Katsuhiro Harada, the director behind the Tekken series, has taken to Twitter today to address fans that have been asking him about a collection of RPGs that certainly deserve a revisiting, the Xenosaga trilogy.
Fans of the game have been asking about making an HD Collection for the three games, the most recent of which was released back in 2006 for the PlayStation 2 and it seems that even Harada wishes to do something with the title since he tried to gauge the market with the Xenosaga characters in Project X Zone.
In a long message which can be read below, he expresses his interest in making a Xenosaga HD Collection but also said that he requires the voices from many fans, not just many messages from one fan. Since he posted this message fans have begun using the #OperationKosMos on Twitter as well as Facebook and people have been addressing Harada directly on Twitter offering their support.
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 [social networking sites] 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…
