Have Sony Been Preparing Gamers for Losing the Final Fantasy XIII Exclusive?
Square-Enix announced that Final Fantasy XIII is coming to 360 during Microsoft’s E3 press conference yesterday. It came as a surprise to many people and has already gotten plenty of reaction from people.
But I bet it wasn’t a surprise for Sony, since a deal between Square-Enix and Microsoft must have been in the works for a while. So have Sony been preparing for this moment?
In a previous post about how companies misled through marketing, I noted that Sony talking again about paying for exclusives. What I found strange in that interview was that the CEO of Sony was stressing that securing exclusives are much harder now. Then last week, the same sentiment was echoed by Sony’s President of Worldwide Studios.
Since the blog is a semi-offical blog for Sony, it must be considered as a part of their PR strategy. By stressing that most studios will decide not be exclusive due to the cost of development, they were trying to soften the coming blow of losing a big title.
Reading between the lines and given the suspicious timing of the posts, I figured that Sony will lose a big exclusive during E3 and like most people thought it might be Metal Gear Solid 4. So it was still a surprise to me when FF XIII was the ex-exclusive.
I didn’t follow FF XIII news closely, so perhaps I missed the signs that FF XIII was going multi-platform. If anyone can find an article from Square-Enix that hints at this, please email me at or comment below.
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about 4 years ago
http://www.xbox360fanboy.com/2007/03/22/ffxiii-not-exclusive-to-ps3-after-all/
Here you go
about 4 years ago
Also, if you want direct-from-source, http://www.evilavatar.com/forums/showthread.php?t=7098 holds highlights from a translation from a Japanese interview with Yochi Wada
about 4 years ago
Wow, thanks Barry. That’s a pretty good info.Looks like Sony had plenty of time to try and entice FFXIII to be an exclusive.
about 4 years ago
good grammar speak