I truly find this hard to believe, so you’re telling me that indie devs, making games in their garages, can justify a port of their 1st game to every platform with enough ROI to make it worth it but SE can’t porting 6 NES/ SNES games in a unified UI from their most esteemed IP?
That I might add already has a “windows” version in some capacity as it’s on steam, you’re actually telling me a paltry few thousand copies sold wouldn’t pay for the port and then some.
Yeah going to be honest, that’s coming across as some smelly BS.
Lastly if this is MS not seeing the worth is paying for these ports, then I stand by the decision, SE should be fronting these ports to grow / repair the brand on the platform, not asking hand out for payment from MS on sloppy seconds of mid barely AA games when the AAA titles that everyone does want from then are locked away from the platform.
Supergiant Games are back on Xbox again though after releasing Hades and announcing their next game for the platform.
Nobody is saying Square Enix is the only JP publisher skipping Xbox. However, in general, the trend with Japanese games releasing on Xbox seem more positive (at least comfortably compared to Xbox One generation). How come Square Enix seem to be in the opposite direction?
the bastion dev and MS as far as understand it had a falling out over the old XBLA structure (like Phil fish and J blow) them skipping Xbox after that was understandable cos XBLA was a toxic as fuck platform to get a game published on back in the day - absolutely past MS fault, but looks like it has been repaired with hades.
never said it was only SE skipping but they are the most egregious, by this I mean there’s no rhyme or reason to it in current form after having supported the Xbox platform for so long 10 - 13 years kinda, ( the gust stuff from NISA and the legend of heroes stuff is niche even by JP standards with no previous Xbox platform experience, don’t blame them or expect them as they don’t sell all that much on the other platforms anyway.)
Just comes across as sus when Sega. Capcom, Konami (with suikoden no less), Koei Tecmo, Bamco and others all do support the platform.
Although I will accept some your point on a few accounts like the Megaman BN game being missing for some asinine reason.
as SE is a 3rd party “international” video game company that answers to shareholders 1st and foremost I do argue it is their responsibility to grow their IP to make more money (yay for capitalism). Thus making their product reach as many users as possible should be their directive (pretty much why it’s rare for western company’s to shun the platform).
Taking money hats or pay-outs might alleviate some financial hardships short term, but long term Ip growth should be the goal and locking shit to 1 preferred platform or missing others cos of initial low sales is a recipe for IP / company stagnation
Square is one of the biggest japanese publisher. There is no other big publisher constantly skipping Xbox.
Much smaller japanese publisher like Dangen, Marvelous, XSeed and Playism releasing games without incentive by Xbox.
Well this was the phase in which Sony supports Indie devs and Microsoft abandoned support for Indie devs (XBLA).
Look at how Square release their games on Xbox. Only two big Square games release day 1 in Xbox One.
FF15 which was a flop
KH3 which Xbox players have no connection without playing all of those prequels
All other games are ports 1-2 years after the Playstation version or much smaller games like Star Ocean or Chrono Cross.
How can you expect a growing audience when their biggest games FF14, FF7R, FF16 are skipping Xbox ? Even if they release one year later it doesn’t change much because everyone who truly wants to play those games are gonna buy a PlayStation.
Pretty much this - it’s like if Capcom only ported ace attorney, Megaman and BOF ports that didn’t sell but ensured all the big games missed Xbox - there wouldn’t be much of an audience for their games on the platform.
I feel like I say this ad nauseum but SE doing what their doing isn’t helping their company grow , regardless of who should be paying the costs for ports (SE), it is the directive of a publisher to make the arrow go up.
Timed exclusives or money hats don’t do that long term cos one day SONY might and can just walk away from the table.
I’ll give you all some napkin math
FF8 - FF9 sold around 8 - 10 mil units back in the PS1 era (7 sold a lot more due to the Watergate effect). That was one platform in the 90’s , fast forward to 2020 and FF7r sells around 5 - 8 mil before the intergrade edition, that’s ZERO IP growth from the PlayStation audience** in 30 years.
But wait, FF13 sold around 11 - 13 mil and FF15 sold around 14 - 16 mil so growth right?
Yeah, that’s known as the XBOX and / or PC ports.
Yes maybe XBOX doesn’t add a lot of sales to their smaller games and thus justify to SE the port costs but that’s simply an end symptom where the root cause is the general omission of bigger titles encouraging XBOX fans to buy into their games.
