In a recent conversation with Ken Berry, President, CEO, and CFO of Marvelous USA and XSEED Games, we speak about the future of XSEED Games as they shift their focus toward third-party publishing. With a rich history of bringing beloved Japanese RPGs to the West, XSEED is now expanding its horizons to include a broader range of indie titles from around the world. Berry shared insights on the types of games they’re excited to publish, the challenges they anticipate with the company’s new structure, and their commitment to maintaining XSEED’s identity among its loyal fanbase.
Azario Lopez: With XSEED’s new focus on third-party publishing, what types of games or genres are you most excited to bring to the Western audience?
Ken Berry: Our history is deeply rooted in Japanese RPGs, so those will always hold a special place in our hearts. However, it’s hard not to get excited about all the innovation we see from indie teams all over the world, not just Japan. We don’t try to limit ourselves to a certain genre, but story-based games tend to fit best within our lineup, as opposed to something like an FPS, sports, or live service game.
Azario Lopez: Can you share any upcoming titles from XSEED that fans should be particularly excited about, especially given the new freedom in selecting third-party games?
Ken Berry: We couldn’t be more excited about our upcoming indie titles Moonlight Peaks and The Big Catch as we feel they offer something unique for their respective genres. We continue to pursue partnerships with Japanese publishers and self-publishing developers who may not have a publishing presence in the West. In the past year, we’ve had a traditional publisher arrangement for FuRyu’s title Trinity Trigger, where we handled all the English localization, as well as a physical distribution-only deal for Granblue Fantasy: Relink that Cygames localized and self-published digitally. Upcoming title Slitterhead is also a physical-only deal where the Japanese dev team Bokeh Game Studio is doing all their own localization and will be self-publishing digitally, with us mainly helping the game reach the retail audience in the US.
Azario Lopez: How will the changes in the company’s structure affect your approach to localizing games for Western audiences?
Ken Berry: Nothing changes when licensing third-party titles from Japan where we also handle the English localization unless it is a distribution-only deal, but with indie titles, we usually have to work the opposite way in that the original text is in English and we have to localize it into Japanese and other languages.
Azario Lopez: Given the strategic shift, how will XSEED Games maintain its identity and reputation among its loyal fanbase?
Ken Berry: As I mentioned earlier, we look for titles from indie teams that we think will fit seamlessly into our catalog, which often involves the art style in addition to the gameplay and story elements. If you look at our past few indie releases such as Freedom Planet 2, Melon Journey, Potionomics, or Cuisineer that we co-published with our sister company Marvelous Europe, you can tell that all of them were influenced by Japanese culture as most of those developers grew up playing Japanese games. We feel any of our fans would enjoy these games, and that’s why we’re a bit more hesitant to pursue games with more of a Western aesthetic as that’s not what people expect from us.
Azario Lopez: Depending on which gaming circles you enter, XSEED is either known as the publisher of some of the most beloved JRPGs of our time or the company behind Senran Kagura. Looking forward, how would you like XSEED to be defined?
Ken Berry: The climate now is definitely very different from the heyday of the Senran Kagura series, and it’s hard to see how that series could prosper in the West in this day and age. I’m most proud of the titles that wouldn’t have made it to the US at all had we not been the publisher because, for whatever reason, we were the only ones capable of doing so. These include games licensed from Namco Bandai like Fragile Dreams, The Sky Crawlers, Retro Game Challenge, and Fishing Resort, The Last Story and Pandora’s Tower from Nintendo, and Brave Story from Sony.
Times are different now with fan translators and digital distribution lowering the investment needed to localize and bring a title to US players. However, it’s still rewarding knowing you’re directly responsible for bringing games to players that they otherwise wouldn’t have had a chance to experience. I’d like to continue that tradition by funding and helping talented indie teams develop and bring their titles to market.
Azario Lopez: What challenges do you foresee with Marvelous USA and XSEED Games operating under their new roles, and how do you plan to address them?
Ken Berry: This is something we’ve been implementing slowly over the past several years, where in-house IPs such as Story of Seasons and Rune Factory would have the Marvelous logo on the front of the retail box while our third-party titles would continue to have the XSEED Games logo. So thankfully, completely splitting the brands shouldn’t be a huge leap from that.
