Praise Yosuke and pass the masks, Sega has released their most recent fiscal year earnings statement and held a Q & A session with investors about the future of the company.
Persona 4 Golden was brought up; it was recently ported over to Steam (which we caught early thanks to SteamDB) and sold astonishingly well. The investor asked if Sega has any plans for further porting titles over to Steam on the back of P4G‘s success, and the answer was an unequivocal ‘Yes.’
Sega President Haruki Satomi stated the following:
We will continue to actively promote porting previously released titles to Steam and new platforms. We are also negotiating with platform holders for new games in the future, and we’re considering ways to sell under favorable conditions for each title.
Worth bearing in mind that those ‘platform holders’ could very well end up being the Epic Games Store, who has been infamous for buying out exclusive access for large sums of money, meaning no one can play those titles unless they cave in and install EGS.
In spite of this pattern, Epic has continued to struggle to grab a respective userbase on the PC, and titles continue to sell impressively well once they head over to Steam; where the mass player base of PC games resides (comfortably, we should add).
Yet it does also absolutely state that more Sega titles that have enjoyed console-exclusivity could be making the jump in the future, presuming that they are also similarly well-received to the point that it makes fiscal sense for Sega to continue.
While Catherine: Full Body recently released on the Nintendo Switch as an exclusive, it similarly bodes well for the very desired titles such as Persona 5 (The) Royal.
In short, Sega sees the opportunity and vaguely stated that they are interested in bringing other titles to Steam.
Precisely when we could see this is an unknown; Persona 4 Golden rumors began roughly six months prior to it seeing the light of day, with roughly a month prior to release being observed before they began importing assets into Valve’s platform Steam.
If we were to wager, a mid-to-late 2021 release for Persona 5 Royal isn’t out of the question, and earlier is possible if the work has already begun in porting the title over; being that it’s a turn-based RPG with fixed animations during battles, there shouldn’t be too much fuss in getting physics right during the port; a problem that has plagued multiple developers in the past.
Unfortunately, that does mean we’ll need to bid farewell to best-boy Yosuke to make room for some new, flamboyant personalities of high-school teenagers discovering themselves while fighting against everybody’s inner demons.