President of Nihon Falcom: “We Want All of Our Games on Steam”
Earlier this month, TechRaptor had the chance to interview Toshihiro Kondo, the president of Nihon Falcom – the developers of both the Ys and Legend of Heroes series. We’ve got our full interview coming up soon, but one specific answer to one of our questions stood out from the rest, more or less confirming that the company hopes to release all of their titles on PC, in one way or another, going forward. The translation for Kondo-san’s answer was provided by NIS America.
TechRaptor: It’s been said that Ys VIII’s PS4 release was made to target the west, though it and a few other “modern” Falcom titles are all receiving PC ports lately. Has Falcom been actively pursuing PC versions for more recent releases in the west?
Toshihiro Kondo: We have no hesitation about releasing games on Steam. Rather, given that we don’t have a large staff, we mainly have to rely [on] partners to help us realize a PC port. When we first started releasing games on Steam, we were initially unsure of whether or not players would want to play our older games. However, as we gradually released games on Steam and saw the very positive reaction that was much greater than we expected, we feel like we want all of our games that come out to [release] on Steam.
Although Kondo’s words might not be too shocking considering recent events – XSEED Games are releasing Trails of Cold Steel I/II on PC later this year, Aksys Games will release Tokyo Xanadu eX+ on Steam around the same time of the PS4 release, and of course NIS America is releasing Ys VIII on Steam at the same time as the western PS4/Vita release – it’s still nice to see the words come out officially, nonetheless. At this point, it feels safe to say that whenever Trails of Cold Steel III gets a western release announcement, a PC release won’t be far behind.
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