The last five years have seen an increasing amount of Japanese titles make the jump to PC, which is good news if you love, say, the Tales Of series, or Disgaea, or Yakuza, and don’t want to buy a console. There are still big gaps though: most glaringly, PC still doesn’t have Persona 5 (though it has Strikers, and is getting the SMT3: Nocturne remaster), but it looks like Sega subsidiary Atlus is keen to make sure future games launch everywhere.
In an interview with Japanese magazine Famitsu (translated by Persona Central), Sega’s Chief Strategy Officer Shuji Utsumi singled out Atlus as a studio that could expand in this direction. Answering a question regarding the future of Persona rollouts, he said “a simultaneous release on multiple platforms would be favorable for our titles.”
“Of course, we’ll make adjustments on a per-title basis, but we want to be conscious of the global expansion of Atlus titles as well.”
Atlus titles generally release in the west long after the Japanese versions—it takes time to localise these sprawling, text and dialogue heavy titles. But the importance of multiplatform releases is demonstrated, Utsumi says, by the recent success of Yakuza: Like a Dragon, which released simultaneously on PS4, Xbox and Steam in the west. After years of Sony exclusivity Sega now considers Yakuza a multi-platform series (sadly, it isn’t taking the same approach to Judgment).
The future of Atlus PC ports looks positive: Catherine Classic released on Steam in 2019, and Persona 4 Golden last year. The latter sold 500,000 copies in less than a month, which proved encouraging for the higher ups at Sega.