Thankfully iv moved on and quite frankly don’t even care anymore, all their big games are skipping xbox and their other games either barely move the needle or just aren’t particularly good in general
It’s never good to have games skip your platform but if there had to be one, Square is probably the best one to do so, terribly managed publisher
Xbox and the fans have no reason to invest in Square at this point and are better focusing their efforts and money elsewhere
Aw, Live a Live was my GOTY of 2022. I’ve also been putting tons of time into Octopath 2 now and while the story still blows it’s otherwise fantastic.
No Asano (HD2D) games on really is unfortunate. They’re all excellent games.
Octopath 2 is struggling on PS though… Can’t imagine a late port of already the least selling Asano game will do better. If Sony was actually serious about these games they’d put LaL on PS Plus day 1, that would help HD2D out on Playstation.
As for the NFTs… Just let em die. I will keep supporting Asano games and just let the NFTs die out.
I won’t be surprised if Phil is asked about their relationship with Square Enix at TGS 2023, interviewers there are good at asking the tough questions. I expect a generic response though.
All is fair. Xbox gets Bethesda, PlayStation can have Square. They’ve already been rewarded with Forspoken… nah, just kidding it’s a terrible game. But considering the massiveness of Final Fantasy 7 back in the late 1990’s on the PS1, it probably makes sense for Sony players to have the PS5 be the de-facto Final Fantasy box going forward. Let them have it.
But I don’t like their method of acquiring that exclusivity at all, i.e. Sony leveraging its market position to demand exclusivity from a company they don’t even own. That’s weak. They should just get on with it & buy Square outright. Then there’s zero confusion or expectation from Xbox players anymore.
Doing deals with Gust/NIS/Falcom should also still be heavily looked into. No Square output anymore leaves a gaping AA JRPG hole on Xbox that Atlus alone can’t fill with their bad output -quantity- (and not all of that quantity is coming to Xbox, no Etrian Odyssey remasters, I know it’s also skipping Playstation)
Nick says NIS (and by extension Falcom) is happening, although they keep doing showcases where every game skips Xbox.
For Gust, well, the Ryza games have outsold a lot of these AA Square games.
Read the article, makes some points like “Xbox paid for all those Square games on GP and now are left with nothing” and “It’s not just Square, other companies like NIS also don’t do Xbox”
The million dollar question is raised: “Is Xbox’s efforts with Japanese publishers… actually solving anything? (I’ve seen this question come up on the Xboxera podcast, when Mega Man Battle Network from Capcom was skipping Xbox. Nick said he feels that Japanese publishers are trying to bait Game Pass or nothing for their smaller games.)”
I also applaud the author for shooting down the dumb arguments that “Square isn’t releasing on Xbox because they’re selling to Sony”.
Says Xbox will have screwed up bad if Persona 6 ends up being Playstation exclusive again.
Xcloud will only work in Japan if it has content that Japanese audiences actually want to play
The article also goes into that, they feel that ABK doesn’t actually “fill” much holes for Xbox content and that they should have went into Japanese content sooner (maybe they will after ABK) as that is by far the deepest hole to fill. I have no opinion on this part of the article, though we do know that ABK was a very sudden thing, so who knows what Xbox was thinking before that happened.
Despite all the underperformances, the horrific management and decisions like NFTs, exclusivity focus, etc. They are actually still doing fine. Much better than say, the 360/PS3 generation. That’s the power of a juggernaut like FFXIV I guess. The AA Switch stuff, when they let Nintendo do the marketing, also sells really good for the small budgets.
Until Sega/Bandai goes exclusive that aren’t retro gaming collection, Xbox shouldn’t be blamed, or at least all of it. But hey, let’s try to kick Xbox for having a good time and soon win the big one.
Xbox needs Japanese exclusives that appeal to the Japanese market, it’s that simple. They can’t rely on third party anymore, they need more 1st party Japanese studios that make games that appeal to the Japanese.
I never quite got the whole argument suggesting that cause Xbox paid to ensure they got certain Japanese games on xbox/Gamepass and not getting them now means studios are waiting to be paid again - as it still means that these games likely didn’t sell well enough to justify continuing to release games based on sales alone
I think you and Bastian have the right of it though, but I’m still optimistic about Xbox and Japanese games. I think they’re on the right path, it’s just going to take time and investment to build a bigger audience for Japanese games/Japanese audience on Xbox. These things won’t change overnight.
That’s nonsense and always has been. The audience is there for Japanese games. If there weren’t you wouldn’t have Namco Bandai thanking Gamepass for the amount of players or Sega going on about how well Yakuza is doing now. Not to mention if there were no audience for Japanese games Resident Evil, Street Fighter wouldn’t sell on Xbox and we all know they do sell. Maybe there isn’t an audience for Square Games thanks to their half asses “support” on xbox. Even then you can’t tell that Final Fantasy , one of the biggest names in rpg’s isn’t going to sell on xbox. It may not sell as much as it does on PS but it sells.
An issue here is that you are using games that had Xbox marketing deals (Scarlet Nexus, Yakuza), and huge mainstream IPs even my mother knows like Resident Evil and Street Fighter as examples.
People get antsy about this but one thing Xbox should do is third party directs like Nintendo and Sony and market (doesn’t have to be an outright marketing deal) some small/niche Japanese games on them
There’s a direct correlation between Xbox doing a marketing deal on Scarlet Nexus and a million people playing it on Xbox.
Octopath 1 was also on GP but it’s addition was not marketed. I can tell you that it was not played by 1M people on Xbox.
The type of games that do well in the west aren’t necessarily the type that sell well in Japan. I think sega or platinum would be a good start. Or maybe an even smaller studio like inti creates.
They could also do the co media things. Develop an anime for the game they are making. Etc.
