Monday, November 4th 2024
The Console Exclusive Era Draws to a Close as Square Enix Joins Ubisoft in Simultaneous Release Strategy
It looks like the single-platform exclusive era that has plagued the gaming industry since the 2010s is coming to an end. The writing has been on the wall for a while, with Square Enix already previously confirming that its games would be launching earlier on both PC and Xbox, but now, the game studio has confirmed that more of its titles will be launching to more platforms simultaneously. This comes after Ubisoft made a similar announcement regarding the launch of Assassin's Creed Shadows after a delay and a bit of controversy.
The news from Square Enix broke in an interview with Japanese outlet 4gamer.net, with Square Enix's Naoki Yoshida confirming that the strategy has proven beneficial in terms of attracting more players to the company's games, further explaining that PC is the largest audience for gaming. The game Yoshida was specifically addressing in the interview was the upcoming Fantasian Neo Dimension—an upcoming CRPG developed by Mistwalker Corporation and published by Square Enix, with a planned multi-platform launch on December 5, 2024—but Yoshida seems to imply that this new policy will apply to more games going forward. It appears that both the announcement by Square Enix and Ubisoft are driven by commercial motivations.During the interview Yoshida alluded to the fact that the simultaneous launch strategy has added more work on the development side of things, likely due to developing and porting a game at the same time, although he commented that the extra work has so far paid off due to the increased uptick in interest from consumers. Currently, Fantasian Neo Dimension has just over 2,000 followers on Steam, according to SteamDB, although this is likely due to the fact that it's a new IP in a niche genre. Yoshida expects the turn-based game to draw in the biggest audience on the Nintendo Switch.
Sources:
4gamer, SteamDB
The news from Square Enix broke in an interview with Japanese outlet 4gamer.net, with Square Enix's Naoki Yoshida confirming that the strategy has proven beneficial in terms of attracting more players to the company's games, further explaining that PC is the largest audience for gaming. The game Yoshida was specifically addressing in the interview was the upcoming Fantasian Neo Dimension—an upcoming CRPG developed by Mistwalker Corporation and published by Square Enix, with a planned multi-platform launch on December 5, 2024—but Yoshida seems to imply that this new policy will apply to more games going forward. It appears that both the announcement by Square Enix and Ubisoft are driven by commercial motivations.During the interview Yoshida alluded to the fact that the simultaneous launch strategy has added more work on the development side of things, likely due to developing and porting a game at the same time, although he commented that the extra work has so far paid off due to the increased uptick in interest from consumers. Currently, Fantasian Neo Dimension has just over 2,000 followers on Steam, according to SteamDB, although this is likely due to the fact that it's a new IP in a niche genre. Yoshida expects the turn-based game to draw in the biggest audience on the Nintendo Switch.
27 Comments on The Console Exclusive Era Draws to a Close as Square Enix Joins Ubisoft in Simultaneous Release Strategy
Market realities are changing and the money that exchanges hands from console manufacturers to third party publishers isn't enough to fund the development of games anymore, as costs are rising exponentially with each and every release. Sony's own PC endeavor is purely because it's no longer feasible to fund a title on console revenue alone.
Even Red Dead Redemption eventually made its way to PC officially, it took 14 years, but it's here.
Personally I'd say that Xbox Series S is the best choice from this gen, purely because of its price. Unbeliavable how PS5 is still so expensive. Shut up and take my money! :respect:
In this case, I welcome the move to not do exclusives on any platforms. However, it will become challenging for developers that need to simultaneously optimize games properly on all platforms. So I expect more bugs in the early stages of the game release. I believe one of the reason for the "exclusivity" on some platform is more to stagger the development work, like console first, then PC, vice versa.
Squares been shit since squaresoft merged with Enix, right not long after that disaster of a movie spirits within. They either rely on final fantasy 7 series to go piggy back off of to keep afloat or come out with abysmal shit like 15, 16 and Flopspoken. Dragon quest 11 was good though.
Two failing companies following each other - Ubisoft and Square.
See, since its a Windows OS modified on it and all games loaded are running in their own hypervisor, I don't think it would have been out of the realm of possibility of running a desktop environment where people could use their xbox series x as PC along side as a plug and play console.
Some stuff did not even compile at all, even after trying to fix for some hours.
Some stuff does not have any functionality or just crash at startup or randomly.
Git is a generic term for all those commands and repositories available which you can clone from the internet to your disk. I had several different "projects" i tried in the past years.
(I think a personal example will give a better point about code and compiling)
I also don't see, why there's not much more of older games being ported within PSN and Xbox ecosystems, and thus being finally released on PC.
There's huge amount of older games, that would overshadow any modern AAA projects sale, with almost free money. But stubborn Game companies and their owners, yet have too thick skull to understand this.
They should have test their audience, by what it likes and what dislikes. And then just listen to it, and do just what the player base wants. Not enforce own silly detached expectations and ideas. At least Ubisoft had. Actually they had many great stuff, being dug into the ground, long before they became Ubi.
Now, I don't see any chance for these games and their series being revived, and returned to the roots, with the overtakes by 10¢ and other aggressive and predatory companies.
This is just sad, that these dumb and greedy companies "leaders" sit on the huge legacy and do not even try to use it in good way. If something happens, they will just jump the sinking ship off, but the IP and ideas, projects, products will be forgotten, or misused. They don't even try to honor and value their heritage and achievements, and thus thousands of developers, and fan/modder's titanic work as well.
Also, it would be much easier to port to the PC(It was still developed on ordinary desktop PC to begin with), if µ$ didn't try to artificially distant their Xbox, and limit the compatibility, during XB/X360/XB1. Simultaneously degrade the desktop PC environment and platform, to the levels below Xbox ecosystem, in order to make their console look better and more "gaming" capable, than the "gaming inferior"/"working" platform, as PC was being positioned. The dumb API like DirectX, XAudio, and many other stuff, is the result of that. But even while having similar tools, the PC was still positioned as "incapable" of running console "xclusive" games.
All your games are belong to us.
So run, corporate, run to your on-demand streaming services now. Your last saving grace to mislead people into buying products they already had, by taking control away from them. Go Go! Lead the lemmings to the abyss, so you can lose your last shred of right of existence. In the meantime I'll enjoy my nigh infinite library of readily available games.
Eventually, the only ones left standing will be the companies that keep pushing out solid, new, content, because they actually have something left to sell us. The rest of the market is oversaturated already. You can get games anywhere, on anything, anyway, and even at any price you want to pay.
Microsoft and Sony are hoping to corner the market by taking all the content producers, but they're only buying the ones that were already making content, not the ones that serve the emerging gaming markets. Sony had a lot of unique IP tied to their console, which is no longer the case. Microsoft never had a lot of unique IP, but at least had some IP tied to Xbox. Why would I care about them any longer? So I can keep playing CoD and another shitty rendition of Elder Scrolls? Lel. Every time in the last ten plus years, the big gaming surprises came from anywhere BUT these big publishers and studios. That ain't gonna change. It took me a while but I got there. Lmao
Ergo its not very relevant what gets devved on, what matters more is what abstraction layer you can put on top and what the resulting performance is. In the end its just a software package with the same functions you're trying to run in different environments.
But frankly I think the cost will be rather close, look at that wild combinations of performance levels in the PS5 Pro. Its not guaranteed 4k60 at all. Its guaranteed upscale and dynamic res scaling to get there, in the best scenario.
So yeah, you're 'running 4K' except the internal render res is probably 1080p, and your frames are generated. Wooptiedoo. You can do that on a 4060 with DLSS.