In a sense, Sony now had its own "Mario" and "Sonic," giving them a significant boost in confidence.
Flipping through the report, Takuya came across the routine updates from major third-party publishers in North America.
EA's FIFA 97 and NBA Live 96 had launched on all major platforms as scheduled.
These two titles, which players had jokingly dubbed "annual releases," hadn't even seen major updates to their underlying physics engines. They simply slapped on the new season's player rosters, wrapped them in flashier packaging, and effortlessly raked in their expected million-unit sales in the North American market.
"Larry Probst is a real master at doing business," Takuya Nakayama couldn't help but remark, his tone tinged with the wry amusement of an industry insider. "EA has completely mastered the art of the 'reskin'—a production-line approach to making money. As long as they hold the licenses, those die-hard sports fans will line up year after year to buy them. It's practically a money-printing machine."
The middle section of the report detailed the performance of Sega's own Jupiter platform.
Among the listings was Jupiter Bomberman, developed by Hudson.
"Hudson's game is barely passing grade if you look at software sales alone," Oguchi Hisao said, pointing to another set of exceptionally bright data. "But the peripherals department is absolutely thrilled. To get four players on one sofa for split-screen battles, sales of controller splitters and spare controllers have surged by over 300% month-on-month! The factory is already working overtime to ramp up production."
"This is the victory of the 'living room social' attribute," Takuya Nakayama concluded definitively. "A game like Bomberman is pure torture to play alone against AI, but with four people sitting together betraying each other, it's the ultimate party carnival. Hudson truly deserves the title of 'Hardware Sales King.'"
Their gaze moved down the report to the battle on the PC platform.
At the end of October, Westwood Studios released their ace—Command & Conquer: Red Alert—right on schedule.
Riding the wave of Halloween consumption, Red Alert's first-week sales were like a storm, ruthlessly crushing all other PC games released at the same time.
Frank Klepacki's heavy metal industrial rock anthem, "Hell March," had become the deafeningly loud background music in countless internet cafes, college dorms, and geeky garages across North America.
"Westwood played a brutal hand with this one," Hisao Oguchi remarked, staring at the exaggeratedly steep sales curve. "Two factions with completely different tech trees, all-out land, sea, and air warfare, and those live-action FMVs with that distinct B-movie feel... They've just raised the bar for the Real-Time Strategy (RTS) genre to a level that will be nearly impossible for their competitors to reach."
"The one with the biggest headache right now is probably Blizzard," Takuya Nakayama analyzed, his mind flashing back to Blizzard's struggles in the RTS arena in his past life. "They're still frantically developing Diablo. With Westwood whetting the players' appetites for RTS this much, if Blizzard can't come up with something truly groundbreaking that can overshadow Red Alert, Westwood is going to devour the entire RTS market single-handedly."
He flipped to the last page of the briefing.
His eyes fell upon a line of bold red text, impossible to miss.
Final Fantasy VII, the epic blockbuster originally scheduled for a September release, had officially announced its delay to December.
In the 1996 Japanese gaming industry, a delay of this magnitude for a super-production under such intense scrutiny was an extremely rare and dangerous event.
It typically signaled severe budget overruns or insurmountable technical hurdles in the game's core code. One wrong move could trigger a full-blown crisis of confidence.
"Square's ambitions were simply too grand," Oguchi Hisao said, his brow furrowed with concern. "Four whole CD-ROMs of data—that's an insane amount of storage. The massive amount of high-definition pre-rendered CGs, the polygons modeled with such terrifyingly fine detail... They're trying to cram too much into this game. Even with the Jupiter development tools Sega provided—no matter how user-friendly or thoroughly optimized—they can't fill a bottomless pit like this. Their internal industrial management is clearly failing to keep pace with Hironobu Sakaguchi's almost obsessive artistic demands."
After listening to his deputy's analysis, Takuya Nakayama simply closed the report and tossed it onto the desk.
Far from blaming them for the sudden delay, he felt a flicker of excitement.
Game development was, after all, an art of compromise.
But Hironobu Sakaguchi was clearly unwilling to compromise. He wanted to push the cyberpunk-infused steel jungle of Midgar to its absolute limit, to render every single strand of Cloud's hair to perfection.
If that was the case, what harm was there in giving them three more months?
As a transmigrator, Takuya knew the players' nature all too well.
A gamer's anger lasted only seven seconds. As long as the final product was polished enough, they would still line up in the freezing wind on launch day to open their wallets, even while cursing the developers to the heavens.
What truly set Takuya's blood on fire, however, was a different kind of historical deviation.
In his past life, Final Fantasy VII had burst onto the scene on the PlayStation, its era-defining visual spectacle delivering a killing blow that decisively ended the platform wars of the 32-bit era.
But now, he had personally altered the course of history.
With even more content, after a painful delay, and backed by Sega's unreserved technical support, Final Fantasy VII was set to launch on the Jupiter platform at the end of the year in its most perfect form.
Could this blade, now sharpened to be even more lethal, recreate or even surpass its invincible might from the original timeline?
Pushing aside these thoughts, Takuya Nakayama slid the Autumn Game Market Brief to the edge of his desk and clasped his hands in front of him.
"How's the final stretch of Diablo coming along at Blizzard?" he asked, his tone steady but pointed. "Specifically, the Battle.net tests—do we have concrete data?"
Oguchi Hisao immediately flipped open the folder he always carried and pulled out a neatly bound stack of email summaries.
In the current market environment, Blizzard Entertainment's situation was starkly different from the previous life.
Instead of being acquired by Vivendi and eventually reduced to a cash cow for capital, this brilliant team had been directly invested in by Sega of America, becoming a crucial pillar of Sega's pan-entertainment empire.
This shift in capital structure had brought about a deep level of technical integration.
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