Kingdom Hearts Iii Nomura Worldwide Release Date

What's the best thing to do when your game gets leaked ahead of its official release date? Why, it's to tell everyone that for future games, you might scrap the idea of a worldwide launch entirely. Makes perfect sense to us.

In a new Famitsu interview, Kingdom Hearts III director Tetsuya Nomura is asked about the situation that occurred last year, when several copies of the game somehow made it out into the wild. As translated by Kotaku, Nomura says "because of what happened, the risks for a simultaneous worldwide release are high, for any games that I work on henceforth, currently I cannot help but reconsider a simultaneous worldwide release for at the very least the retail package version." Wow.

From where we're sitting at least, this seems like an incredibly backwards way to look at things. Is it really the worldwide release of Kingdom Hearts III that led to the leaks? Would it be any different if the game had launched last month in Japan? Let's not kid ourselves, details would be all over the web by now.

It's also worth remembering that the actual ending to Kingdom Hearts III has to be downloaded days after the title is released -- a move that's meant to stop spoilers in the first place. Quite frankly, it sounds like Nomura just has to accept that leaks are largely inevitable in this day in age. You simply can't have full control over every single aspect of a game's launch -- especially not when it's releasing both physically and digitally.

It's taken us years and years and years to get to a point where we're getting big Japanese games at roughly the same time as everyone else. Let's not act like this is suddenly a bad thing, eh?

[source kotaku.com]