Right, I just don’t see how porting a game already running on PC, PS4, Switch, and mobile will cost so much money that a few thousand sales (which are at a minimum guaranteed, assuming no Game Pass, which only adds to the revenue) don’t justify the porting expenses lol
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I don’t know. You would have to ask people who are in charge at SE. lol
I don’t think people realise how much money Sony are paying SE. But even at the end of all the Sony cheques a lot of their games will come to Xbox. FF16 will no doubt in my mind come to Xbox and so will a lot of their other games like Dragonquest 12. (pretty sure this might be multiplat)
SE have done great business with MS before and even now with allowing CD help develop Perfect Dark. SE ported every FF game on Xbox and put the KH games on Gamepass.
For a company that does awful in Japan the SE support is pretty good. They just see it as a better business venture to make timed exclusives because Sony are paying them a bucket load of cash that they can ease their development cost with
but SE aren’t blind loyalists to Sony. If they were FF games would never come to Xbox and Sony wouldn’t have to pay a ridiculous amount for timed exclusives.
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But why? It’s not like these game sell like hotcakes on Xbox anyway, so if this is Sony’s way to “gotcha” them…then lol.
I wonder what it will take for them to just finally let it all come to Xbox too. The Mana games, Actraiser and so on. Phil has done his best, proven with releases like Dragon Quest and I would hope the next one too, so what more could he really do?
I’d say the same for games like YS and other JRPGs, if you release on Stadia, on Android Play Store…you can release on Xbox too. Maybe these companies still want to see Xbox (Game Pass) growing more until they finally take them seriously?
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Huge corporations like SE are not the same thing like small devs like NIS and Falcom. SE is only greedy and badly managed, the other companies who knows, they might cannot justify the risk without a hefty payment upfront, which is likely with Stadia and Luna, lol.
I don’t want Phil paying for SE scraps, it would send the bad message, it’s already not the best thing in the world he had to pay for B-tier stuff 2-3 years later on GP.
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Google paid a shit ton to small publishers for those games. on the one Hand I’d love Ys to be on Xbox. I mean Ys Origins is on Xbox. But on the other Hand…MS shouldn’t be forced to pay obscene amounts of money for a Monstrum Nox port if the publishers are ignoring xbox and just want money. No put your games on the system if you value to establish a userbase on that system and respect the gamers on that system. they clearly don’t.
SE are probably the same. Hopefully gamepass changes that. Remember Octopath isn’t even out on Playstation. But I wonder how much MS paid for a port.
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NIS have been Blind Sony loyalists for a long time. ITs only recently they put their games even on Nintendo platforms.
Even during the 360 era when even top Japanese publishers were making games on 360 over PS3 at times or certainly 360 as well NIs ignored them. And it was purely due to loyalty.
Falcom obviously took the Google cash.
I didn’t know that, anyway it’s mostly their loss, with modern development tools porting games from PS to Xbox/pc is cheap and I’d reckon MS would be open to GP deals. Unfortunately MS loss is when big publishers skip Xbox, because the damage is both image-wise and marketshare-wise.
There are two factors here.
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Small SE games sell like shit on Xbox. SE does not consider it economically significant enough to port them, unless Microsoft is willing to pay to have it done through a gamepass deal or similar.
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Certain medium or large games have exclusivity deals with Nintendo or Sony. Octopath and Triangle Strategy are examples of Nintendo timed exclusivity deals; FF7 remake and FF15 are examples of Sony timed exclusivity deals.
In combination, Square Enix Japan titles come to Xbox late or sometimes never. SE-Europe does not have the same issues however. The Spider-Man DLC exclusivity deal is the only thing they took recently. Otherwise it’s all day and date on Xbox.
This is all business. It’s nothing personal.
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Those games sell like shit mostly because of them: if you never port them, market them properly, etc…it’s a self fulfilling prophecy. Now with GP they don’t even have the same old excuse, with a GP deal the Xbox port would be the most played by far, those games are not big sellers anywhere.
