Final Fantasy was among Xbox’s top targets during the original Xbox era

During a recent interview on The Expansion Pass, former Xbox vice president of game publishing Ed Fries said the Final Fantasy series was high on the list of games he wanted on Xbox that did not make it during his time there.

“The Final Fantasy series is really high up there.”

Fries recalled frequent trips to Japan during which he met with major publishers with varying levels of success in securing agreements. Some deals with Square Enix were made after Fries left Microsoft.

“I would go out to Japan fairly regularly and meet with Konami, Capcom, Square, and Sega. Some we were able to do deals with, some we weren’t.”

Discussions with Square in particular were described as complex due to their position between supporting platform competition and managing their reliance on Sony’s ecosystem.

“It was always a tough discussion because they wanted Sony to have competition, but they couldn’t be too overt in their support for Xbox.”

This hesitation was rooted in concerns over how Sony might react to such a partnership. Fries noted that, while speaking hypothetically, there were fears about potential disadvantages, such as reduced promotion or less favorable access to development resources, including dev kits.

He noted that any potential exclusivity arrangement for Final Fantasy on Xbox was tightly constrained by the commercial value Square expected to retain from PlayStation releases.

“A common conversation would be that we could do the next Final Fantasy on your platform, but here’s how much money we would lose…”

Fries said these negotiations often came down to direct financial trade-offs rather than creative or strategic alignment.

“If you're going to pay in advance the hundreds of millions of dollars that we expect to make, then sure we’ll make it only on Xbox.”

These third-party discussions and publishing negotiations were primarily handled by a team led by George Peckham, who reported to Fries and operated within a defined budget structure.

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About FINAL FANTASY

For over 35 years, the FINAL FANTASY series has delighted generations of gamers and millions of players worldwide through beloved role-playing adventures that are built upon the benchmarks of spectacular visuals, highly imaginative worlds, rich stories, memorable characters, and technical and gameplay innovation leading the industry and earning the highest accolades from around the world. Each mainline game in the series is a completely new experience, and an ideal entry-point to the series. Titles of the series have sold over 207 million units worldwide.