With the exception of the highly delayed port of Nier Automata from PS4 to Xbox One, a port that took several years before it was realised, it has been six years, since the launch of a game from PlatinumGames on an Xbox platform, and even then, that title was Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutants in Manhattan, an Activision licensed game that launched on all platforms. With those licensed Activison games off the table you have to rewind to 2013 and the launch of the Konami-published Xbox 360 game, Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance to find a game that Platinum developed for an Xbox platform. It has been a point of frustration for Xbox players, especially considering that the one title they did partner with Xbox to launch, was the doomed Scalebound. VGC’s Andy Robinson scored some time with PlatinumGames’ new CBO Takao Yamane along with PlatinumGames CEO Atsushi Inaba and vice president Hideki Kamiya, to ask the hard questions about the developer and their relationship with the platform. Perhaps we should be more hopeful of a multi-platform future for PlatinumGames’ works going forward based on their answers?
The first question on the matter saw Robinson ask the trio about the last five games they’ve launched post-Nier being unavailable on Xbox platforms, Inaba replied “We’re a developer, so we don’t really have any say or choice on what platforms we’re going to release our games on. We develop the game for the publisher, and the publisher basically holds that whole platform strategy in their own hands. So, we can’t really say anything, it’s completely up to the publisher. But personally, Xbox is a very important hardware platform moving forward, and we definitely want to keep Xbox in our sights moving forward for our titles. We want to release our titles on as many platforms as possible moving forward, so we definitely have Xbox in mind.”
Robinson then asked the developers why, some of their more recent independently published releases, The Wonderful 101 Remastered, and Sol Cresta, weren’t released on Xbox platforms given that they didn’t have any external publisher influence involved. To this it was Inaba again who replied, saying, “The reason is simply that we couldn’t make it in time as we didn’t have enough hands on deck. Basically, we were just too busy to include Xbox into our platform support. That’s pretty much it. There were no issues per se with Xbox hardware – that was not the case. And it wasn’t a case of us believing we wouldn’t sell any copies on Xbox or anything along those lines. It was just basically that we didn’t have enough hands on deck both in development and publishing to, develop the titles, release the titles, and also self-publish on the timeline for Xbox, when we started to look at our platform support. We couldn’t get it onto our list for the platforms we wanted to release the games on, unfortunately.”
Finally Robinson asked about the prospect of future games, Bayonetta 3 excluded given that it was partially financed by Nintendo, coming to Xbox gamers. Inaba rounded out this portion of their interview saying, “Our platform strategy is basically to cover as many platforms as we possibly can and attack from all angles. That’s what we’re thinking right now. With Yamane-san leading our publishing efforts for PlatinumGames moving forward, we are open to many different opportunities with different platforms. So, teaming up with Microsoft to put content on Xbox is definitely something we’re open to. We’re not negating any possibilities. We’re open to all possibilities, whether that be for all other first parties, whether it’s talking with Sony, Microsoft, or whoever else approaches us saying they want exclusive content on their platform, we are definitely open to those discussions as well. We are very happy to have our content on as many platforms as possible.”
So while the conversation doesn’t give us a definitive confirmation that future games will be available on Xbox consoles, there’s arguably more hope there than we’ve ever seen previously. Pair this with the fact that the messaging from both PlatinumGames and Xbox has changed in recent months surrounding the future of Scalebound, and perhaps Xbox fans should start looking forward to more PlatinumGames works in the future.
