Well, the news has hit and 3 months later only a handful of people signed on to support Xenosaga HD.
This in turn had Katsuhiro Harada responding:
http://www.twitlonger.com/show/ngsp5q
So I think it's time to face it, he isn't going to get 10s of thousands of signatures, it may squeek 10000 out but that will be pushing it. The question is, where did he/we go wrong? I've got a various examples, but I would also like to know what you think if the people here have anything to add.
1) There just isn't a market for Xenosaga.
Obviously one of the biggest everyone needed to overcome was the fact the game is from a series that no one really played, which gets even more complicated when you look at the overall critical reaction to the games that at most seem to be luke warm to worse. Even I have to readily admit it's the weakest link in a series I love.
2) No real way to get the message out to the JRPG crowd.
The news popped up on a twitter message and then was laid into fan's hands and gaming websites to do the rest. There wasn't even a mention of it on the Bandai Namco official website. This pretty much means the amount of people that will ever know of the petition is already greatly limited.
3) (My personal belief of this games biggest hurdle was) People simply don't want to support something if they don't know what they will be getting.
Katsuhiro needed to lay out exactly what he wanted to do with Xenosaga. What he was going to update, what was going to remain the same, what platform(s) it was going to be on, exactly how many signatures (within reason) he is looking for on the petition, who was going to be in charge of developing the game, ect. It would have also been GREATLY benificial to have something made up to show to get people hyped, if the idea came to him longer than a drunken night of wishful tweeking he should have found people in his staff that were interested in this as well and came up with something.
Also, If he would have targeted a platform or showed the desire to release on all platforms, then maybe the companies they were going to support could help get the word out and generate some more buzz. People wouldn't have this feeling they are going to be suckered into signing something for a game they aren't going to experience. One of the greatest reasons Op Rainfall worked was because it was an attack from multiple directions. They got calls to the Nintendo Headquarters, they got their facebook and twitter hammered with support, and they got petitions that generated around 5000 signatures in 3 days instead of 3 months. They were only able (and willing) to do this though, by knowing exactly what they were fighting for.
So what do you think? Do share!
