360 Definitely Out for XIV - Lessons About Selling XIV to The West

[Balbanes]

http://m.ign.com/articles/1189705

The Xbox 360 is being yanked off the shelves of Japan's retailers.

Western games are at best a niche market in Japan.

Japan is, on a global scale, "insignificant" to software publishers.

These are some snippets of the above-linked article. Now, I think Yoshida has done an excellent job so far with XIV, but what can be learned from this article in regards to making XIV a global success, rather than just a success in Japan? Which, btw, was a big focus for Wada.

[syntaxlies]

i read an article about a year ago about the heads of the Japanese gaming market coming together to talk auot the death of Japanese gaming and how they need to westernize to survive. some of the things they pointed out were:
Japanese pride, not buying American games.
Americans think playing games when your an adult is cool
Japanese adult game playing is frowned upon
Americans love of first person shooters and the Japanese inability to make them
so that's some of the things i remember from he story.

[AmewKitsune]

Also, there was totally that port of XI for the 360...

[Defmetal]

That XI port for 360 was horrible.
It got nasty reviews for the Play Online, it was riddled with bugs, it crashed alllllllllllllll the time in Dynamis and Besieged...
It also had dreadful framerate issues, oftentimes having no more than 15 fps (for a game capped at 29.997).

Fafnir fights often turned to 3 FPS ordeals, and modern Abyssea struggles to allow any action to be performed.

One of the major problems, as recognized by the community, was the inability to configure graphical settings, such as turning Character Shadows off or Weather Effects, to boost FPS in towns and HNM Contests. (As shadows are a major FPS killer in ff11 on nvidia gpus, which the 360 uses).

[Jennestia]

That XI port for 360 was horrible.

The only problem with XI on 360 is the memory leak that causes the system to freeze after x amount of hours during certain events, which btw, was corrected for many. The only long standing event remains Abyssea and Dynamis.

Fafnir fights often turned to 3 FPS ordeals, and modern Abyssea struggles to allow any action to be performed.

This sounds like a personal problem -- my FPS were never below 25 in crowded areas on my 360. Hell, even in bottle neck areas (Abyssea during JP prime) my FPS is still above 25 FPS. Remember, FFXI was originally ported to the 360 VERY early when the 360 was still pretty unstable. The latest models of 360s have zero problems running XI beyond the memory leaks that just quite frankly is always going to exist since they're very restricted when dealing with MS because a lot of updates to the console ignores XI's existence.

Japan is, on a global scale, "insignificant" to software publishers.

Which is good, since it's not like they're using our systems or anything.

[ChiefCurrahee]

Just because a console isn't doing well in 1 region doesn't mean there isn't potential for profit worldwide.

*IF* FFXIV were ever ported to 360, it would present an opportunity for SE to sell their game to a much wider audience combined with PC and PS3. Even if it meant not doing well in Japan.

The article was about how Japan isn't a make or break deal for a platforms success any longer.

[Zeigrin]

Okay, when money is on the table and there is a fan demand it WILL happen. Now I shall take my leave of this topic before things get out of hand.

[Zenaku]

let ffxiv be release for xbox new console not 360 i just don't want it to be limit like the ps2. i wish the game was release for ps4 not the ps3 but w/e.

[Balbanes]

Really wasn't intending this to be a 360-port debate, but how SE needs to continue to adapt to make XIV a global success, rather than "just another JRPG."

[Winterclaw]

Really wasn't intending this to be a 360-port debate, but how SE needs to continue to adapt to make XIV a global success, rather than "just another JRPG."

But squenix is a japanese company and japan like japanese games. If they adapt it too much, it might not be popular in japan.