Marvelous USA and XSEED Games interview with executive vice president Kenji Hosoi – organizational changes, games lineup, and more

gematsu.com:

Marvelous recently announced organizational changes that will see the Marvelous USA and XSEED Games brands publish as separate labels in North America, where previously everything was published under the XSEED Games label. To talk more about these changes, Gematsu spoke to Marvelous USA and XSEED Games executive vice president Kenji Hosoi at PAX West 2024, where both brands are showcasing a diverse lineup.

Get the full interview below.

First thing’s first—what was the reasoning behind separating XSEED Games and Marvelous USA into distinct publishing labels?

Kenji Hosoi, Executive Vice President, Marvelous USA / XSEED Games: “I think it’s always been slightly confusing for our fans since we were both XSEED Games, as well as Marvelous USA. Even in online comments, sometimes people would refer to us by both names in one sentence, so the brand separation was to mainly clarify which titles fall in the Marvelous category and which ones are XSEED’s. The Marvelous side will consist of titles that are internally developed by our Marvelous dev team—like the Story of Seasons and Rune Factory series, as well as Daemon X Machina and others. The titles that we license from external developers and publishers, such as the indie titles Potionomics, Sakuna: Of Rice and Ruin, and Freedom Planet, would fall into the XSEED category.”

I understand differentiating Marvelous content from third-party content, but then you have Marvelous Europe who is still publishing that third-party content in Europe, and Marvelous the parent company still publishing in Japan. So why is there only that separate in North America, as opposed to just publishing everything as Marvelous USA going forward?

Hosoi: “Unlike Marvelous Europe and Marvelous Japan, our company originated as XSEED Games, and many of our fans have been with us throughout our decades long journey of bringing games from Japan to a western audience from before we teamed up with Marvelous. Many people still think of us as XSEED, so we