Falcom president Toshihiro Kondo recently shared with the website Dualshocker that the studio is currently trying to find a publisher for a possible Switch port of their upcoming action-JRPG, Ys IX. He stated:
“We have talks in progress with multiple publishers regarding possible Switch games, but I can’t tell you anything precise yet or if it will happen or not.”
Rather encouraging knowing the massive success most JRPGs are meeting on Nintendo‘s latest console. It is important to note that when asked last year about the same question, Toshihiro replied:
“That will depend on the success of Ys VIII. So far, in Japan, we’ve mainly been launching our games on PlayStation systems and things are going well. So, rather than switching, we’d like to have more balance.”
When asked again last month, he gave a different version:
“Switch is an incredible platform we like, but the truth is that we don’t have the knowhow to really develop for Switch.
Plus we’re, fairly convinced that our main user base is actually located on the PlayStation platform. That said, you know, thanks to working with Nippon Ichi Software in Japan and then NIS America over here, we were able to bring one of our games to Switch and obviously we want to grow the brands as much as we can and put it out as much as we can. So in the future, if we have the opportunity to have our games ported by other other companies to Nintendo Switch, it’s something we would definitely be happy to pursue.
And as a gamer myself, as an aside, I personally love the Switch. In Japan when this question comes up, it always, we get this weird thing where it’s like “Falcom doesn’t want to work on Switch,” or “Falcom doesn’t like Switch,” or something. And that’s not… The plain and simple truth of it all is that we just don’t have the knowhow and the ability to be able to work on Switch games right now.”
Seems like we’ve come a long way, everytime the man is being asked, he gives a different answer, possibly meaning that their previous Switch port, Ys VIII probably did pretty well and they simply cannot ignore the system anymore. In any case don’t expect Ys IX to release the same day on the PS4 and the Nintendo Switch, stay tuned for possible updates.