Square Enix Building U.S. Studio - Looking for 360 Developers

[memory2zack]

Pristine20 said:

What I got from that news posting was this:

1. It's best to have your studios in EU & NA due to the current crisis. Then they will move all their main FF and KH teams in the U.S as well? The crisis is temporary and affects the whole world. Yen currency may as well fall back to its initial trade. Will they re-focus to Japan? This has more to do with creating a western developing studio than anything else, crisis or no crisis.

2. It's best to focus these games towards the west in general due to sales trends in gaming. Yep, you got that right. Japanese trends are so different than Western trends these days, both in hardware and software, that it´s nearly impossible to satisfy both hardcore masses.

3. The above 2 trends would favor the 360 getting any games that aren't multiplatform and possibly the wii due to the 360 2:1 gap over ps3 in NA.

4. New games from new studios doesn't equal good games because S-E is the publisher or even the developer as we've seen in current years. That´s true, but that´s not their primary concern right now . They need western-oriented games that are good enough and sell very well in the West, unlike some of their ps1 and many of their ps2 games that were great but didn´t sell in the West.

5. Also, S-E has not done well outside the JRPG market and JRPGs are best made in JP. KH, PE, Musashi, Ehrgeiz, Drakenguard are not RPGs that are good up to great games. Don´t tell me because KH and PE have some RPG mechanics that they are ones because they are far more action games and much/quite less JRPGs. 

Reading your posts, you do a good job making it seem like they're jumping ship with the ps3 because it suks or just hasn't sold enough that they just want to make 360 exclusives? that sentiment itself doesn't make sense because multiplat would be the right answer except they were paid the difference of course.

Only time would tell if this move is actually really beneficial or just introduces unforseen losses on the company because they won't have the luxury of the "buy first, ask questions later" approach that gamers use regarding S-E games in the JRPG genre.  I think it´s the right move because practically no one, except rabid fanboys, buy SE games without asking questions before with the exception of the main FF and  KH, as well as DQ in Japan. And people only buy main FFs because they are 100% sure SE put their biggest effort on the title. At least with a new IP targeted to Westerners they have more chances to sell better in the West than a new IP targeted to Japanese. And who´s knows best what Westerners want? Western developers; Japanese developers not so much, only a few.