ZAKZAK on why Dragon Quest is back on Nintendo

The Dragon Quest/Dragon Warrior series (one of my favorites) has made the move back to Nintendo from Sony, starting with Dragon Quest 9 on the DS. Why?

According to ZAKZAK, an industry insider explains: “The key can be found in the DS’s surprisingly strong sales. Currently, the cost of developing a game ranges from 300-500 million yen, but that will jump to 800 million – 1 billion yen with next-generation systems such as the PS3. Most developers who got a look at the PS3 when it made its first appearance as a demontration system at the Tokyo Game Show were intrigued by the clear images but did not get it in their heads to go that far themselves in game design. It would just cost too much.”

Games on portable systems cost much less to develop. And the DS is already a monster product, clocking 12 million units in sales since its release in December 2004. And of course games for that system have been hits as well, such as the “New Super Mario Brothers” and “DS Brain Training.” Add the latest installment of Dragon Quest, one of the top console series ever, to that lineup would be tantamount to “arming an ogre with an iron staff” in ZAKZAK’s vernacular (an analogy akin to “pouring gasoline on a fire”). Future DQ games will be released on the Nintendo Wii.

However, DQ series developer SquareEnix is not putting all its eggs in the Nintendo basket. The new Final Fantasy games will continue to be released on the Playstation as the company announced in May. SCE is also a major shareholder in SquareEnix.

3 thoughts on “ZAKZAK on why Dragon Quest is back on Nintendo”

  1. For SquareEnix, it makes sense to cover both bases (XBox360 doesn’t count as a viable competitor for the Japanese market), and DQ and FF have evolved differently at Enix and Square, and going with Nintendo for the DQ franchise and PS3 for FF makes a huge amount of sense.

    The DQ series was never about pushing the limits of the console GPU, but sticking to a tried and trusted formula. The DQ franchise also spawned various off-shoot games (moreso than the FF franchise) beyond the core DQ series, leveraging the characters from the DQ sagas.

    On the otherhand, FF has been (more and more, as the series evolved) about slick, cinematic graphics (and that illfated attempt at a FF movie….), and needs PS3’s processing power to keep pushing that particular envelope.

    I’d bet DQ is more mainstream than FF, I’m not a hard core gamer but I would (probably) recognise a DQ character or monster more often than an FF character (apart from maybe that cute chocobo character), and that differentiation is consistent with the choice of platforms for the two main offerings from SquareEnix.

  2. SE’s decisions also probably have to do with local fervor. They expect the PS3 to do well in the US, and so have put FFXIII on the PS3. Meanwhile the DS is selling like gangbusters in Japan, so DQIX goes on the DS. (while DQ is more mainstream in Japan, FF is HUGE in the US. Whereas you’d recognize DQ characters before FF characters, I’d be hard-pressed to find a gamer in the US who couldn’t name at least 10 FF characters off the tops of their heads. Heck… FF is so big here that even though I don’t play them at all, I can name/recognize about 10 characters.

  3. Maybe Nintendo realized that a good portion of their loyal DQ fans can no longer afford to spend 40+ hours in front of the TV, but instead have plenty of time on the commuter train.

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