New Rumour Hints At Exciting Future For Square Enix Games On Xbox

Instead of acquiring studios I would roll into these companies and cut them a fat check to simply have their catalog on Gamepass

@ZuneTattooGuy But that is extremely pricey to the point it just vastly cheaper to just buy outright buy the company.

Final Fantasy 1-6 Pixel Remasters on Game Pass please.

You are absolutely right, @AverageGamer. The problem Xbox has, @ZuneTattooGuy, is that the current split for Xbox versus PlayStation is roughly 30/70. That means that for Microsoft to put something on the Xbox as an exclusive, or even Game Pass, they have to compensate the Developer for the other 70% that they do not get to sell to due to it not being on the PlayStation. Even for a game that is already on the PlayStation, such as FF7, Square Enix would still expect to lose some sales were it to appear on the Game Pass, and would expect a level of compensation as a consequence. It's far more cost effective to buy the company and then do as you please with the games, including having them as fully exclusive...

I thought Sony was going to buy these guys?

@ZuneTattooGuy If you look at Xbox's leaked internal emails it's clear they don't like that approach.
A studio acquisition is an asset.
It's something that gives back for the long run.
A big game on Gamepass, while great for us and Gamepass in the short term, is money thrown down the drain to sustain something just for a little while longer.

To be honest if you are a hardcore Final Fantasy fan you probably have a PS4/5 or a PC/Steam Deck etc. FF16 is currently the only true PS5 exclusive !! (or will be until 2024, Spiderman 2 will take its place)

@AlwaysPlaying I very much doubt Sony are interested. It wouldn't add anything to their long term strategy like Bungie and Nixxes have.

I really hope this is true.

As a massive JRPG and Final Fantasy fan, this would be a dream come true.

I also wish they’d release some other PlayStation/Nintendo JRPGs from Square Enix like the Secret of Mana series on Xbox.

I hope so. My wife has a ps5 but I would love these to be on my xbox. And maybe SE will actually release Pixel Remaster on disc at a reasonable price or actually be sold in shops like any other game.

I do hope that this rekindled relationship between Microsoft and Square Enix leads to some release parity - at least for those games that aren't [timed] exclusive to other platforms - kind of a shame to continue to see Xbox getting skipped.

Sonys money not cutting it anymore? SE are not in a great position, they’re struggling. Maybe they’ve realised cutting themselves off from other markets and taking money isn’t the most profitable anymore. I think they’re kind of being forced to open up due to their poor performance.

Nah.... I won't expect anything from Square. As long as Sony is there they will do everything they can to stop japanese developers from coming to Xbox. But they should reconsider this though.

@Belkan

It’s not that simple anymore. Square is not doing well and when you aren’t doing well in business, you make changes. Square continuing to make games as exclusives for Sony when they wind up underperforming just doesn’t make sense so at least for me, this rumor isn’t shocking at all. It’s just pure common sense in my book and was inevitable at this rate.

Square effectively cut themselves off from a decent sized portion of the market and it’s becoming clear that they need to switch things up if they want to see levels of success that they want to see.

They may have wanted to save FF7R, FF16 and others for a Nintendo Direct event, and then have a simultaneous release on Xbox - rather than announce everything at the Xbox Tokyo Game Show.

@AlwaysPlaying Announcing a major acquisition focused on exclusivity while fighting a major acquisition by a competitor likely wouldn't go down well with regulators and Jim Ryan did say nothing is more important than CoD. So if Sony were to announce a Square Enix acquisition, it would be after the Activision acquisition had either gone through or been blocked to the point that Microsoft walks away.

Hopefully they stay independent, their Switch support has been amazing so far and there's so much potential for Switch 2 to fill in gaps like FFVII Remake trilogy, FFXVI, native versions of KH, etc.

Basically SE is the only thing that made me get a PS5. Take them out the equation and Playstation really doesn’t interest me much unfortunately. Insomniac is the only other reason but not sure they are enough by themselves.

Hopefully Xbox can get all the SE goodies!

@Moonglow I was talking about Square struggling and maybe realising Sonys money isn’t the best option for them anymore financially.

PlayStations business model is a whole different discussion but I think they’re learning the hard way that top end multimillion $ games isn’t sustainable in the long term.

@RIghteousNixon at least square knows, Sony alone isn't enough for them. Sony exclusive looks to be back firing now. This is a massive blow to them. This isn't the PS4 era now, where Sony was too carried away and get cocky over the success of ps4.

