They owned 17% of Squaresoft, which they bought to help save Square from the Spirits Within fiasco, but when Square and Enix merged to save Enix, Sony gave up almost half it's shares to Enix to help the merger. They now own about 10% of shares in SE as a whole. Either way, SE owes them for a hell of a lot.

I expect Sony to really bargain with SE to get some great exclusives for the future. They are going to try to concrete their hold over the 360 in Japan.

Also, keep in mind, Sony owns nearly 10% of Square Enix...that does give them a little bit of voting power in certain matters.

Woops, stated right above me! 

@shams

The people that are looking for all these games to be PS3 exclusives are the ones that want the best possible experiance. I don't see how anyone that has been playing games for the last ten years does not understand the lack of quality of multi platform games. Everyone is going to have to accept that the PS3 is the most powerful system of this gen and that some games are only possible on it. FFXIII and KH will require 50GB disks with great compression to fit all the data they need. It would not even surprise me if they had to use 2 BR disks, and if the game came out on the 360 they would be useing at least 6 DVDs, because if they were using 1 50GB BR with good PS3 compression, then the 360 would have to use more disks as it can not decompress as fast.

If Final Fantasy XIII did came out on the Xbox 360 it would come on 5 x DVD-DL , and I guess that like in the old PSX days you couldn’t revisit certain City’s, Dungeons and more since the disk space is limited, or maybe every time when you enter a town you should need to change the Disk….

Anyway many people who have been working on FF XIII says that; The game makes good use of the advances that the Blu-ray offers and that the game could only be possible on the PS3.

Anyway, keep dreaming Nintendo/ Xbox fanboy’s.

There's no need to dream of anything. There's already a few SE RPG titles coming to the Wii and the XBox that we know of. With that said, a SE RPG.. it won't make or break any system.

If the rumor is true, then it's a dumb move from a business perspective simply because there's no guarantee of a price drop for the PS3, and there's no guarantee that Sony will sell millions of consoles in the next 3 months. Currently, you'd need about 30-35%, maybe even more, of the total PS3 owners to purchase [insert random game title here] to really see any decent profit, because after all, everybody gets a piece(publishers, developers, retailers).

If SE wants to put that much money into the PS3, then best of luck to them.

I'm not dreaming - just quoting what I have read. This from "the-magicbox.com":

In a recent interview in Nikkei News, Square Enix president Yoichi Wada said the company will adopt worldwide simultaneous release and multi-platform development strategy for the next-gen market, the reason is to reach broader audience worldwide.

- 1UP reported that Square Enix will reveal a number of new Kingdom Hearts game titles at Tokyo Game Show, one of which will be heading to PSP.

...

Now, no question that FF is their biggest franchise - and most important. And if this is their new "strategy", wouldn't it also apply to FF?

And I doubt its also coming to the Wii, unless its just a scaled down version - meaning both PS3 / 360 versions in development. Both machines are almost identical after all, its not *that* hard to do this. And if they need to release it in 2 or 3 discs for the 360... so what? This isn't even a slight deterrent to development.

@re Sony owning 10% of SE: So what? Any company can buy shares in any other company you know - its called an investment. And they usually do it when they see more potential for growth in that company, than they do in theirs.

There is a good reason why there are rules in place to stop a company from "secretly" buying so much of a company, that they end up controlling it (which is called a takeover). Sony do NOT control SE.

...

SE are not stupid. If they decided to exclusively back the PS3, I think there would be a shareholder revolt - for "profit" reasons. Why target < 20% of the worldwide console market, when you could target, 40% or even 100% of it?

lol shams.... just LOL.

Using your logic I can't wait for DQIX on my PSP....LOL

Which is why the most popular FF still remains to be a PS1 title?

Are people arguing that FFX, FFX-2, FFXII are better than FFVII, FFVI (etc)...?

Its the perfect example of why graphical power is no where near as important as you make it out to be.

And lets not forget that even the poor old Wii destroys the PS2 graphically - not to mention the PS1. Its easily powerful enough for them to create an awesome update to any of the FF games.

...

How many games have SE now released on the DS? Do you think that is a vote that profits + sales > "best possible experience"? (and lets not kid ourselves about the experience of playing on a DS vrs even the Wii...) 

They won't do it, but there is probably a compelling business case for SE to go exclsuive to DS + Wii if anything. Maybe with a token PS3 release thrown in for good measure.

It must not fill SE with confidence when titles like HSG5 (PS3) sells 25%-30% of the software units than HSG3/HSG4 (PS2) did. Sony might be up for that sort of risk - but I doubt SE is. They have other options in the market - cross-platform support being the safest one.

Don't laugh, you might just get it... :P

Although when you are already targetting the console with 2/3rds of the overall marketshare (closer to 80% in Japan), there is a lot less reason to go x-platform. But it could still happen.

Well, shams, we could argue all day but I can't be bothered. I will just wait until TGS and see if S-E announce that FFXIII is now being developed on the 360... and to hear S-E announce all future games multi-platform.

I however think he is referring to S-E making games for all platforms, not that all games are going to appear on every platform.