More than anything, though, it’s a gut punch because it sends a message. The wrong message, really. Xbox had one major studio in Japan - no more. Xbox is making deals with third parties and independent creators, yes - it’s got something in the pipes with Hideo Kojima, for instance - but like I said, the first party is your north star. It’s your best foot forward. The message becomes this: Japanese games are not a priority for us.
No amount of Spencer pow-wowing on the Final Fantasy fanfest stage with the Square Enix CEOchanges that. No amount of co-marketing money thrown at Persona or Yakuza to get Xbox versions and Xbox logos on the trailers can undo that message. Publishing a Kojima game might help a bit - but not as much as having a beloved Japanese studio in your actual stable. In the end, Kojima is just a gun for hire - whatever he makes for Xbox will be compared to Death Strandingand his big new spy franchise at Sony.
And furthermore, if you were a Japanese publisher or developer approached for acquisition, how would you rate the odds of survival for your business based on the evidence before you? Would government regulators trust that Microsoft would be a safe pair of hands for Japanese brands, big or small? In 2019, the year before the Bethesda deal, Xbox mulled over a purchase of Square Enix, not for the first time in its history. How much of Square Enix would remain now had the company pursued that takeover?
It’s funny especially because the attachment rate of the average gamer to a console is like less than 4 games. Microsoft killed their cash cow when they mismanaged Halo into oblivion. Players came to Xbox for Halo not the other way around. Once they had that audience they invested into them with more titles (like halo 3 and gears of war) and improved online experiences, by the time the 360 was done, Microsoft’s new direction for the console including the announcement (then retraction) of CD keys being their new killer feature, they lost the entire audience at the turn of the hardware generation. Players ended up mostly on PC at that point.
“Xbox…not a platform for fans of Japanese games”.
Are people really surprised by this?
What big Japanese games have ever been exclusively for Xbox?
Blue Dragon? Lost Odyssey? Both of which would have been more successful on Playstation, or at the very least whatever Nintendo console was relevant then.
Honestly, it just a bad time to be a fan of Japanese games in general.
No one in Japan has an Xbox and the vast majority of people outside of Japan with one didn’t buy it to play anything Japanese (nor have they ever).
Anything getting released on Playstation out of Japan is getting censored one way or another. Anything weird or crazy or violent or sexual is fine in Western developed games, but when it comes to Asian ones, then it’s too much. It’s almost as if Sony hates Asians.
Nintendo’s hardware is so old, you’ll be lucky to get more that 20 FPS on anything multiplatform, and no one wants to make anything exclusive for it because they have to compete against Nintendo.
And if it’s on PC, it’s either a terrible console port or isn’t made because no one in Japan games on PC.
You’ve been WAY behind on japan’s opinion of PC games, it’s easier now to count the games that don’t receive a port than games that do, like Unicorn Overlord. I dreamed of having Persona and Like A Dragon on PC back then. Even the newest idolm@ster is on steam and people are making a translation for it.
Since it’s just a massive headache for niche devs nowadays they are just skipping the Playstation version altogether, like the new Bunny Garden having only switch and PC versions.
japans fully behind pc nowadays. there’s a reason why japanese devs of various sizes for the first time in the past few years have made pc ports of their games. Bandai, whose never had games like taiko no tatsujim, nor tekken on pc, and virtually the entire gundam franchise, puts most of the titles on pc. Capcom who never put monster hunter on pc till world, and always made pc a second thought, has put all of their titles. on pc now. Sega puts some of its largest IPs like Phantasy Star online on pc.
the same trend can also be seen in reverse, where a lot of wetern developers are having japanese language support in their games, one of the most popular in japan, being apex legends.
japan not being into pcs is very outdated information nowadays.
Idk the last few years have been pretty good when it comes to PC ports of Japanese games IMO.
We got stuff like the RE remakes, good PC ports for japanese franchises which never had PC ports (for example Ace Combat 7 and Armored Core 6), not to mention that it seems much more likely for new japanese IPs to just have a PC port when they release these days (as long they’re not exclusive).
Weirdly the original Xbox and the 360 are full of Japanese exclusives. It was also the only place where you could play some Cave shmups.
