Capcom's Old Game Engine Seemingly To Blame For Certain Releases Skipping Xbox

Probably be if Microsoft needed a big Gamepass drop.

All those missed games on the day of announcement, should provide some gaming for a few months and many folks picking up MVC when it eventually leaves Gamepass.

People rallied hard for the return on MVC2 on anything so I'm sure the XBox side will continue that rally as well.

Why in the heck would Capcom still use the outdated MT Framework for new releases (knowing full well Xbox doesn't support it anymore) - especially when the Capcom Arcade Stadium used RE Engine to power the emulation?!

Translation, pay us upfront xbox

@GamingFan4Lyf Same reason games still release on UE3 and UE4. Cost of development.

You can bet that any game that was developed on MT during this time was deemed to not be something that would sell well on Xbox. So they used an established engine people were already familiar and/or developing on to save costs since poor sells and the dev time for an Xbox version would actually reduce profits.

If this is true, I feel like Xbox should really step in and fix this.

@GamingFan4Lyf cost of development as the other person said.

NRS used UE3 for MK11 in 2019. And they used UE4 for MK1. So yeah…

@InterceptorAlpha pretty much this. Not to mention the older titles would have been in development for quite some time before release. At least as far back as 2022. To fair the support probably stopped before then that’s just when the last MT Framework game launched.

Also want to point out MT Framework doesn’t support PS5 so those games only have PS4 versions.

@anoyonmus @InterceptorAlpha Considering I think MT Framework and RE Engine are effectively 'in-house' engines, It feels like Capcom are using MT Framework as a way to 'get out of jail free' on the usual excuses.

@ValentineMeikin the Ace Attornery games have moved over as have games like Ghost Trick. It’s kind of hard for me to consider this a Capcom issue when clearly they are in process of moving everything over. I just think these skip games were in development for a while. Not recent. And monetary wise didn’t make sense to update the engine.

@JoakimZ why would they do that though? I’ve only seen them step in for games like Palworld that have huge player bases.

Capcom Fighting Collection was released in 2022, and released fine on everything. The whole declaration that they 'stopped supporting XBOX in the last few years' seems very dubious with that one example.

Capcom seem to be telling Microsoft one thing while they're doing another. I almost think Capcom are trying to figure out how much to fleece Microsoft for as part of 'porting costs', when the whole fact the games run on PC says that they can run on XBOX fine.

@ValentineMeikin no it doesn’t. And it’s more than one game. Since 2022 no MT Framework game has appeared on Xbox. However no RE Engine game has skipped. Including a game like Ghost Trick.

@mousieone You look at the MT Framework wikipedia page, and there's been no confirmed games made for MT Framework on console since 2022, other than the MvC Collection, where Capcom abruptly declare that support for the XBOX One 'expired' arbitrarily 'a few years back', never mind that Capcom themselves supposedly stopped supporting MT Framework years ago to use RE Engine.

That's why I find Capcom's claim dubious. If they stopped releasing MT Framework games on Windows and XBOX outright in 2018, and stuck to it, I'd believe this claim. But as it is, the claim doesn't hold water.

@ValentineMeikin First off if you look at the games that skip Xbox none of them have PS5 native versions. None.

Second Capcom isn’t claiming anything. Jawmincher isn’t not Capcom. And Windows Centeal doesn’t claim their sources are Capcom either.

Third all of those games are old minus MHS 2 not sure of the list just hasn’t been updated with the collections because their ports or what. But technically the Switch/PS4 version of MHS 1 just released like this month and they don’t list it as a separate game because it’s a port.

Forth If you look at the Re Engine games none of them have skipped Xbox https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/RE_Engine

Finally pretty sure 2022 is when MS officially said they aren’t making XB1s anymore but Sony hadn’t yet
https://www.theverge.com/2022/1/13/22881211/microsoft-discontinues-xbox-one-consoles-2020

They’d actually stopped production sooner just no one mentioned it until then.

@ValentineMeikin In house engine or not doesn't matter. If you say, told iD to make an Elder Doom game on 343's Splitstream engine, they'd still have to completely learn it. And the entire time learning it, figuring out how to optimize, etc, is time and money taken away from development time.

Just because one team uses an engine doesn't mean every team uses the same one, or even knows how to.

@anoyonmus @InterceptorAlpha I guess. Just seems odd to put a whole bunch of arcade games using RE Engine in Arcade Stadium, but then use the old MT Framework for the Marvel Collection.

Couldn't Capcom have just used all Arcade Emulation work that was already done in RE Engine but with these Marvel games instead?!

I kind of understand the Monster Hunter Stories - probably super easy to port those since they were MT Framework on 3DS so just keep it in MT Framework where available.

My gripe is specifically with these retro collections where the Capcom Arcade boards across varying generations have already been emulated once in RE Engine in Stadium but then reverts to the MT Framework for another set of Arcade Games. Makes zero sense, to me!

As I say further up, Capcom themselves declared the MT Framework toolset to be depreciated. I'd understand the Ace Attorney games using MT, since they were developed in it, but the fact that they've built emulators in RE Engine, but they decide to stiff the XBOX by using MT for the Fighting Collection...

And a lot of the features that Fighting Collection has... They've been proven to work in RE Engine's emulators, so it's not that. The unlocking of boss characters is a dip switch, not a engine feature, so Capcom's use of MT for both this and Fighting Collection, when their own staff stopped using it for anything other than Monster Hunter, was a deliberate choice.

@ValentineMeikin how else do you explain

No Battle Network collection but they put Ghost Trick on Xbox

No Great Ace Attorney but Apollo’s Justice

No MvC collection but Ace Attorney investigations

MS only pays for Ace Attorney games but not Great Ace?

