Anyway, congratulations to Microsoft for once again reassuring the Japanese industry and the wider buying public here that they really are a reliable partner and employer whose support can be counted on for the long haul. You earned such a tremendous amount of confidence and good will around the time of the original Xbox's release when you laid off people in your main Japanese branch in such an unprecedentedly brazen manner by local standards, it's nice to see you've been inspired to try your luck and repeat that cycle once again twenty years later.
I look forward to retrospectives on this period a decade from now when the media asks you why you still continue to struggle to attain genuine support in this sector without Game Pass contracts and sheer international inertia and all your executive team will be able to do is shrug their arms and reply, "But, we tried."
I will also remind you all that Shinji Mikami famously left the negotiating table with Microsoft when they were trying to court him to bring Resident Evil 4 to the Xbox, largely because they couldn't come up with a coherent brand identity and vision for the wider industry. Microsoft execs will insist this was essentially an interpreter fumble and they would've had a ready-made response had they properly been clued in to Mikami's line of thinking, but it's now a matter of public record that they entered the industry in large part because Bill Gates hated the thought of ceding the living room computer to Sony, so, you tell me how much of a compelling argument they would've ever had in the best case scenario.
Anyway, not to put words in his mouth, but then that same conglomerate did Mikami a solid by binning his studio—whose younger talent he was genuinely working hard to grow and foster to thrive without him, I'll add—the minute he took his eye off of it, so imagine how he must feel and what he would've told his younger self that walked away if he could. Caring collaborators indeed over at Redmond.