The harping on the C;C Xbox One launch is I think rather hindsight-ish.As
@Parzival mentioned up the thread, it's more than likely that MAGES was locked into some sort of agreement with Microsoft that they could not easily break. They had started releasing their games on the Xbox 360 in the late 00s, and typically how it goes with exclusivity contracts is that the platform owner pays off a considerable chunk of the development costs.
This is why so many video games in general did not used to release on multiple platforms. It's a safe business strategy and a good way to ensure you don't take any losses if the game only does modestly well, which is more likely than not. Additionally, as I said earlier, the Xbox 360 did not perform poorly in Japan as it sold 1.61 million units. It is quite likely that they received profitable returns on Chaos;Head, Steins;Gate and Robotics;Notes' launch on the 360.
When Peter Moore was head of the Xbox division, one thing that he tried to do was strengthen the system abroad following the mostly regional success of the original Xbox (though the original Xbox had some great Japanese games too, mainly Sega ones who Microsoft formed a partnership with once they became a third party developer).
The 360 actually has a pretty killer lineup of Japanese games as a result, nothing like how the system is today. It had two RPGs, Blue Dragon and Lost Odyssey, that were made by Mistwalker which was headed by the creator of Final Fantasy, Hinorbu Sakaguchi. Tales of Vesperia was exclusive to it for a long time (over a decade), as was Beautiful Katamari which are both fairly high profile Japanese game series. A lot of CAVE shmups were, outside of arcades, also exclusive to the 360; such as Deathsmiles, Akai Katana, Dodonpachi SaiDaiOuJou, Mushihimesama, probably a few more I'm forgetting. Even the original Idolmaster is still exclusive to the 360 in this fashion too, and some other higher profile multi-plat JRPGs such as Eternal Sonata and Star Ocean 4 were timed exclusives. The 360 also received most of the high profile multiplats during this time, such as the Metal Gear HD collection and FF13.
There are other Japanese games from smaller developers too, like Magna Carta 2, Sylpheed, Ginga Force, Spectral Force 3, but by now I think you get the picture. A lot of Japanese developers ranging from big (Bamco) to small put their games on Xbox, and it was more than likely quite profitable given how many of them did it. Unfortunately later in the Xbox's lifespan, Don Mattrick takes over the Xbox division and ruins this for everyone.
Although he's most known for the absolute disaster that was the Xbox One launch, Mattrick had planted the seeds for it much earlier. In the late 2010s Xbox began to wane out of the Japanese market, opting instead to focus their energy on trying to appeal to casual gamers. This manifested in attempting to copy the Wii with the Kinect. This is sort of a trend that's been the case with Xbox ever since, shitting all over their core base in order to appease casuals that only care about game consoles as a box to play the latest COD and FIFA on. It's no small part of why Xbox is in such dire straights these days.
But anyway, I guess I'm somewhat passionate about this issue because I really dislike the double standard that seems to exist with fans of Japanese games when it comes to the Xbox and PS. If something's exclusive to the Xbox it's considered "trapped" behind it, but if it's exclusive to the PS2 or something it's totally acceptable.
This is more than likely a runoff of the fact that the PS1's aggressive marketing campaign of FF7 was what made JRPGs somewhat popular in the West. The reality is though that Sony did nothing to earn those developers or games and also that RPGs existed beforehand just fine without Playstation. All PS did was moneyhat them just as Xbox did in the late 2000s.
So the notion that Japanese games need to depend on Playstation hardware, especially with how much Sony has begun to shun the domestic market and all the times they've fucked over Japanese developers (See: Japan Studio, Censorship, Rugpulling the Vita, etc), is rather silly to me. Sadly, most older Japanese games that weren't bound to Playstation have become rather obscure in the West as a result. This includes a lot of Sega games, especially their RPGs like Skies of Arcadia and Panzer Dragoon Saga which aren't talked about much in spite of their exceptional quality.
This mindset is more than likely also why we never got physical or US releases of a lot of these Japanese 360 games, which is such a shame. Part of why I like that we're getting Reboot is because it gives me a way to physically own a copy of the game in English, because the only physical port we have is the PS3 version of S;G. Anyway, nerd rant over but TL;DR Mages putting their games on Xbox wasn't a bad business decision at the time that they signed off on it. They had no way of knowing that Mattrick would show up and rugpull everything that his predecessor had built in Japan out of the blue.
Also here's a picture of my Japanese 360 games, some actually did get Western releases which is neat! I plan to pick up Chaos;Head and Robotics;Notes LE, as well as maybe the XB1 C;C in the future if I can.
- 360gaims.jpg (207.45 KiB) Viewed 35 times
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