UPDATE:
Fans have taken it upon themselves to create a campaign to get the attention of Bandai Namco producer Katsuhiro Harada in regards to creating an HD remaster of the Xenosaga trilogy. If you’re on twitter, you can tweet #OperationKOSMOS, and you can even follow the official group channels on Twitter and Facebook. Don’t forget to retweet the original post from Harada-san, just for good measure.
ORIGINAL:
A few months ago (in June to be specific) Bandai Namco and Tekken producer Katsuhiro Harada dropped a bomb onto the Xenosaga fandom scattered across the internet – there was a possibility of an HD collection for the series.
The trilogy was originally developed by talented veteran RPG studio Monolith Soft, who at the time were owned by Bandai Namco. So why are we talking about this now?
Apparently that slight tease ignited the fan community to bombard him with requests for an HD collection, so he simply responded via Twitter with a more thought out proposition, seen below:
To Xenosaga fan community.
I do understand that you all are desiring “Xenosaga HD collection”.
Also, I do appreciate all your passionate comments.
I do understand your feeling to “tweet every day until the day Xenosaga HD collection comes real”.
However, what I need in order to achieve your dream, is not to have tweets from the “same person” sent to me every day.
It has been a long time since Xenosaga has been released.
It really brings back memories of those days they were developing the first Xenosaga staying up all night, when the TEKKEN Project was also staying up all night on the same floor at office.
A while back, triggered by the overseas version of Project X zone, I have conducted a research and calculated if there is a business chance for Xenosaga HD remaster.
It was a very simple research at that time. Yet, research does cost money.
And at that time, I was not able to seek business chance.
In other words, I was not able to find the necessary market size that will pay for the development fee needed to create the HD remaster.
Back then, the reactions on SNS and unique users were rather few in number.
It may be that I didn’t work hard enough.
Measures such as kickstarters are as of last resort, and at any rate we will not have a chance of winning as it stands now. It will not gather people by crowdfunding without creating some kind of big movement to support it.
To be honest, I was about to give up and I’m troubled.
What I need, are the voices from many fans.
This is a little different from having “messages sent every day from the same person”.
Although I do understand the deep love for the game, more than that, the cheers from as many “unique users” as possible is what is needed.
Digging further, I will not be able to believe comments like “I’ll buy 100 copies!”. Most companies will not believe in it.
It is not realistic for one person to tweet 100 times every day, or buy 100 copies alone.
It’s more realistic if you bring 10 fans to the game (not to mention, it wouldn’t mean anything by having the same person suddenly creating alternate accounts. I will be able to tell those).
What’s important in these kinds of cases is the number of unique users.
It means more to have 100 people mentioning they want the game one time, rather than having one person repeating it 100 times.
A miracle would happen if several tens of thousands are gathered at the end.
Of course, involvement from the company is needed for this but…
Nintendo wholly acquired Monolith Soft back in 2007, and they’ve been working on various games for Nintendo consoles, like the Xenoblade series.
Naturally, if this actually comes into fruition, Bandai Namco simply needs to handle the optimizing and software assurance on current generation platforms.
Editor’s Note: The above image is from the Xenosaga anime, as the majority of screenshots from the Playstation 2 originals are of terrible quality.