@themightyant Let's put it this way, Bungie and Nixxes are the only two studios Sony have bought that they didn't have a long exclusive-based relationship with, outside of the recent trio of studios that haven't released a game at all. Insomniac (Ratchet & Clank), Bluepoint (remakes of mostly Sony games) and Housemarque (Dead Nation, Super Stardust, and a few more) all had long relationships with Sony prior to being bought out. If Sony is going to buy random studios, it's going to be something akin to their push into PC, mobile and cloud gaming...which is conveniently what Nixxes, Savage and Haven are involved in. I'd mention live service, but that's a dirty term on Push Square. Firewalk is doing a live service game for them.

I'm not saying I'm right, and you're wrong, I'm just saying that's where the logic is when it comes to buying studios. They are probably more likely to buy out Just Add Watter, Q-Games or nDreams before they think about someone like Square Enix.

Microsoft on the other hand? IP grab. Otherwise they'd just buy 40 individual studios without the baggage that Activision has. One wonders why Microsoft hasn't bought the obscenely talented guys who make the Ori games yet.

@Belkan

Yeah, even for some of Sony’s big 1st party exclusives, you are seeing relatively low sales when compared to their overall installed base. People can run around spouting Sony’s impressive hardware sales figures all day long, but the money is made through selling games and services, not hardware.

Square sees the writing on the wall. They need to sell to the entire market and cease walling themselves off into a corner of the console market by focusing mostly on Sony.

Any rumor about Ms and falcom?

I have really fond memories of square from the ff 7-9 days but the truth is I haven’t really like a final fantasy since 9. Including 16 (and especially, especially 13)

Sony acquiring SE would hurt Nintendo a lot more than it would do Xbox.

I just want to see release date parity going forward, especially with games that are revealed for other than PS

Square Enix announced a new title Little Goody Two Shoes for the end of October yesterday also for Xbox.

Just tell me where/when/how to preorder 🤙

@themightyant Studios who considered themselves fiercely independent like Bungie and Insomniac are now under the umbrella of a bigger company, but it doesn't matter anyway. If someone doesn't want to sell up, you're going to make them sell up whether they like it or not! (that's a hostile takeover for those who don't know) But I get your point.

Brain drain is absolutely a thing of course. Some of Sony's recent buys have been studios with no prior releases, but expertise in various areas like cloud and live service. For Sony as a whole, they have a weird relationship with mobile. Unlike Microsoft, they still have their mobile division (though the phones are so close to stock Android they may as well not), but they also have about three or four different mobile publishers, including the guys who publish Fate/Grand Order, which is one of the highest grossing mobile games of all time. That one isn't PlayStation though, but rather Aniplex, which is an anime company that is rather confusingly under the Sony Music banner, but I digress.

I'm not sure "a game every quarter" is going to benefit Microsoft too much if every other game is a Fallout or a Starfield. Sure, they can bring them out every week if they wanted to, but anecdotally I've seen plenty of people say they aren't playing Starfield now that Forza is out, and I imagine the same would be true of Redfall. The average person only has X number of hours to game every night after work, spouse and kids. It's not going to work as well if every game is a 100+ hour epic. But that's why Microsoft probably has a million analysts on retainer and I don't.

Although my saying that does raise an unrelated question I've asked myself enough times - are games too long these days?

@themightyant I spent the last day trying to formulate a response to this that wasn't "I feel completely identical!". If you've ever seen me in the PushSquare forums (albeit more or less only on one topic. I'm not good at foruming!), you'll probably have noticed my Sonic The Hedgehog marathon. I may have Amy Rose-tinted glasses on, but playing them has seriously been the most amount of fun I've had in gaming in a long time.

So when I realised that Assassin's Creed Mirage was coming out, I realised I wasn't up to date with Odyssey and Valhalla. A DLC is supposed to be a more streamlined, significantly shorter version of the game it comes from. Took me more than a week just to push through all three of the Odyssey DLCs, and it's not like I was only playing for five minutes at a time! Compare that to some of the old Sonic games from decades ago, and I have been able to knock those out in a day! I'm not sure that's a good thing though. But while I did enjoy playing Assassin's Creed, I'm not sure I like the time investment it takes.

Honestly, when I game, I simply just want it to be fun! Long games make it less fun though.

@themightyant Thanks muchly. 😊

Odyssey is super long. It also has over 40 assassinations of just the Templar allegory group alone. Even more when you add in the DLC. But it also gives you huge amounts of context and exposition, particularly towards the end. Enjoyable, but don't expect to be done in a week, or even a month. Like we say, time ≠ enjoyment. Valhalla I've barely put a dent in, so I can't comment.