Funnily enough their only JRPG release in a long time is exclusively skipping Xbox (Mega Man Battle Network)
For Sega and Bandai (and Capcom but they’re starting to not support with lesser games), it’s good they support (mostly anyway, Bandai still skips on some lesser games here and there and it’s been a long time since Xbox got any D3publisher games from them), that support has been here for years now so with the apparent loss of Square Enix there should be something more to fill in the hole (The 3 Persona games very much bring the quality, but in the end it’s only 3 games so the quantity… Not so much)
I bring up NIS (which Falcom falls under) because besides Square they are the first to come to mind with quantity, and MS worked with Spike Chunsoft already to bring games that are even more niche/worse sellers (besides Danganronpa as it’s one of the biggest VNs)
And I do hope there is a team of some sort working on Atlus Switch/PS/PC backlog games as well.
I’m one of those people who count Monster Hunter as a JRPG
You’re right, of course, it is a gap in the portfolio they can target to fill (and you’ll remember I’ve argued for it before due to NIS games being on literally everything else) but I don’t see Xbox just sleep walking into SE dropping support. It seems clear to me that continually strengthened relationships with SEGA et al are a direct result of needing to find partnerships that they can work with.
Throw in Konami there too, by the way - Suikoden is coming to Xbox next year and that’s something I’ll never get tired of thinking about.
I agree with you that I’d like to see them do more, but I think there’s plenty of evidence that they are moving on from SE. No surprise the fans are too.
I see Square Enix becoming less and less relevant. All other publishers are growing and their IPs are becoming bigger. Square Enix is on decline and if not for FF14 it would not be even relevant.
If you look at SE’s history I think it’s pretty easy to infer that everything they do has some sort of back-end deal attached to it. The main reason we know FF7R and FF16 is paid Sony exclusive is because Sony went ahead and made it clear with fine print on their marketing. Just because there is less attention or scrutiny on their smaller releases doesn’t mean money isn’t exchanging hands, even if it is a small sum.
SE is probably just putting everything up for bid and sometimes exclusivity gets bought, sometimes not.
As far as Sega Atlus in particular, the real test will be if Persona 6 lands on Xbox day and date with the PS5 version. I’m hoping its a "Yakuza " situation where the floodgates are open and the series is never exclusive to Playstation again. Even better if its on Gamepass at launch or a short time after. Persona is arguably as popular as FF is in the west these days.
Though Atlus is still kinda iffy to me (still waiting for that xbox version of P4 Ultimax or maybe allow the 360 version to be played on current gen through bc) so we’ll see If they learned the wrong lessons from the new ports doing well sales wise.
As much as I’d love it, nooooo way will Persona 6 be on Game Pass Day 1 or anywhere near. That game will be milked for years. Maybe they’ll put it on sub services in a few years after it gets the ‘Royal’ style treatment.
I tought it was made clear as a bottled water that SQE works nowadays almost entirely on deals and Microsoft won’t budge.
FF7R on PC was released only after the Intergrade version exclusively at EGS for like six months or a year, then it was released on Steam with zero fanfare, I remember the peak playerbase being a fraction of what Persona 4 and 5 did. PC players were annoyed as hell with no set deadline on the ending exclusivity for NEO Twewy and Kingdom Hearts (this one still EGS only) that they gave up on the company, same with Xbox players years before.
In the case of Crystal Dynamics being a co-dev for Perfect Dark was a case where the studio head for The Initiative was previously in the same office there, Xbox just wanted to hear a “Yes” or “No” if it could be lended for the project, they didn’t care for the rest of SQE because they won’t budge with their business style, they have other companies in the line that are worth of attention and conversations. Look at how well High on Life is doing.
And for games like Star Ocean 6 and FF Origins, I think the case rest mostly on the developers side wanting it than SQE.
About the last thing you said, it’s really bad. That means Square Enix considers development on Xbox a waste of resources and that it’s only worth it when their projects are outsourced to external developers.
A Gamepass deal would just be icing on the cake. Getting it day one on Xbox is the highest priority. Again assuming Atlus didn’t learn all the wrong lessons from their recent success with late ports of Persona.
