There is a difference when they skipped at the beginning when Xbox completely ignored the Japanese market in 2013-2018 and to the situation in 2023.
If you don’t grow your audience, you will never get your investment back. There is no way that all those Kemco games have big audience to get to their break even point, but they still release their games.
While it’s getting better and japanese publisher starts to release their popular IPs on Xbox again like Namco with Tales or Marvelous with Story of Seasons.
Even new IPs are coming to Xbox like
Loop 8 by Marvelous
Melon Journey by Xseed
Blue Protocol by Namco
Square is making a 180 and starts to skip Xbox. How does this make any sense ?
They said in an interview years ago that they need an incentive to port games to Xbox. Should Microsoft really keep paying Square to release their games on Xbox ?
You’re arguing there’s no playerbase for this, when sales of previous entries prove that wrong, Final Fantasy XIII for all the mess it is was a million seller, all three games were re-released under the Platinum Hits label, Final Fantasy 15 which is another one also sold more than a million, so did KH3, they are easy to find games in any store.
Final Fantasy is a big name that anyone and their ancestors know, the reason why PC and Xbox customers don’t care its because Square doesn’t care to make efforts at all, so they also sent their message with their wallets.
Its still another storefront to manage and if they use some Amazon specific thing for microtransactions etc. they have more to handle than only some Android.apk
See, this is where things get complicated. Why they do it with no worries but Square come off looking hesitate. Luckily they didn’t say “coming to all platforms.” I don’t know. It seems more complex than what many of them knows.
I have no problem when smaller games skip Xbox. Ace Attorney and Megaman were never big on Xbox and are much smaller IPs than Final Fantasy. I mean for whatever reason Capcom release Ghost Trick on Xbox.
Square fully stopped bringing games to Xbox in 2023. Their biggest IP had a remastered collection and is skipping Xbox.
You’re arguing one big company that has gone the opposite of the industry by restricting platforms once supported for no reason, against smaller developers who had no funds and now are supporting the Xbox, the only thing it shows is how the point stands, developers with little resources are willing to work with the platform while a bigger one is being picky. I remember how many smaller Xbox 360 games were Japan exclusive and were regarded as much better than the japanese triple A games that Microsoft invested back then.
To me, the only path for xbox to get someone like square enix to commit to Xbox is to keep growing until they are very hard to ignore anymore(and they are heading that way). Japanese companies has this “keiretsu” thing going on, so its always gonna be harder for a foreign company to get games on their platform from that side of the world. Xbox would need to have a big mind share like the 360 era imo.
Such a simple concept that continues to confuse people for some odd reason.
It’s almost as if the games actually being available for the console helps in building an audience or something. People forget that there was most definitely an audience for JRPG growing on the 360 with Tales of Vesperia as an exclusive along with nearly every other major rpg hitting the including FF13 which caused the great meltdown of 2008.
But over what ? It’s not like they had an exclusive fall through like Scalebound. Did Microsoft make a demand: “We won’t give you GP checks anymore until you stop doing Final Fantasy deals with Playstation.”?
I believe they would have to give the okay for that because it happened before Embracer acquired them. The only thing I can think of, and it may be tinfoil hat theory.
The only thing I can think of is Microsoft may have done a backdoor deal with Square to buy the western studios for billions, but ABK deal of course would stall a deal.
? It’s not like they had an exclusive fall through like Scalebound. Did Microsoft make a demand: “We won’t give you GP checks anymore until you stop doing Final Fantasy deals with Playstation.”?