Final Fantasy XIII, PS3 version delayed by Xbox 360

Mike Bantick
Sunday, 03 August 2008 10:37

Your IT - Entertainment

At the E3 Media and Business Summit this year Microsoft revealed a coup, wooing the traditional PlayStation based Final Fantasy series to Xbox 360 for it's thirteenth incarnation.  Digging deeper however, developer Square Enix has revelled that it hasn't even started development of the Xbox 360 version.


In many ways, the announcement that Final Fantasy XIII will make its way to the Xbox 360 was the kicker announcement of 2008's E3 summit .

Square Enix's president Yoichi Wada has backed up this decision with the thinking behind it.  Seeing the Xbox 360 as further step into North America for Square's products; ”We always consider the territory and hardware for titles, and I just want to make sure that we're neutral about dealing with companies."

"In North America Microsoft is doing very well with its hardware, and for that reason it's a very important partner for us," said Wada, continuing, ""We're now in the age of the multi-platform, but depending on age and territory, users have different tastes. Therefore it's very difficult to just deal with one company or one hardware platform - in order to offer our product to the vast majority of gamers we need to deal with multiple companies and platforms." 

Which is all well and good, and will have investors in Square Enix rubbing their hands in glee.  A further  20 million console base to sell their products on looks promising for the companies bottom line.

So what could be wrong?  Errm the fact that development of the next in the blockbuster series has not yet begun.  Add to this that the plan is to release the PS3 version at the same time as the Xbox 360 version and some nervousness in both FF Fan and Investor camps starts to creep in.

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