Have you ever heard something about a franchise that you know is beloved and then go, “Wait, that really happens to it?” It doesn’t have to be about video games, either. You might know a TV franchise that has gone on for years, and yet it’s constantly fought to stay alive amidst cancelation rumors. Or, you can look at the Marvel Cinematic Universe, see its many billion-dollar films, and then see that it’s had a lot of behind-the-scenes issues and a few flops. Then, for the gaming world, you can look at a series like Final Fantasy, see how long it’s been going, and realize that even with all its success, it struggles to move units sometimes.
This has been punctuated during the last two years as not one but two major Final Fantasy titles, including a certain release from February, released on PS5, yet didn’t exactly “set the world on fire” despite the critical praise it got. That is what led Square Enix to do a massive restructuring of itself, as they were taking huge losses, thanks to its games not “meeting expectations.”
That brings us to the one and only Yoshi-P, who was doing a talk with 4Chan about the upcoming RPG Fantasian Neo Dimension and revealed that future releases from Square Enix could see simultaneous drops instead of exclusive ones that eventually go elsewhere:
“Of course, we want you to play it a lot on other platforms as well. This time, we will also release the Xbox Series X|S version at the same time. In the future, Square Enix titles will be released simultaneously on each platform more and more, but since this is close to the first release, we would like Xbox users to play it as well.”
He further reiterated in a different interview that he expects the sixteenth mainline entry to come to Xbox soon, though he didn’t have an announcement about whether that would happen. They could also bring the “remake saga” to Xbox, though that might take a little longer. However, if they were to pull that off, that would open up the third and final part of the saga to be put on Xbox at launch.
While this may seem like an “obvious thing to do” for some, Sony and Square Enix have had an exclusivity deal for a while, and it’s only now that Square Enix is seeing that if it wants to keep its beloved RPG series healthy, they have to go even wider with its distribution.
