CrossFire X is a follow on to Smilegate’s 2007 release of CrossFire which has remained popular in Asia (Smilegate’s partnership with Tencent Games in China proved very fruitful for the company in terms of revenues).
Microsoft made their announcement at E3 on Sunday regarding this exclusive release for the Xbox One in 2020.
We’re partnering with the legendary team at Smilegate to bring CrossFire to console for the first time ever. #XboxE3https://t.co/8Nrh4tQvhb pic.twitter.com/kjkWUE1Xkn— Xbox ➡️ E3 (@Xbox) June 9, 2019
Unfortunately, players of some of Smilegate’s other titles like Epic Seven (a turn based mobile RPG) and Lost Ark (a PC MMO-ARPG) somehow managed to began speculating about what this would mean for those respective titles. Some folks are reading way too much into this announcement though. CrossFire X will need to compete against other established shooters like Call of Duty for example so Smilegate is going to have continue to invest in the game during its period of exclusivity on the Xbox One in order to make it the best experience as possible.
Lost Ark players who believe this is going to result in some publishing announcement in the west by Microsoft are going to be in for some disappointment; this is pretty specific to Xbox One. Smilegate’s subsidiary which handles Lost Ark, Smilegate RPG, is marching to their own cadence with regards to publishing agreements. Mail.ru (My.com) threw money into the pot along with performing the localization (which needs to meet Smilegate RPG’s standards) for the publishing rights. Unlike other development studios, Smilegate has a tendency to perform the bulk of the non-vocal localization for their titles (their recruitment site occasionally has positions for localization).
Russia is getting an earlier release because a publisher put the $$$ up (as well as performing the localization). Of course, there aren’t a lot of publishers that are setup to handle this specific region (data center, payment processing, etc). No western publisher has yet come to a similar form of agreement since it’s going to take way more upfront money to secure the publishing rights for both NA and EU let alone, performing the localization work (more so for EU where there are other languages like German, French, and Italian) if they want to fast track the launch (as opposed to waiting for Smilegate RPG to perform that work first).
Furthermore, there aren’t a lot of good options (many of the smaller publishers just do not have the cash reserves to vie for the publishing rights). Smilegate RPG has the option of self-publishing but as I’ve written before, they would need to seriously overhaul Smilegate West (Z8games) and possibly look at re-opening a European subsidiary again (instead of trying to service/support the multitude of non-english speaking European countries from Toronto, Canada).
My point is that Microsoft isn’t going to go deep into publishing a PC MMO-ARPG which they don’t have any sort of development control over so I really don’t see how this particular partnership for CrossFire X, is going to have any sort of major impact on Lost Ark being published to the west any faster. I suppose time will tell whether or not I am completely wrong on this one.
