- Joined
- Aug 9, 2019
The only Japanese studios I can see actually wanting to be acquired by Microsoft are ones that have good long relationships with them or are headed by people who actively espouse that they like the brand. So outside of Sega that's pretty slim pickings. The ones I could see are Itagakis new studio since the guy is an out and out fanboy of the Xbox to the point he shit on Nintendo after Devils Third saying that Microsoft would have help him make the game better. Grounding Inc. which is headed by old Sega people particularly Yukio Futatsugi who has worked on quite a few Xbox exclusives like Panzer Dragoon Orta and Phantom Dust. Last would be White Owls which is owned by SWERY65 who even writes about Xbox in some Jap magazine and made D4.Really make no sense XBox to go after Japanese companies, a very small market for their games in both the West and Japan on MS platforms. They have been trying to grow that fan base in the West by getting series like Dragon Quest and Yakuza on both Xbox and gamepass but MS know if those series were XBOX/PC only most of them would be huge flops, they need Playstation and/or Nintendo to make money just XBOX/PC is becoming a way to get nice extra sales especially PC.
The only Japanese companies that it would make some sense for MS to go after is Sega just for their PC studios and getting their backlog of games especially those from the other consoles for Gamepass, and guess ips like Sonic would be useful to MS. And Capcom because most of their games are far bigger in the west now, even Monster Hunter World was bigger here than Japan so I doubt a pc/xbox only release would kill most of their ips.
However, one area I could see Xbox/MS actually gain traction in Japan is cloud gaming, Japan for the last 10+ years has been moving more to portable gaming, so having a way to play console-level games on their phones/tablets could be a way in especially if MS has a good line up of Japanese games and you are able to stream games not part of gamepass if you already own them.
This is one area Sony has dropped the ball despite being first to it, PS Now for online streaming really isn't good and it isn't even on phones, hell they could have put it on the vita when that was still a thing but nope. They do have ps4 remote play which does have a phone app but this feature seems really poorly marketed.
I don't think console gaming is going to make a big comeback anytime soon outside a form factor of the switch where it is able to do both, this why Sony really need to get their shit together with stuff like PS Now both in terms of quality and marketing.
Outside of those people worrying that Microsoft is going to buy Capcom, Square, or any other large Jap studio/publish are being pretty foolish. They definitely wouldn't go for Square unless Square approached them first because they already tried to buy Square after Sprits Within flopped and then Square tried to pull a fast one and demand twice the agreed upon price at the contract signing. Even Sega is a weird thing because Sammy would have to divest the Sega half of the business for any company outside of maybe Nintendo to be interested.