Phil Spencer's recent musings on Final Fantasy XIV releasing on XBOX One are a bit misleading. In a recent interview at IGN, Phil Spencer, head of XBOX, commented on the idea of the game coming to the Microsoft platform saying "Its a business. As I've grown in this role, and I've tried to learn the third party exclusivity thing --and you see us doing far less of it now-- [I've found] it's not something I'm a huge fan of." Later he continues to say, "Different kind of deals happen, and I know that's part of the business, and maybe it'll be my failing in the end. but it's not something I specifically embrace with any deal that's out there, whether it's something else. It's not something I can specifically talk to."
To some, Spencer's reference to third party exclusives in the first quote lead them to assume that Sony and Square Enix have an exclusivity deal with the game.
It's important to realize that this is not true. Naoki Yoshida, Producer and Director of FFXIV has had a history of saying how he desired the game to be on Microsoft's newest console and that Square nix was ready to begin development. Yoshida commented on XBOX's closed network environment saying "The thing is, [Final Fantasy XIV] is all about cross-platform compatibility. Anybody from any platform can play together. We don't want to split our community into people who play on this platform or play on that one."
Naoki Yoshida holding an XBOX One controller at a Final Fantasy XIV panel.
In order to truly unpack the complexity of Spencer's quote, we have to do a brief retelling of history. Since XBOX Live's inception, the service has had a closed nature to it. By closed, what i mean is that games that play on XBOX Live were only allowed to play with other games on XBOX Live. Initially this made sense, console games played within their own ecosystem.
The game that would traverse the PC/Console schism would end up being Square Enix's previous MMO, Final Fantasy XI. The game was initially released on PlayStation 2 in May 2002 then later on Microsoft Windows in November, both Japan exclusives at the time. However, despite the games release on two separate platforms, the servers were populated with both PC and PS2 players allowing truly inter-platform play.
Eventually in April 2006 Final Fantasy XI would find its way to Microsoft's sequel generation platform, the XBOX 360. This would come to be known as one of, if not the only game on 360 that allowed for online multiplayer functionality without requiring an XBOX Live Gold subscription.
But even the release of FFXI has its own interesting origin.At the time, Microsoft had a much smaller install base in the Japanese market than both of their competitor's Sony and Nintendo, and it was believed it was because of XBOX being a 'foreign' system as well as there just not being games on the platform that the consumers wanted. In hopes of alleviating their slacking sales, Microsoft struck a deal with Square Enix.
At this time, Square Enix was practically the single greatest producer of JRPGs internationally and in Japan. While other companies did exist, Square was best known and had a long standing pedigree with some of it's IP's (Final Fantasy, Dragon Warrior). Microsoft's deal with Square to develop and publish games for their console, but one of the conditions Microsoft had to agree to was that they would allow Final Fantasy XI to be released on the 360 without the restrictions of the closed ecosystem as well as to not require the XBOX Live Gold subscription.
The result was that Square Enix got their inter-platform MMO on the XBOX 360 and began developing games for the platform, some of which included Infinite Undiscovery (an exclusive) and The Last Remant( a console Exclusive) as well as the multi-platform release of Final Fantasy XIII.
Recently Microsoft has been marketing the eventual inter operability between the XBOX One and Microsoft 10, which is still not very reassuring. Microsoft is willing to allow select PC games to play nice with XBOX live because they not only own the developers making these games, but also own the Operating System Windows 10. Which means this inter connectivity is still up in the air for third-party developers.
This is vastly different from Sony's implementation of cross-platform play which has allowed games like Final Fantasy XI, Final Fantasy XIV, and even Portal 2 to be playable across PlayStation and PC platforms.
While there are other, smaller, problems with networking infrastructure, such as update intervals for consoles vs. PC, it is ulimately the closed nature of XBOX Live that has resulted in games like The Elder Scrolls Online to effectively fracture their player base, segregating the players by their medium of choice (in this case PC, PS4, or XBOX One) rather than allow them to play together.
So, the "business" that Mr. Spencer has been talking about has nothing to do with platform exclusivity, and instead has everything to do with Microsoft's unwillingness to open up their network ecosystem to play nicely online with competitors, which ultimately is preventing online games from being a truly online experience.
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