the character. Final Fantasy has been wearing the costume for twenty years. Whether anything underneath is still recognizable is the question its next numbered entry will have to answer.

© Confic Magazine

Written by Anonymous