icecream said:
I'm not sure where you're getting with this. The next Tales games were decided long before Vesperia even went on sale much less these results.
Namco chose to put Vesperia on the 360 knowing full well how weak it was performing in Japan. Team Symphonia wanted to make an HD Tales no matter what, and that was the only choice at the time.
Whether they will continue to develop HD Tales series or shift to other platforms will be known by their next project, not the many other projects on other platforms by the other teams currently in development.
No, it wasn´t that long ago. They were announced just some months ago with Tales of Hearts and next Tales of for Wii.
Now the big question why? Yes, why were the next Tales games decided before ToV released?
Sorry, but you can´t be serious, can you? The X360 situation in Japan is horrible, you would be dumb if you waited ToVs release to decide where you´ll go with your franchise, seeing that on the other hand the Wii is selling well and ToS2 already sold passable (and what a surprise the next Tales for Wii was confirmed after seeing those sales).
Now, to the dumb question. Why did they even bother with ToV?
The answer is simple, they were a little more optimistic back than in 2005/2006 (I know it was announced last year but EGM and other insiders hinted Tales of and also Star Ocean4 for X360 already back in 2005/2006).
I´m not saying that they expected the X360 to be a success (no way, but they neither expected that it would flop similar to the first Xbox) but they expected that games like Blue Dragon, Lost Odyssey, some other little jRPGs like Enchanted Arms and also the announcemnt of Last Remnant or Infinite Undiscovery would create a profitable niche market on X360 for jRPGs so they could profit by knowing that there won´t be any competition for their games for several months and to also have
the option to realease it one year later on a very successful HD console. On top of that most likely some MS moneyhats sure helped to make this decicion. How do you explain the ToV bundles? I doubt Namco marketed the bundle this was Microsoft, nor do I think that Namco give away these ToV units for a best friends low price, the other way is more likely