It took a long time, but Square Enix finally launched Final Fantasy XIV on Xbox consoles earlier this year. Speaking with Eurogamer at Gamescom 2024, producer Naoki Yoshida discussed the community’s response to the launch and reiterated Square Enix’s commitment to Microsoft’s console platform.
Players have been waiting a long time for the Xbox release of Final Fantasy XIV, but I’m happy to say that we’ve seen a really strong response on Xbox. We’ve seen communities starting to establish and now they’re growing. We’ve had a pretty good response on Xbox.
With Final Fantasy XIV as an opportunity, we can take this opportunity to strengthen the community on Xbox towards the Final Fantasy franchise. I think this is where we would take more communication and work on establishing the community moving forward. And this is important, not for Final Fantasy XIV, but, I would say, for Square Enix. With Final Fantasy XIV’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.
I want you to just take this as a general argument, but when it comes to the Xbox platform and the fact that it was difficult for Japanese titles to be released on the platform, that’s tied into the fact that in the Japanese market there is an extremely low number of users on Xbox. And naturally, because we are Japanese developers, we have a desire for many people in our country to play our games. I think that applies to developers in any country, whichever country they come from, they want many people from their own country to play their games. Because of that, it’s really a tough point in terms of a business standpoint. I think that’s generally one perspective of how you can look at things in terms of the situation.
However, at Square Enix, we have been changing our policy. So now we are moving towards the policy of releasing our games on a multiplatform basis, and we really want as many players as possible to play our titles. So with Final Fantasy XIV 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.
Yoshida is referring, of course, to the new multiplatform strategy announced in May by Square Enix. It was largely due to the disappointing sales of PlayStation 5 exclusives like Final Fantasy XVI (also produced by Yoshida-san) and Final Fantasy VII Rebirth. The former, in particular, is just about to launch on PC, and it’s not at all far-fetched to imagine it will eventually launch on Xbox, too. It may be more tricky with the Final Fantasy VII Remake trilogy, as Sony is believed to have secured those games for good.
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