I agree that’s a strong step, but the maintaining and building relationships stuff will also be necessary in the interim anyway. This thread is about SE - and honestly they’re one of the most prolific in terms of having both large and small Japanese productions (many of them published but not internally developed). I do maintain that out of the possible targets, they’d be a respectable pick for fulfilling these and other strategic objectives (a mix of game sizes from pseudo-indie to AAA, high volume of releases, beloved franchises, Eastern and Western appeal etc).
Regardless, that’d be a 3-5 year time horizon before you start seeing real impacts regardless of who you’re hypothetically discussing. In the mean time, imo it’s just good business to try and bring all the Persona games to GP, try and secure day one GP for Persona 6 maybe even, try to splash out for more ports of SE and from smaller companies. Some people seem almost offended by the idea that this is necessary, but imo it’s just reality, and making multiple concerted moves in conjunction is the most effective way to bring about change.
That’s the self-fulfilling prophecy I was speaking about, they were not so eager in the first place and they need to be milked every time.
I mean, it’s obvious SE doesn’t want MS money considering they are skipping them with all their major eastern games for the time being, the 2 year time deal with Forspoken is ridicoulus and we are almost there for FF7R, who knows how long will be for FF16 and FF14 which is almost a joke now (every time there is a different excuse from Yoshida lol). And those game would sell on Xbox without doubt and they would profit from them.
This is the only real solution outside a 10 year small steps plan which can backfire anytime considering Sony would moneyhat any big profile game from Japan they can (and every time they do, Xbox japanese grand plan is slowed down a lot, it’s not a drop in the ocean like for western games, considering how few big japanese games are). They need to force consumers /media /developers hands to reach some sort of success, obviously now they have returned to TGS, with GP and Series consoles a bit better received they are not in a completely dead position, but MS cannot behave like a “better than dead” position is their goal, lol. Unfortunately a big splash is very difficult in that region, MS would need to overpay their target almost assuredly (for market share and cultural divide reasons) and imo this is the reason they are not eager to do it.
Sega and Xbox were a partnership. Dreamcast users bought Xbox and it was more mutual than you are remembering. Both parties benefited and to this day many current Xbox people were also former Sega Dreamcast owners.
Shouldn’t it be better than being owned by a chinese company and Winnie the Pooh ? Tencent and NetEase are coming in with their countries money bag and I don’t think Microsoft should watch and do nothing.
Who knows, technically Tencent and NetEase are only acquiring minority shares all over the world, the famous laws fanboys always remember for Japan are actually in place to avoid chinese influence over japanese companies. Nexon (half korean and half japanese) is the one which is investing big in Japan. Anyway I agree that if there is a window of opportunity MS should acquire a big target.
It’s clear to me they are holding off releasing games on Xbox trying to maximize the earnings by coming late and getting the Gamepass extra money when it hits the platform.
We already knew SE west is a different thing vs SE east, moreover this game needs every help it can get. Also Sony got if first with its puny PSNow, so Xbox is second choice anyway for them, lol (I don’t even want to talk about the Spiderman skin controversy).
Development is dirt cheap with how development works now. If you’re spending a huge amount of time on a ps5 version the series x version is going to be an easy port job.
At least we got Nier Replicant this year, and Octopath came to Xbox even though it’s not been released on PlayStation.
I found it a slap in the face when they didn’t put The Last Remnant Remastered on Xbox, yet they put it on PS4 and Switch. SE even had the gall to delist the original version on PC.
Well to give you scale here for how bad it can get for smaller titles, Ace Attorney Trilogy sold 0.5% of it’s copies on Xbox. Zero-point-five percent. This is according to leaked internal Capcom documents, so that’s actual sales data not just speculation.
Big stuff like Final Fantasy is usually “only” outsold be 3 or 4 to 1 by playstation copies of the same game, so that’s still fully justifiable to come to Xbox. But niche stuff? Stuff for jrpg hardcore fans from the 90’s? It’s 100% possible the cost of porting and testing those games is basically the same or more than the amount of revenue they earn from it. Even if it breaks even or makes a modest profit, telling the CEO of square enix they should port a game to Xbox for a 1.2:1 return on investment over a 12 month period is not going to seem attractive. They’d rather spend the money almost anywhere else, because they’d get a better return reallocating those funds to increasing marketing instead or something.
I can understand fully why they wait until Microsoft gives them a GP deal before porting some of that stuff.
That’s what happens when you drop almost reluctantly a game from a series never appeared on the platform, moreover from a genre almost non-existant on Xbox, without any marketing at all, some of these small japanese release are really almost invisible on the store and they rarely go on sale, etc…it’s destined to fail, how could Capcom or any other publisher try a such low effort? They could afford deals directly with MS, if they were small indie devs I could understand. It’s almost like if SEGA had released in a half hearted way Yakuza on Xbox and not with all the possible visibility. That series was never on Xbox but now has a following because they actually tried and cared. The same could be applied to SE behaviour: I remember a FF spin-off which allegedly made SE angry for Xbox low results, but it suffered from the same low efforts.
Doubtful that’s enough, SE-Europe is quite active as a publisher and owns the rights to quite a few IPs and has quite a large back catalogue. I’d think closer to the 4 billion range. Buying the whole thing probably makes as much or more sense though. SE-Europe is effectively half the company, that’s a pretty significant asset to sell. The overall package might be an easier thing to pull off!
They aren’t going to go out of their way to do specialist xbox marketing above and beyond the marketing for their game generally. If people are aware of the game but choose to buy it elsewhere, that’s that. It’s a problem for Microsoft, but not for these companies - they just… don’t support Xbox, easy for them right?
The common answer “it’s not worth it” is correct only when you say that the responsabilities are at least mutual, those publishers didn’t cultivate a fandom and that’s a problem of cultural divide in some part. Anyway it’s not the end of the world for Xbox, which is still kicking since 20 years with an overall mediocre support from Japan, I think it’s more a loss for them than for MS in the end, which is not the company who sometimes bleeds money and/or needs to spun off assets, while we hear at leas once a year that someone from the known japanese big publishers has some money issues, the most recent were SEGA and SE, also the news about Nexon acquiring stakes within Bandai Namco, SEGA, etc…
