Forget Suikoden 2 on PSN - Tell Konami to put it on Steam.

[Bubblin]

A console release is a flash in a pan for any videogame. It hits some immediate impact sales for those interested and hobbles along for the duration of that console's lifespan, then is left behind as new consoles are released.

A game release on PC is eternal, however. You have the immediate buyers, those who grab it on a whim during sales and it stays around for decades, years continuing to build up new fans. Many people who have heard of Suikoden 2 know it's a good game, but never had the chance to play it on a PS1 or don't own a PS4 even now. They would have little reason to not pick it up if it were ported to Steam, considering it runs on most any computer as it is.

Square-Enix has profited massively from porting FF7 to Steam, to the point of making it viable for them to port FF8 and FF3 over as well. Steam handles all the promotion of the games and gives them a nice, shiny spotlight every major sales period - absolutely everyone who could have ever wanted to play any of those games has had the ability to since their Steam release.

So, how would Suikoden 2 arrive on Steam?

The Chinese PC Edition. The work is already done in getting the port up and running, all Konami would have to do is hire a translation team to retranslate it and hammer out a deal with Steam. With any luck, and with a translation team who knew what they were doing this time around, it would have a polished and quality script.

I doubt Konami would even need to shoulder the full burden of funding the translation if they took up an 'interest gauging' Kickstarter-style preorder, similar to how Starbound took preorders. If (insert amount here) number of people preordered it at $15 or so, they could use that as evidence that there's enough interest in Suikoden 2 to warrant hiring a translation team for the PC edition.

Is there any reason I'm missing why this would be worse than getting Suikoden 2 on the PSN?

Hopefully they might even translate the PC edition of Suikoden 1 over as well.

[Raww Le Klueze]

Square-Enix already had a PC version of Final Fantasy VII in English lying around so it was exactly a major investment for them, same with VIII.

As for downsides? A few. The buck stops at Suikoden II for starters. There are no PC versions past that, not III-V, Tactics or Gaidens.

Without Suikoden I there'll be no data transfer, and Suikoden PC is a very Win95 game that will have issues trying to run on modern computers. Steam only works for older games mainly thanks to DOSbox, it's not the Steam platform that runs the games. In fact, before DOSbox a common complaint was that older games simply wouldn't work properly.

And considering Konami apparently didn't even save the source code for Silent Hill 2 it's unlikely they still have a limited Chinese-only release saved in their vaults.

Also, PS Classics have worked for 3 hardware generations, PS3, PSP, PSVita so it's not exactly the console dead-end you claim it to be. Rumors are there's emulators heading to PS4 as well but even if it doesn't there's PSNow, which if it works out as intended is basically a Sony version of Steam.

I think the idea of a Steam release, while it would be nice, is realistically asking more of Konami than they'd be willing to do, considering they won't even throw the games they already have on PSN, a game they'd have to make for a new platform is a long-shot. Possibly if someone did a fantranslation first they'd consider it if all the work was already done but that's a big maybe and that's a pretty big task for someone to first figure out the Chinese version, convert it back to Japanese and then translate and hope to god that Konami did a straight port.

[Bubblin]

I'm not sure why they couldn't just create a decent, new US port themselves, considering one was made exclusively for China. Surely they wouldn't have invested a lot of money into a PC release of the game in a country it likely has a niche market in? If they did it once they could do it again, or is there some complication I'm not seeing?

Unless it really is just an issue of 'They probably lost all the Suikoden source code and assets'.

[Antimatzist]

How is the largest country in the world (people wise) a niche market? JRPGs on PC, now THAT'S a niche market, it wouldn't have made sense to bring it to the US.

But I wonder something - Sega released a lot of Mega Drive Compilations on Steam - how do they run? I guess they have a built in Emulator otr something? Couldn't something similar be done with Playstation games if Sony wanted? That'd be cool, but highly unlikely.

[BrucePrintscreen]

How is the largest country in the world (people wise) a niche market?

Please do not take offense but I am not certain the rate of PC owners in China in the late 90's was that high. It is likely that China had a computer population that was far below its human population and probably inferior to that in the English-speaking world. It may be different today but I question the importance of the videogame market in China by then.

[Wolkendrache]

It's hard to compare with a country where the term "Suikoden" is as popular as "Robin Hood" in England.
Considering the delayed game market development, China might probably be the only country where a Suikoden (re-)release could attract more than just a loyal fanbase imo.

[Pyriel]

Please do not take offense but I am not certain the rate of PC owners in China in the late 90's was that high. It is likely that China had a computer population that was far below its human population and probably inferior to that in the English-speaking world. It may be different today but I question the importance of the videogame market in China by then.

Consoles were banned there until fairly recently. Cracking the market with a Chinese translation required it to be either a PC game or a board game. Furthermore, the Chinese version wasn't released until 2003. I don't think we'll ever know what sales were like, but they were using the only platform available, so the results were automatically better than the ¥0 they would have made otherwise. Well, assuming they didn't lose money on the development costs. Given how cheap Konami tends to be with their remakes, I'd be surprised if they went far into the hole having it ported by the lowest bidder with a bit of new artwork and a new translation.

[Antimatzist]

How is the largest country in the world (people wise) a niche market?

Please do not take offense but I am not certain the rate of PC owners in China in the late 90's was that high. It is likely that China had a computer population that was far below its human population and probably inferior to that in the English-speaking world. It may be different today but I question the importance of the videogame market in China by then.

I can't find any number of back then, but today, China is the biggest PC gaming market in the world. http://www.cinemablend.com/games/PC-Gam ... 40337.html

And as Pyriel said, the port was released in 2003, the situation was likely comparable to today (in a larger scale). It's definitely less niche than JRPGs on PCs back then. I cna only think of Grandia 2, FF VII and VIII, were there others?