The first Xbox boss: Japanese companies wanted to support Xbox but were afraid of Sony

Today, pretty much all major Japanese titles are coming to Xbox, something that certainly hasn't been a given during the console's nearly 25 years on the market. Major franchises have often been missing, with Final Fantasy in particular standing out for its only sporadic releases.

It's therefore easy to assume that Japanese game studios didn't want to support Microsoft and their Xbox, but that doesn't seem to be entirely true. On the contrary, Square (which had not yet merged with Enix) wanted to jump on the Xbox bandwagon but didn't dare to, a sentiment shared by several other Japanese publishers.

At least that's what the first Xbox boss, Ed Fries, claims in an interview with GamesRadar:

"Some of them we were able to do deals with, some of them we weren't. They [Xbox] were able to do some deals after I left with Square, but it was always like, a tough discussion because they wanted Sony to have competition. But they couldn't be too overt in their support of Xbox. They couldn't make it too obvious they were supporting Xbox."

That explains why the Xbox mainly received a selection of somewhat niche Japanese games in its early days, not least Capcom's Steel Battalion, essentially titles that wouldn't rile Sony. Publishers were simply afraid of being frozen out of the PlayStation ecosystem, he says. Some, however, dared to support Xbox, such as Sega (which was a bit adrift after the Dreamcast) and, above all, Tecmo. Regarding the latter, Fries says:

"They did it kind of to tweak Sony because they wanted Sony to have competitors because otherwise they're a monopoly, and monopolies, you know, just do whatever they want."

During his final years as head of Xbox, Phil Spencer made several high-profile trips to Japan and courted the biggest publishers. This has contributed to the Xbox audience today rarely missing out on any Japanese games, but it has taken more than two decades to fully get there.