SE and their pals (Capcom, Bamco, etc…) got big money from MS for their crap jrpgs during 7th gen and then they were surprised they sold badly because japanese devs were years behind technology and design wise at the time, MS was very unlucky with the timing of their only big japanese push. They spent the big bucks for outdated products and then when there was a renaissance 10 years later they have already abandoned the market. Then Phil was promoted and tried to restart the push, but now is hard: those companies are incredibly narrow minded and risk averse, also MS is clearly not in the mindset of big checks for games like during 360 gen.
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A self sustaining prophecy perhaps, but Square didn’t start it. The 360 gen saw an unprecedented amount of Japanese support on Xbox 360, and while still less than the competition, it sold ~1.6 million units in Japan. Xbox One sold ~120k units in Japan. I wonder what percentage of that 120k was US military personnel. Either way, dead as a door nail.
If you want to get this support back, Microsoft will have to splash out a lot of money in one form or another. The current situation where they sell perfectly well on Nintendo and Sony suits them just fine, they’re not missing out on much internationally and they’re missing out on effectively zero dollars in Japan. They’ll get a hell of a lot more porting to Steam than they will porting to Xbox in most cases, hence PC gets these releases while Xbox doesn’t.
Microsoft has already been doing this with Sega - a concerted amount of Gamepass deals for every title in the Yakuza series. People on this site don’t seem to mind Sega - in fact they seem to love them - but Microsoft had to bribe them extensively to get all these games to come over. I see so much ill will directed at Square Enix but I think you’re all taking it personally to some extent.
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MS paid the big bucks for the “unprecedented japanese support” during 360 gen, lol, if was not out of the goodness of their heart. Then they even releases better PS3 ports of the same games as soon as they could. You skipped all the part where I was saying MS paid the big bucks and the instant they stopped, also the japanese support stopped (outside major series which sells anyway). Maybe they don’t want to be fooled again.
Yeah, MS paid SEGA and they released most of their games, which now have a public and release day one on the platform without shit deals. How can SE imagine Xbox customers would buy overpriced years later ports of major series because they like Sony bribes? MS has to pay even for b tier stuff like their DQ spin-off years later. Their decision for FF series will harm the overall success of the series, limiting the platforms won’t do it any good.
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Lol they sure kicked that loyalty to the curb quick after Nintendo. Not even localizing Disgaea 6 PS4 for the West and not giving PS4 the new Prinny Collections (collections of their old games… which were PS2 exclusives)
Just offer them the money for CD, Em and all IP
Things might change this generation. Last gen Xbox has an absolute disaster start of the gen. No surprise it barely got any JPN support.
Sony are more westernised now with more western figure heads. Probably one of the reasons the relationship isn’t as shady *cough I mean as good.
Big games as well. The split of FF15 was around 80% PS4/ 20% Xbox ?
But then we have this weird problem that SE release games like KH3 without the prequel and hope it performs well.
Comparing NIS to the big japanese publisher is a little bit unfair. But I agree that NIS is living in their own bubble and only open up when they were close to bankruptcy.
This !
We are now in a loop of “pay us an incentive or we don’t care about you”.
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I think Sony will get the Japanese side of SE eventually, I believe MS contracting CD and eventually EM is a way to safeguard those studios from any Sony buyout.
I mean in terms of absolute numbers - the big games still sell way worse on Xbox, but 20% of 4-6 million units is absolutely worth supporting, while 20% of 200,000 units is possibly not worth the effort, particularly given that some fraction of that 20% will be able to buy on other platforms, and Xbox was simply a preference they had.
The absence of sequels it not always a problem. It’s more the general case of lack of these entire categories of games over a long period of time cultivating an audience preference split - those that like these sorts of games will generally already own somewhere else to play them, so when they do get simultaneous ports you’ll still see strong preference for them on other platforms. It’s something that can only be changed over time and not easily.
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I think the ship has sailed if they keep the mindset of “we have to repair and grow our relationship with japanese publisher”. Acquire a publisher like Capcom and make all their games console exclusive. This will attract fans of Capcoms IP and probably other japanese publisher to release games on Xbox if they think that the fans of Capcom IPs are the same of their games.
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