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It's finally summer, and, in addition to love, a bit of post-E3 Square Enix news is in the air.

First off, the folks over at SE have hired artists to create original pieces based on Deus Ex: Human Revolution based on the game's futuristic setting and moral issues. These artists have each been asked to create one poster design relating in one aspect or another to body augmentation. Proceeds from the art, which will be displayed in New York City for two weeks starting on July 28th, will be donated to education in the arts.

There's been some speculation regarding whether Dragon Quest X will be announced for the Wii U. Series composer Koichi Sugiyama recently stated that he was working for a new DQ soundtrack to be completed by 2012. While this doesn't necessarily point to anything specific, Square Enix CEO Yoichi Wada, when questioned about DQX at Square Enix's last shareholder meeting, said that he hoped to be able to release the game for both the Wii and Wii U. Ideally, Wada said that he would like to see the tenth installment of the franchise released as a Wii U launch title.

Many other questions were fielded at the shareholder meeting. One of these was the PSN outage: how much the company had lost due to the situation and whether or not they would seek compensation. Wada also announced that Square Enix would be working on ports of the Mana series. He recognized that the newest Front Mission title got terrible reviews and said that he wished they would have spent more time working on the game. On the brighter side, he expressed optimism towards the company's various forays into the realm of social networking.

In somewhat more trivial news, it appears that Square Enix has quietly uploaded both Final Fantasy VII and VIII to Steam. Don't get too excited, though; these ports will likely never see the light of day. Or the light of your basement--whatever. The steam files are slightly improved copies of the Eidos-released PC versions, improvements which were meant to boost compatibility on modern systems. That said, the files haven't been edited in over a year, leading us to believe that, for whatever reason, Square Enix has given up on the project.

That's it for now, we'll be keeping our eyes peeled for more SE news over the summer months.

Source: Destructoid, Kotaku, Andriasang

It just seems to me that if Final Fantasy VII were made to work on current PC hardware and operating systems without having to resort to hacks everywhere, that would almost be a license to print money. I would almost certainly buy a copy of both it and probably Final Fantasy VIII, too, assuming both were priced in a way that makes sense to the current market.

Since remakes and rereleases are the core of Squenix' RPG cash flow these days, it really shocks me that these things could be at some level of progress but not announced, or, as this story implies, even going to happen for consumers.

By "uploaded" do you mean that the data was given to Valve for the Steam service, but has not yet been made available for sale? That's probably what you mean, but I'm just asking to be sure.

I'm still not too used to seeing the confluence of Valve's Steam--something I associate with western game companies--and Squenix, which is an iconic JRPG company.

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Quote (Glenn Magus Harvey @ 25th June 2011 01:24)

By "uploaded" do you mean that the data was given to Valve for the Steam service, but has not yet been made available for sale?  That's probably what you mean, but I'm just asking to be sure.

I'm still not too used to seeing the confluence of Valve's Steam--something I associate with western game companies--and Squenix, which is an iconic JRPG company.

That likely is the case, yes, but it seems a rather odd thing given that games from that era have been ported over. Mind you, the PC ports of 7 and 8 were a bit dodgy at best of times, but at the same time porting older FFs to PC wouldn't likely be all that complex in real terms, and would be very likely to make the money back and more.

It seems a great many people have that issue, yet the fact is, Steam has the strongest share of the digital distribution market for PC games in the world, and on top of that SE did take over Eidos, giving them a foothold in Europe and North America. It's just good business sense really.

This post has been edited by Del S on 25th June 2011 11:39

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Quote (Glenn Magus Harvey @ 24th June 2011 20:24)

By "uploaded" do you mean that the data was given to Valve for the Steam service, but has not yet been made available for sale? That's probably what you mean, but I'm just asking to be sure.

I'm still not too used to seeing the confluence of Valve's Steam--something I associate with western game companies--and Squenix, which is an iconic JRPG company.

From what I understand, yes, that is the case, GMH.

I agree with Josh to an extent; I think these things, as popular FF ports, could be good money for SE. Ultimately, though, I lean towards Del's assessment; even at the time of their release, these PC versions were rather buggy. I would imagine that a large number of complications would stand in the way of making them play on a current machine at the standards that would be required to sell it successfully. Plus, with availability on PSN, I think there isn't as much necessity to push through what I would anticipate to be a considerably-less-than-stellar version.

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Mind you, the PC ports of 7 and 8 were a bit dodgy at best of times, but at the same time porting older FFs to PC wouldn't likely be all that complex in real terms, and would be very likely to make the money back and more.

Heck, they could take the route of Nintendo, and literally sell the same game--i.e., bundle the PSX version with a Playstation emulator.

Don't know how well it would go over with Sony, though. I guess they could instead do a Windows (or was it DOS at the time?) emulator instead if that were the issue.

--------------------

Check the "What games are you playing at the moment?" thread for updates on what I've been playing.

You can find me on the Fediverse! I use Mastodon, where I am @[email protected] ( https://sakurajima.moe/@glennmagusharvey )