Phantom Blade Zero’s developer S-GAME has denied rumors that they had rejected Xbox.
S-GAME was replying to a story that spread over the weekend from ChinaJoy 2024. As reported by Insider Gaming, a Brazilian news outlet allegedly interviewed a staffer from S-GAME. When the staffer was asked if Phantom Blade Zero could come to Xbox, the staffer supposedly replied that “Nobody needs this platform.”
While that response was certainly incendiary, there were too many details that should have raised questions about its credibility. Among other things, the Brazilian news outlet didn’t have a name for the supposed staffer, and outlets reporting on it were relying on a fan translation, with no verification if the translation was accurate. Other outlets were not able to verify if this even happened.
The Phantom Blade Zero Twitter account came out with this statement:
“Recently, we noticed that some media outlets have claimed to have interviewed an unnamed developer from S-GAME at Chinajoy, who seems to have made some statements regarding the release platforms and strategy for Phantom Blade Zero.
We want to clarify that these claimed statements do not represent S-GAME’s values or culture, as we believe in making our game accessible to everyone and have not ruled out any platforms for Phantom Blade Zero. We are hard at work on both the development and publishing fronts to ensure that as many players as possible can enjoy our game at release and in the future.
Our team is looking forward to sharing more development updates soon, and we are excited to bring our world premiere demo to Gamescom this month!”
Interestingly enough, this statement received a response from Palworld’s community manage Bucky:
“Absolutely wild that some media outlet basically wrote “we spoke to a nameless developer at one of the largest games expos in the world and he said Xbox bad” was enough to convince so many people.
No recording, no pictures, no names.”
Sony is certainly famous for having secured third party exclusives through the years. When PlayStation launched, they convinced developers like Namco to make their arcade games like Ridge Racer and Tekken on custom hardware, to facilitate easy ports to the PlayStation. In other cases, they signed publishing deals, such as the arrangement they made with Naughty Dog and Universal Interactive for Crash Bandicoot.
Nowadays, they can still arrange for publishing deals, like they did for Shift Up’s Stellar Blade. But in general, game studios are incentivized to bring their games to more platforms, not less. If Square Enix had to choose one console because it was prohibitively expensive to develop Final Fantasy VII for PlayStation, Sega Saturn, and Nintendo 64, nowadays the environment is such that it’s cheap to produce a game to be multiplatform from the onset.
Furthermore, games nowadays are stronger when they are available on more platforms, not less. The biggest games today, from Fortnite to Minecraft to Call of Duty, are playable on any platform they can run in, including mobile.
Infamously, Helldivers 2 was a breakout hit for Sony late last year, only to see their player numbers crater when Sony enforced region locking limitations for the game on PC. Subsequently, Square Enix reported that the PlayStation 5 exclusive Final Fantasy VII Rebirth did not meet their sales expectations.
If big, successful companies feel the pressure to go multiplatform, how much bigger is that pressure for new game companies like S-GAME? Their lack of capacity to release Phantom Blade Zero to more platforms doesn’t mean it’s out of the picture, only that they made the best decision with what they have.
Phantom Blade Zero will definitely be bigger if S-GAME could make it a global multiplatform release. A belated release to more platforms will also still be better than not even trying. It may be contradictory on its face, but if Xbox owners (and Nintendo fans too, because why not?) want this game to come to their platform, they should hope that it sees success on PlayStation 5 and PC when it releases.
