Nihon Falcom president says Steam and Nintendo Switch have largest portion of new players

Nihon Falcom president Toshihiro Kondo has taken part in an extensive interview with Japanese gaming publication Ascii Japan. One of the topics Kondo discussed was the influx of new players to Nihon Falcom games from both Steam and the Nintendo Switch consoles. Kondo also admitted that in order for them to be successful going forward they have to try and pursue multiplatform worldwide releases for their titles like it did for Trails In The Sky. Here’s what was said via machine translation:

Moving away from the topic of games, with recent hardware price increases and other changes in the gaming industry, your company has recently adopted PC (Steam). Could you tell us about your expectations for the future, or any prospects for the direction you plan to take?

“Basically, the remake of “The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky” was the first to put that idea into practice. Up until then, the Trails series had been mainly developed for PS5, but with “The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky,” we challenged ourselves to develop the series worldwide under our own leadership, including Switch and PC (Steam).

With new games, the scenario and other aspects often end up being finalized right up until the master version is ready, leaving no time to work on the overseas version. With “The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky,” we already have the assets, which made things easier. And when we actually tried it, we got a very positive response.

Therefore, I believe that going forward, the basic approach will be to eventually expand globally across a certain number of platforms.

And right now, in terms of the number of new users, Switch and PC (Steam) account for the majority. If we want to continue for a long time, we need to add those platforms as well, release titles properly, and do our best to expand our brand awareness.

Conversely, we’ve learned that even with long-running series like the Trails series, if we create a good game for a new platform, customers will stick around. We’ll focus on doing that properly to maintain an environment where we can continue creating games.”

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