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April 06, 2005
Microsoft is pulling all the stops on XBOX 2
Well after Hironobu Sakaguchi left SquareEnix to start his own company making games exclusive for XBOX now 2 more legends, Yoshiki Okamoto and Tetsuya Mizuguchi are going to work making XBOX 2 only games.
Ah Okamoto-san, I will always remember my misspent youth spending hours and hours (and hours) in front of Street Fighter 2 machine.
After the total failure in the lucrative Japanese market, MSFT seems to be pulling all the stops trying to entice more and more Japanese games developer to make titles for XBOX. I’ve always said that XBOX in its current form, despite its relative easiness to make pirated games, will not make it in both the Japanese and Asian market. Japanese and Asian prefer different types of games than the American, it has always been and I can’t see this to change in the foreseeable future.
It’s hard to explain the different between Jap/American/European games flavour unless you play a lot of games yourself and have tried the different type of games. I personally prefer the Jap style games, Euro games second and I hate most of the games that come out from the US. Don’t really know why, I guess how you grow up with your games has a lot to do with this.
The Asian market has always been leaning to the Japanese games since donkey’s age, luckily for us there are enough American who like those Japanese games to warrant conversion, especially the popular one. Having said that I still couldn’t forgive Square for not porting Final Fantasy 2, 3, and 4 to English version.
Anyway, around late last year the sales figure for PS2, XBOX and GameCube respectively were 70m, 15.5m, 14m. My prediction, seeing all the efforts that MSFT is currently doing, XBOX 2 will be closer to PS 3 and that will make GameCube a distant third on the next generation console. I don’t think XBOX 2 will take PS crown on the next gen console, but it’s looking very dangerous. I’m a PlayStation bigot so I will buy PS3 regardless, unless SquareEnix moved to XBOX exclusively. They’ve done this before moving from Nintendo to Sony when they were SquareSoft, it was the greatest coup in the gaming industry (ever, if I may say so), then you know it’s Game Over.
Posted by vhadiant at April 6, 2005 10:21 PM
