Final Fantasy XVI producer and Final Fantasy XIV director Naoki Yoshida was recently interviewed by the Japanese website 4Gamer alongside series creator Hironobu Sakaguchi to discuss the upcoming game FANTASIAN Neo Dimension, which will be available next month on PC and consoles after an exclusive debut on Apple Arcade.
When asked whether he’d ever want to make a game for Apple’s platform, Yoshida-san replied that in his mind, the idea of a platform exclusive is disappearing altogether.
Now the biggest gaming platform is the PC, and with the streaming boom, PC-based gamers are becoming mainstream. But on the other hand, smart devices are becoming a platform that everyone has for the younger generation. Given that, if possible, it would be better to make it playable on any platform rather than making it for a specific platform in order to reach a much larger audience. With that as a basic idea, I decide whether the game I’m trying to make will run properly on smart devices.
If the parts that can’t be run are equal to the fun of the game, I’ll give up on smart devices and make it fun. On the other hand, if it fits within the specs and can be played without the device getting too hot to touch, it’s definitely better to make it for smart devices as well. In my mind, the idea of a platform exclusive is disappearing altogether.
Final Fantasy XVI certainly suffered from that. It was only available on PlayStation 5 for over a year, which led to weak sales, similar to Final Fantasy VII Rebirth. Now, Square Enix has largely switched to a multiplatform strategy that will take Xbox into much greater account. Yoshida reiterates the shift later in the aforementioned interview:
This time, we will also release the Xbox Series X|S version (of FANTASIAN: Neo Dimension) 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.
Xbox fans are hoping Square Enix will eventually bring Final Fantasy XVI to their favorite platform, too, after the recent debut on PC.
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