Saturday, March 21, 2015

Square Enix and Microsoft: Love Story, or Gang War?

So, if you haven't heard, FFXI will be closing its servers on the Xbox 360 March of next year (2016), this lead me to express interest in having FFXIV: A Realm Reborn (read the review?) released on the Xbox One.

"That'll never happen." You say.

Not so fast, I respond eagerly.

Producer and Director Naoki Yoshida was quoted saying the following at last year's (2014) E3:

"We really want to do an Xbox One version, as a big Xbox player myself.

The thing is, A Realm Reborn (ARR) is all about cross-platform compatibility. Anybody from any platform can play together. We don't want to split our community into people who play on this platform or play on that one.

So we're currently in talks with Microsoft, trying to convince them that this is what needs to happen."

So he's very eager to have ARR released on the One, and Microsoft HAS been developing quite the relationship with Square rather quickly the last few years. Ten years ago, did you ever think we'd have Final Fantasy or a Kingdom Hearts game on an Xbox console? I didn't.

Microsoft would be very stupid to shun Square, they have a large library of games and a large fanbase, the potential profit in it for both companies is quite high.

So while this doesn't mean a whole lot, it does mean that if it were up to Square, Xbox WOULD be getting ARR in the future, but that's up to Microsoft.

Microsoft has had experience with cross platform in the past, namely Shadowrun (X360 and PC).

No comments:

Post a Comment