Naoki Yoshida has hinted at Square Enix bringing even more of their games to Xbox, following Final Fantasy 14’s release on the platform.
Eurogamer got to interview Final Fantasy 14’s director, where he talked about how the port came about in the first place. As quoted on Windows Central, Yoshida said this:
“With Final Fantasy 14’s release on Xbox, Phil Spencer spent a lot of his time and a lot of effort and put in a lot of hard work into making it a reality. So we would like to make the best of that and further deepen the relationship with Xbox gamers moving forward.”
So we know that Square Enix did decide by themselves that they would start a new strategy to make more of their high profile games multiplatform, and also cut down on their overall game output in general. That means making less experiments and calculated risks, such as Forspoken or Foamstars.
But its clear that the Final Fantasy 14 deal for Xbox started even earlier than that. You can’t just port an entire multiplatform live service game in the span of a single quarter, or even just a year. And that definitely could not have been possible for a game at that scale. So Yoshida giving Phil Spencer credit for making this happen is deliberate. We may not even begin to imagine the dealmaking and compromises he had to do to make it work.
Yoshida then talked about how Square Enix’s noncommittal relationship with Xbox has played out. This is the first game that Square Enix has brought to Xbox since Final Fantasy XV, and he’s aware that they lost fans in the Xbox community as a result. Yoshida also talked about how Xbox has struggled to sell consoles since. But, he hopes that Square Enix’s return to their platform will help them get their platform back on track in the market. In Yoshida’s words:
“So with Final Fantasy 14 as the starting point, we do want to release more Square Enix games on Xbox, and there will be more of our titles released on Xbox. So I hope players will look forward to future things to come on the platform.”
Of course, the first such games that would come to mind would be Final Fantasy 16, and then a distant second would be Foamstars? But seriously, even their former Nintendo Switch exclusive Dragon Quest Monsters: The Dark Prince was just released on Steam. That’s definitely now at play to come to Xbox as well.
While it’s well known that Final Fantasy XV sold more on PlayStation 4 than Xbox One, as it turns out, that doesn’t really matter. It turns out Square Enix is still best served investing to bring their games to as many platforms as possible, because it’s the total number of sales that are important to them. Hopefully, they do find the audience with Xbox fans that they should have kept this whole time.