Fans I might add have no issues buying / playing RE or MH, Yakuza, Persona, Tales of, Scarlett Nexus, Dark souls etc. Not as many as PS I might add but enough to keep justifying the new releases and ports.
Of which RE, MH Yakuza and especially the Dark souls universe have all grown massively in the past 5 - 10 years, in no small part to the XBOX audience.
Worse case is the Xbox version makes back the cost of the game (2 million copies) which means all other versions are purely profit…I think there is bad blood between MS and SE.
Xbox has been hoodwinking a lot of SE in the last few years
Stole Darryl Galagher for The inititive
IO Interactive is now making Xbox exclusives
So is Avalanche with Contraband
DONTNOD make Tell Me Why
Crystal Dynamics to make Perfect Dark
If I didn’t know better Xbox has been mildely f***ing SE over for a few years. Maybe they took it personally.
It’s really hard to justify SE’s marketing strategy.
THEATRHYTHM FINAL BAR LINE is not on Xbox, ok that’s fine. “People on Xbox don’t buy FF games.” And it’s also not on PC.
PARANORMASIGHT: The Seven Mysteries of Honjo is not on Xbox, cause we know Xbox fans don’t like visual novels. But it’s also not on Playstation.
People are fine if SE just skip some titles on Xbox but the question is are they going to release ANY new games here? We see no announced titles for Xbox yet now. I used to think KH4 would be there but now I am not sure. I probably won’t take it if one day they end the console exclusivity of Forspoken and pretend to be friendly again: “Hey Xbox fans we bring you our brand new title. Please don’t disappoint us in sales.”
You “don’t increase an audience considerably” you build it up steadily over consistent releases. And stop it with the whole Xbox gamers on play COD, halo, fifa, Forza nonsense.
eh you never know until you try. Nobody would’ve thought Yakuza series would be a hit on xbox due to xbox being known as console for shooters and sports box. However, Sega took the chance of bringing the series to xbox, and were able to build a community on xbox for it.
I agree that Microsoft needs to get more aggressive in that market by building a pipeline there and other Asian markets. I think at the end of the day we can’t judge platforms based on past data because interests can change on a platform, and it does seem bad business wise to skip out on a platform who is going to gain market share due to acquisitions and other factors.
You don’t only grow by attracting that audience, you can also grow by converting the existing audience. That’s exactly how Sega and others have leveraged Game Pass. And while we don’t have data on Yakuza, we know that Sega has release every Yakuza game on Xbox Day 1 since they started. They would not do that if Game Pass did not successfully build an audience.
To be fair while I agree it is down to Xbox that there isn’t as strong an audience for Japanese games and JRPGs in particular - I do think they could have done more to build an audience for there games and are just as responsible. Releasing mostly older titles on the platform then not releasing their biggest titles on Xbox isn’t a great way to build an audience.
Sega wanted to make Yakuza officially multiplatform, it came to PC then they made a deal with Xbox to introduce all games into gamepass and worked so well that the franchise is also associated with both platforms. Sega keeps releasing Yakuza games into Xbox and its well recognized.
Square didn’t give a shit after ROTR exclusivity controversy propped up by the media, decied to alienate Xbox consumers even if Final Fantasy games sold pretty well, even KH3 did top ranks on Xbox One like PS4 on NPD charts. Then later did the same with PC players with EGS exclusives and etc, FF7R on Steam did a worse opening than Persona 4 Golden and Persona 5 individually, why both consumers should care if the company doesn’t help? To this day Kingdom Hearts series on PC is only available on EGS.
Its not just Xbox that has to bring consumers, its the company who also needs to help to bring it, its their own product. For example, there’s a company in Brazil who sells vehicles from multiple carmakers and even have a factory to build some of them, CAOA, it represented Hyundai as a whole until 2012 with big sucess and Subaru to this day with zero recognition, one person told me that the reason why Hyundai became so popular here its because the headquarters wanted it to happen while Subaru didn’t care. Hyundai would then build its own factory in the country due to this efforts’ results.
Hopefully a solution is found. Remember all those older FF games that came to Game Pass? Good times. But I don’t agree with Jez that Xbox is missing out on a huge game, is it really? It’s not like we’ve been missing super great games by SE. One that would sting is DQ though.
You “don’t increase an audience considerably” you build it up steadily over consistent releases. And stop it with the whole Xbox gamers on play COD, halo, fifa, Forza nonsense.