Azario Lopez: In what ways will the collaboration between Marvelous USA and XSEED Games continue to evolve in terms of business and marketing support?
Ken Berry: Hopefully, it will help evolve Marvelous as a brand associated with strong IPs with their own growing fanbase as they have a lot of original titles in the works being developed in-house that will be revealed in the coming year. At the same time, XSEED Games can focus solely on servicing other Japanese publishers as well as indie developers worldwide.
Azario Lopez: While XSEED was never shy about releasing games on PC, I believe it was the release of Ys VI: The Ark of Napishtim around ten years ago that marked the beginning of the company’s push to get your games on PC. How has that learning process been?
Ken Berry: I had to look this one up as it was actually Ys: The Oath in Felghana that was our first release on Steam way back in March of 2012. Games of Japanese origin were still few and far between at the time, but I think the success of Recettear published by Carpe Fulgur a little over a year earlier really opened a lot of people’s eyes. Luckily, Andrew Dice of Carpe Fulgur was a huge cheerleader for getting more Japanese games onto Steam and gave us a lot of advice in those early days and would even reach out to Valve on our behalf, so that helped a lot. But even after more than 12 years, we are always learning new things about Steam since it is always evolving.
Azario Lopez: When it comes to PC gaming, XSEED has put a lot of resources into providing PC players with optimization tools and post-launch support, which has maybe had the opposite effect on budget since you created those expectations early on by supporting your PC releases with quality ports. Is this something XSEED plans to invest in for players and potential partners?
Ken Berry: The great thing about PC gaming is that unlike a console release, a title’s lifespan is not limited to just a few years and can continue to sell indefinitely. Even our earliest Steam releases continue to produce not insignificant amounts of revenue each year. You don’t want to risk a long-term revenue stream with short-term cost savings by putting out a subpar product, so we use our long experience on the platform to try to convince our partners to launch as good of a product as possible since it’s so hard to recover from a bad launch.
But optimizing titles for Steam is hard, and sometimes you have no choice but to launch even when your own team isn’t completely satisfied with the performance. But that doesn’t mean we aren’t always looking to improve. When the company we hired to port Little King’s Story to Steam couldn’t improve it any further, we had to launch the title, but we were later able to convince PC optimization guru ‘Durante’ to work with us to help optimize the title. More recently, when the No More Heroes PC release couldn’t be optimized any more by the original porting company, we had our one in-house programmer Sara (who also handled the original Ys: The Oath in Felghana Steam release for us) take over and work on it for well over a year to help address some of the issues we’ve known about since launch. It’s not always financially feasible, but we take great pride in our PC releases and always try to do everything we can to give every player the best experience possible.
Azario Lopez: Looking ahead, what are your long-term goals for XSEED Games under this new structure, and how do you plan to achieve them?
Ken Berry: Our goal continues to be to bring great games to players in the US and around the world, whether they originate from Japan with a “normal” development budget or from a small dedicated team from somewhere else. By treating our developer partners with respect and empowering them to achieve the best version of their game possible, we can earn their trust as well as those of the player at the same time, helping to achieve long-term success where developers want us to publish their titles and players are always willing to give our games a chance.
What a crock of stupidity. Senran Kagura would thrive in the current climate if handled right. Just look at the success of Stellar Blade, First Descendant, Mecha Break, and the mobile market in general. There is more of a demand for ecchi games than ever, the issue is that Californian twitter politics get in the way of business decisions and make people think people want heavily edited versions of these games when the market says otherwise.
I think the problem is more how certain companies keep interfering with stuff that the players like. For example, Senran Kagura started to get censored a lot by Sony and it displeased the players. Maybe XSEED should pivot more to the PC market.
Absolute hogwash. People are still clamoring for games with fanservice, as the ever growing indie and ecchi scene on platforms like Steam are becoming more and more prominent. It is the localizers and publishers that changed their tune and effectively became moral arbiters by gatekeeping certain games from the West.
I’ve always liked XSEED stuff that I’ve purchased. I’d like to say thank you for putting in such great work, but I doubt they will ever see this comment. I wish them well.
You should have asked why they don’t work a deal with Clouded Leopard to bring Cold Steel 1 & 2 on Switch.