Literally the only explanation is the engine.

Considering that MT Framework supports Windows, it shouldn't be that hard to do a minor update to their own engine to release the game for, at least, Xbox One or run MT Framework within RE Engine like other not demanding games that run within a second engine do, e.g., Sonic Origins. I would love to say that Capcom's latest game will come, but others haven't yet. It's a shame because it leaves collections incomplete. It would be worth contacting Capcom for official clarification instead of re-tweeting.

@mousieone If you look at the list, quite a lot of the games you mention are MT Framework games, which is the big confusion here. MT Framework 2.x was specifically made for support for XBOX One and Playstation 4, and quite a few games released from 2018 to 2022 are both MT Framework 2.0 and XBOX One compatible.

That's why I said earlier on that, if the MT Framework 2.x games from around 2018 onwards stopped supporting XBOX One entirely, instead of selectively, I'd believe that it was the engine.

Capcom know how to use their own in-house engine, and Capcom know that quite a few games were developed with MT Framework, so they DID update it to support XBOX One. But apparently, with several collections, one or more parts haven't come to XBOX One with no pattern at all to what's releasing and what isn't.

There's no consistency to MT Framework support, which is highly unusual, and makes me believe whatever sources are being cited... are either white lying or scamming Microsoft to hide the real reason they aren't releasing on XBOX.

@ValentineMeikin Again all skipped games run on MT Framework and to date no RE Engine game has skipped. And no game running on MT Framework has launched for Xbox since 2022. That is a pretty consistent through line.

@GamingFan4Lyf my guess is that this collection isn’t just a set of emulated ROMs, but full on native ports. Similar to what Capcom did with the more recent Mega Man Legacy Collections. Which I believe also ran on MT Franework.

@mousieone are you saying the game won't support ps5 running on ps4 backwards compatibility? I've never heard of such a thing and hope I'm wrong about it.

This was one of my favourite game announcements during the Direct - hopefully Capcom & MS can find a way to bring it to Xbox 🚀

@Beetlebum91 no I didn’t say that. I said the game doesn’t have a native PS5 version. It still runs with PS4 BC.

@mousieone awesome, thanks!

@ValentineMeikin @GamingFan4Lyf I think the part that everyone's missing is these are basically a zero-cost cashgrab reissue of old games, not some sizable new game port remaster project that includes moving games over to a new engine. They're just looking at their catalogue thinking "what can we quickly release to market to boost the quarter and fill the calendar?" That includes grabbing MHS and doing a quick polishing job on it and sticking it on whatever platforms the engine supports. That doesn't include retrofitting the entire project into a new engine. That job will be saved for the inevitable remake 4-7 years from now where it's a "play it again for the first time" experience, which is really all the future of the games industry is going to be made of.

This idea is nonsensical. There is no sane reason why the MT engine wouldn't run on an Xbox One or Series.

The reason the game isn't ported is much simpler. It's not profitable. The fighting games community is relatively small to begin with. On top of that, the user base of Xbox is too small, compared to the others, and the part of it that would buy this collection is miniscule. We can be happy, that we got SF6 (SF5 skipped Xbox entirely). If you play online you rarely see Xbox symbols, meaning, even such a heavy weight didn't sell well on the platform. Sony, Nintendo, and PC all have a long history and larger user base concerning fighting games. Outside Killer Instinct, Xbox has not.

The worse Xbox as a hardware platform performs, the more we will see such things, which opens up a nice downward spiral.

@lokozar "The worse Xbox as a hardware platform performs, the more we will see such things, which opens up a nice downward spiral."

Not necessarily in this case. Capcom seems to have a strong relationship with Xbox (outside MonHun money hatting), and in these examples we're looking at their rerelease ports of old games in an old engine skipping xbox while all of their new games in their new engine do not skip xbox. This seems less like a case of "weakening xbox sales is hurting game releases" and more of a "past weak xbox sales hurt availability of some old games for rerelease but has no effect on current/new games."

Much more likely that they are just skipping the xbox because it's a niche title.

Would the small number sales be worth it to develop and manage the xbox side of online capabilities? Probably not.

@NEStalgia @lokozar well DF disagree and does think it’s the Engine. If you don’t believe me

https://youtu.be/8lGvOQ-QVNs?si=zjfLQVzFkVk-NWXy

Starts at 42:48

@mousieone It's important to point out, that Linnemann himself is unsure about this, and that he actually doesn't say it would be impossible on a technical level.

I can see nothing here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MT_Framework that suggests a hard incompatibility to the Xbox platform. Monster Hunter World was the last game using the framework, and that was released on Xbox One. So, even if we assume some shenanigans is going on with PS5 and X/S, Capcom could have released the collection for Xbox One - parallel to the PS4 release. You can play Xbox One games on X/S.

Note how Linnemann also talks about an investment Capcom would likely have to make, if they released for Xbox One. Meaning, he thinks it's generally possible. He literally mentions the parts that would be involved. Which brings us right back to my point - it's expected by Capcom to not make any money worth the investment. This forecast right there is something every Xbox customer should be a bit worried about.

@lokozar the issue comes from a change I think on MS side that broken the MT Frameworks ability to code for that platform as a new game. Existing games could be updated because the devs do have the know how. I didn’t link that video either but XboxEra Jesse said between 2020 and 2022 whatever it is is it happened when MS made the change from the old XDK to the GDK for even XB1 games.

Games that started development before this change would have been fine but games started after would need the new upgraded GDK instead of XDK.

And something between these two kits it’s what broke it.