Final Fantasy XIII on Xbox 360 IN JAPAN!!!!!!!

[Dodece]

Honestly all this discussion about whether the title will be released in Japan is null and void, because even if Square has an exclusivity contract with Sony for the market of Japan there is a loophole large enough to drive an aircraft carrier through. Sony cannot compel either Microsoft or Square to region lock said game. Thus once it is released world wide in under two days imported titles will be available at select retailers. Not only that, but it will probably be playable in Japanese since 360 games almost always contain multiple language settings.

Onto the comments about Square jumping ship on Sony and how evil that is. There is a lot of ignorance in this thread. Nintendo abused developers in comparison to Sony. Quite frankly they still do to a lesser extent. Then Sony preceded to abuse developers this generation to Microsoft's benefit, and Microsoft has made major headway in accommodating the needs of developers. This is as simple as it gets.

Nintendo lost Square, because of a number of things they did wrong and Sony did right. Nintendo stood by the cart format. Nintendo did not support third party developers. Nintendo imposed memory limits. Nintendo had no backward compatibility initiative. All of these things made developing for the 64 cost prohibitive compared to the Playstation.

Nintendo officially stated that they stayed with carts because it avoided load times. Which is technically true there were no load times on the 64. However Nintendo owned the license and manufacturing rights to the cart format. They were running a monopoly and charging accordingly. Carts cost well over ten dollars, and the larger carts cost upwards of twenty dollars. Compare that to a CD that cost a dollar to manufacture. Then take into account that Sony had a buy back policy.

Sony would actually refund the manufacturing cost if you could not sell the game, but basically if you sold the game for as little as five dollars you were never out of pocket on manufacturing costs. Nintendo would never make such a guarantee and developers knew it. Developers had to cover their own manufacturing costs. Nintendo could care less if it made developing for their console financially dangerous as long they got their cut up front. Well both cuts first the licensing fee then the manufacturing costs. Nintendo was just too greedy. They should have just been happy with the manufacturing revenue.

Nintendo did not and still doesn't support third party developers. Sony was handing out financial incentives that gave developers a stronger motivation. Love it or hate it, but every developer has to make payroll. Anything that makes that easier is a good thing, and more importantly it allows for more creative freedom.

Nintendo thanks to the cart format was making coding more difficult on developers not less so. With a cart a developer has to compress and clean their code. A disc format is far more forgiving. A game could have extraneous data left over from development. You could not do that with a cart.

Finally Nintendo had no forward compatibility with their 64 console. There was foregone conclusion that carts were going out being that they were cost prohibitive. That meant that once the console went out the developers were left holding the bag with little to no chance of after generation sales.

The irony this generation is that Sony has managed to copy the failures of Nintendo. This generation they have the more expensive format which is also partially monopolistic. They are not heavily supporting third party developers. Their hardware is causing developers headaches, and it is not entirely clear whether this generations games will be forward compatible with the next console. Will the PS4 use the Cell, or even have a Cell on the motherboard? Not very likely given the fact that the chip has failed to even plus Intel.

Square isn't so much turning on Sony as staying true to the philosophy they agree with. The same philosophy that had them leave Nintendo behind. The same philosophy that is bringing them and Microsoft closer together. Square is just practicing common sense. Microsoft is just being a better partner then Sony happens to be at the moment. Microsoft has done everything that Sony did right two generations ago.