Our ultimate goal was to celebrate the release of FINAL FANTASY XVI by producing a community-focused, creator-friendly, livestreamed event that puts fans at the forefront. It isn’t often that a new numbered Final Fantasy title releases, so we wanted to ensure that we put on an event befitting of the moment with the fans while also revealing the FINAL FANTASY XVI Demo in spectacular fashion. We wanted to show fans more about the game’s combat gameplay, story elements, and innovations in how music was integrated into the game as well.
All of the above was wrapped up in a pre-launch celebration that allowed fans to meet their favorite developers, content creators, and meet other like-minded fans in anticipation of the games’ release.
We worked closely with our production agency StunGun, who has extensive experience and expertise in producing live events. Since the event was meant to be globally reaching, our plan was to ensure we were in sync with StunGun and also our colleagues across the globe so we were all on the same page about what would be shown and the implications of what we would reveal.
The entire event was planned and scheduled down to the minute as there was not only the livestream happening, but also signing sessions, photo sessions, interviews all happening simultaneously. Getting everything and every team member where they needed to be on time was an incredible challenge since we were dealing with over 50 team members who can’t be in two places at once.
The content for the livestream was planned with a long lead time but we had to go through many revisions on how to best represent the intended content and how that content would be portrayed for the livestream audience. For example, when Soken-san revealed how the music evolves during boss fights, it was a challenge to create that visually so fans could understand it.
Our influencer team also had the challenge of ensuring the 100+ content creators we invited were all taken care of and having a good time. Part of the challenge here was to schedule hands on livestreamed sessions for them as we had 20 kiosks where they could livestream the game on their own channels, and that also had to be scheduled meticulously so they all had an opportunity.
We also had 40 kiosks dedicated to allow general attendees to play a portion of the game. Since we had over 800 live attendees, it was a challenge for us to make sure they all had an opportunity to play through an easy to understand ticketing system.
From the beginning we wanted to make sure we could accommodate as many fans as possible to attend the event as it was a big priority of ours to incorporate their enjoyment into the activities. As soon as we made our announcement and made tickets available, they lasted 7 minutes before they were all gone. When showtime came we saw the majority of those who acquired tickets show up to the event, which we consider a huge success.
Our other main goal of ours was to reveal the FINAL FANTASY XVI Demo in a big way. We made it a part of our keynote with Naoki Yoshida making the big announcement along with a global map showing when fans across the world can dive into Valisthea for the first time. The sheer amount of fans who downloaded and played the demo exceeded our expectations and the outpouring of positive sentiment around the demo after its launch from content creators as well as fans was above and beyond what we expected.
Lastly, a big goal of ours was to showcase the games battle system, story elements, and music. We were able to do this through including key developers talking to each subject with the help of content creators joining them on stage. The fans were able to enjoy watching Maximilian Dood do a hunt with Ryota Suzuki, Alanah Pearce talk about storytelling with Kazutoyo Maehiro and Hiroshi Takai, and Alex Moukala talk about Final Fantasy music with Masayoshi Soken.
