I respect that outlook from a monetary perspective, but from a Kingdom Hearts fandom perspective, I just feel as though that Square Enix should have outright pulled the plug on the Xbox One production when they seen that the system wasn't performing as well as they expected it to in Japan. Making it a PS4 exclusive saves costs of porting Kingdom Hearts III, because unlike 1.5 and 2.5, it's using HD assets through the form of Unreal Engine 4 from the ground up.
I'm not an Xbox owner but even I feel as though this is a lack of acknowledgement of consumers that bought the Xbox One for Kingdom Hearts III. My initial point still stands.
They most likely cannot "pull the plug" due to how the contracts are set up and the higher ups at Square most likely want to collect the revenue from the Xbox One version however small it will turn out to be.
Porting KH III alone is much less time- and cost-intensive than porting the other entries of the series as well.
Wut? You really think that there are a reasonably sizeable portion of players who bought a Xbox One just for KH III? Somehow I find that hard to believe as not only is the Xbox One nowhere the leading Console except maybe in the USA (in Europe 70% or more of the market is PS4, in Japan even more and I do not really have any information about Oceania) japanese games have never done very well on Microsoft consoles anyways.
As the PS4 is apparently more and more turning out to be the winning/leading console of this generation they most likely only make the Xbox version because agreements made earlier require them to, not because they want to do that version.
Porting the rest, though? It's a waste. And it is a shame for those fans on XB1, not to mention it sucks for players who won't get to experience KH from the start of they are new to the franchise, but this should have been expected.
I've honestly expected this from the very moment it became somewhat clear that the PS4 would "win" the console race in most parts of the world.
To me it was obvious that they would always treat the Xbox One version as a sort of "unwanted stepchild" that has to be taken along due to duty requirements and nothing else.
Other Square games released on Microsoft-consoles also most often got only a meager success (if at all) so I can actually see why Square wouldn't want to be overly involved with it.
Maybe this is another part of Nomura stating they announced KH3 too early. Back then, well, the future wasn't all THAT clear. If they had announced it just last year or this year, I think XBOX would be out of the question or not even considered.
Good observation, this is likely true as back then there was at first no indication that the PS4 would eventually take the lead.
With the information they have today they would certainly not enter such a contract to begin with and KH III (as well as probably FF XV) would be a PS4 exclusive title.
I think there was a possibility the interviewer was saying that the idea for summons in KH in general came from Final Fantasy, probably? But who can say, really.
But if that was the case, they didn't get across what they were trying to say at all.
But if they really were asking about FF summons in KH, than they're just completely misinformed, as you said.
That is a possibility indeed, but an RPG having summons isn't exactly a Final Fantasy-only thing as other RPGs like i.e. the .hack franchise have summons as well.
EDIT:
That "entire console base" of Xbox Kingdom Hearts consumers you speak of is probably pretty negligible to them and way too small to consider.Still, doesn't change the fact that it's such a corporal shill by Square Enix. I'm dissapointed by Tai Yasue confirming this. What a low blow by them, treating the Xbox Kingdom Hearts consumers like additional means of convenient profit as opposed to genuine fans. Yeah, I get that Square Enix is business and they have to maximise their profit margins, but at the expense of the ignorance of an entire console base of consumers is as corporally biased as you can get.
Remember: Japanese games do not sell well on the Xbox "console base" at all so they have no actual incentive to actually believe that there is a sizeable base of consumers for it.