Atlus and Sega have made a lot of baffling decisions with the Persona franchise, and in spite of its critical and commercial success, they’ve kept the mainline series restricted to PlayStation for far too long. Recently though, Persona 4 Golden launched on Steam, immediately seeing massive success, and that success has led to Sega re-evaluating its strategy for multiplatform releases.
During Sega’s recent quarterly financial briefing, President and COO Haruki Satomi said that Persona 4 Golden sold better than expected on Steam, and attributed that success to a combination of its critical acclaim and low price. Meanwhile, Satomi went on to say that that success has made the company reconsider things when it comes to multiplatform releases. Not only is Sega now looking into bringing more older games to Steam and other platforms, but is also now considering simultaneous day and date PC launches for future releases.
“We remastered Persona 4 Golden, a title previously released on the PlayStation Vita, and launched it for sale on Steam this fiscal year,” Satomi said. “Because of the game’s critical acclaim and its low selling price, sales were much stronger than expected. 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. Among those there are measures such as preparing PC versions of the games from the beginning, with multi-platform releases in mind.”
The Persona franchise itself is a goldmine that Atlus and Sega have been sitting on for years, and ports of Persona games on PC (or the Switch) would surely bring them a lot more success. Hopefully it’s something they’ll look into, now that Persona 4 Golden has proven that there’s success to be found by tapping into the series’ potential.
Meanwhile, it was recently confirmed that Persona 5 Royal has sold 1.4 million units worldwide. You can read more on that through here.
