ike most devoted gamers, I spent a good portion of yesterday afternoon listening to the internet's voices: while it may not be the spectacle that it once was, E3 is still upon us. There were indeed many announcements from the event, but one reported on by 1up's Shane Bettenhausen particularly caught my interest:
At the end of Microsoft's E3 press conference, Square Enix president Yoichi Wada returned to the stage to announce a bombshell: Final Fantasy XIII is coming to the Xbox 360. He showed an extended trailer for a game that was previously announced as a PlayStation 3 exclusive.
A bombshell? Really? While this surprise announcement by Square Enix may have left many wondering if hell had just frozen over, closer examination of demographics and past history reassure that this is just business as usual. You see, Final Fantasy VII wasn't actually the first game in the series. In fact, there was a time when Square Enix seemed to be exclusively in Nintendo's stable, not Sony's.
FF XIII: hot on any platform.As we started to witness near the end of the last technology cycle and throughout the current one, the age of the exclusive release is nigh over. Short of first-party developers, no one can justify limiting their sales by releasing a hot property on a single platform. Although Square Enix might at times have seemed the exception, closer examination reveals that their timed releases and reexaminations of old properties amount to the same. Final Fantasy XI, the company's massively multiplayer online experience, has now been released on three separate platforms (the Xbox 360 among them) — sure, this wasn't a simultaneous rollout, but it's far from exclusivity all the same.
Square Enix really has nothing at all to gain by keeping their mainline Final Fantasy games exclusive to Sony platforms — indeed, the only party that's losing as a result of today's news is (perhaps) Sony. The days are gone when Ken Kutaragi could rely on Rockstar and Square to provide a stable of worthy competitors for the title of "must-have video game." We're nearing an era where the purchase of a particular hardware platform is dictated by its features rather than its software. From the perspective of the average consumer, that's a pretty nice place to be.
